Picnic Bench Wrangler: Platonic occupation

I’ve had my eye on this one for a while. The picnic benches at Colt State Park tend to migrate, sometimes singly and sometimes in groups, sometimes in daylight and sometimes overnight. Park administrators, however, clearly have ideas about the correct arrangement of benches across the landscape.

This creates the occupation of Picnic Bench Wrangler, something I’m thinking about for my retirement. Here’s the current wrangler in action, warily approaching a stray picnic bench that has wandered off by itself.

Picnic Bench Wrangler approaching a stray

It looks like a great outdoors occupation, combining all your basic outdoor skills and understanding of picnic bench behavior with the operation of noisy machinery with big tires. In addition to hunting down strays, the Wrangler also has to cull the herds to maintain their proper sizes.

Picnic Bench Wrangler culling the herd

Having cautiously approached the herd to avoid startling them, the Picnic Bench Wrangler deftly snags the chosen bench with his lift fork and reverses quickly away.

Picnic Bench Wrangler relocating culled bench

The Wrangler moves rapidly away from the previous herd and then deposits the bench in its appropriate location with the new herd. The Park Administration has clearly marked each bench and designated the specific areas for them.

At the end of the day the wrangler can be seen at the top of Surprise Hill, gazing off to the West – towards Westerly, RI, in fact – across Narragansett Bay in a pose reminiscent of Curly Washburn (the Jack Palance role in City Slickers).

A-yup, seems pretty idyllic.