Excerpt from LIFE WITH BIG GREEN

Following is an excerpt from my memoir, “Life with Big Green,” recounting cataclysmic events surrounding the National Wildlife Federation’s Board of Directors meeting in the summer of 2003. At the Skamania Lodge, with the spectacular Columbia River Gorge as backdrop, NWF’s CEO unceremoniously and unexpectedly was fired. My job, as his assistant, went on life-support.

Links to my full story are at the end. 

…[CEO] Mark retained support from where it mattered – the Board of Directors. Nevertheless, the staff dysfunctions were not invisible to all Board members. In June [2003], one director, Ed Clark, spelled out criticisms of Mark in a lengthy letter to the Board’s Executive Committee. It had to have been informed by insider knowledge of Mark’s management crisis. Someone on staff must have been spilling the beans to Ed.

It wasn’t me. I stayed out of it, despite my frequent interactions with Board members in my new job as Board Relations Director. I bit my tongue, even though by the time of Ed’s searing critique, I had secretly decided to quit my job at NWF and flee my nasty boss.

Quitting in Secret

It had been three years since I had been on a solo outdoors adventure away from home. It had been so long that I didn’t even feel my usual guilty pleasure about sneaking away. This one I had earned. I needed to heal. Low dusky clouds hung over the wet, black tarmac at Dulles Airport. It seemed fitting to be leaving for Oregon in April rain.

From the Portland airport, I drove out to the Pacific coast in my rental car for a few days of birding prior to meeting up with Jim Martin, a Board member and retired head of Oregon’s fish agency, who was going to take me fishing…

On the Columbia River with Jim, I caught the biggest fish of my life, a seven-foot-long sturgeon weighing at least 250 pounds. The following day, I caught the biggest salmon of my life, a 29-pound spring chinook.

Back at my motel room that evening, I was feeling mighty fine. All was well with my world. “Like velvet on the palate,” is how the label described the local pinot noir I was drinking.

That was the fateful moment when I decided to check my email. I hoped to do quick triage on the 78 new ones, fewer than usual for two days, but then, I was on vacation. First priority – dealing with Mark’s missives.

I can’t recall what he said in his email that set me off. I suspect it was nothing out of the ordinary, just another condescending harangue about some mistake that was my fault. I sat there for a long time in the growing dusk, stewing with my pinot, and asking why I kept putting myself through such misery…

Now, drunk on wine in my Oregon motel room, the thought of going back to working with that asshole every day was overwhelmingly depressing. There had to be a better way to get through life.

The next day, I decided. I called my wife and told her I wanted to accelerate our planned future move to Oregon. I just couldn’t take it at NWF working for Mark any more. We would move to Portland. I’d find some kind of environmental job there. Now midstream in her nursing college, Eva would have to transfer. She said okay. And that’s how our big decision was made…

The hour I decided to quit NWF.

Un-quitting

When I returned from Oregon, our family quietly began preparing to move west in the fall. I slipped my resume to a headhunter in DC. My wife informed her nursing school that she would not be returning the next school year. At NWF, I told no one of our plans.

I hated going to work more than ever. I hated dealing with Mark. Even so, I felt I was doing a good job. I told myself:

In order to do my job well, it requires me to almost get inside Mark’s skin, to really understand his thinking and motivations in order to anticipate his expectations. That is creepy. It’s really time to move on.

By a happy coincidence for me, the Board’s summer 2003 meeting was scheduled for a conference center on the Columbia River just 50 miles east of Portland. My job included overseeing the planning and logistics for such meetings.

In July, I flew to Portland for on-site preparations. And, unbeknownst to anyone at NWF, to look for a new job and place to live in Portland. My wife and one of our kids came along, and we spent a day driving by houses that a local realtor in advance of our trip had identified for us. After my family left, I spent more time in the city, trying to imagine living there, not just in summer, but in the dark, rainy days of winter. The more I saw, the less I liked the idea.

I visited every environmental and fishing organization in Portland, ostensibly for the purpose of inviting them to attend our nearby Board meeting the next month. My secret reason, however, was personal. I was checking out job prospects. It was bleak. The environmental groups were too greenie for me. I would never fit in. As for the fishing groups, most devoted to salmon restoration, I saw no openings for a job.

On my last day before heading home, Jim Martin took me salmon fishing one last time. We drove several hours before sunrise from Portland to the coast. Motoring the several miles out from the Tillamook Bay launch ramp to the open ocean, fog was so thick that Jim had to navigate by radar. A dozen other boats blindly tracked in our wake.

Jim got the lines set and started trolling slowly through the ocean swells. Up. Down. Up. Down. Up. Down. Don’t think about it; watch the horizon, I told myself. Except with the fog, there was no horizon, just the claustrophobic world of gray mist surrounding the sickening rise and fall of the boat. No wind and the engine’s fumes hung on board. Within an hour, I was puking my guts out. It was the most humiliating fishing excursion of my life.

I had thought I could handle it, even with my lifelong propensity for motion sickness. I had taken Dramamine. I had just wanted to fish on the ocean so badly. My pathetic showing seemed a fitting metaphor for my entire trip. You can’t always make things work out through force of will, wishful thinking, or drugs.

Eva and I agreed that moving to Portland wasn’t the right thing to do, after all. Living in another big city was unappealing...  Most importantly, I had no confidence that I could find a decent-paying environmental job in Portland.

We went back to our plan of sticking it out in Virginia for another three years. My wife enrolled in graduate school. Our daughter would be done with college in that time. Then, finally, I could retire from NWF, and our move to Oregon would be to small-town Cottage Grove (home of Eva’s parents), not to big-city Portland. Eva would start her nurse practitioner career.

I returned to work at NWF surprisingly chipper. At least now I had certainty about my future (or so I thought). I had survived this long with Mark. Somehow, I could get through another three years with him…

My First Inkling

In the meantime, Board member Ed Clark’s attack on Mark had fizzled. The Executive Committee declared Ed’s tactics to be divisive and forced him to resign from the Board of Directors. Ed had been in line to become chair of the Board – a dream for him. Going after Mark killed any chance. At the time, Ed couldn’t have known that one day he would be vindicated. For the moment, though, Mark’s hold on his job seemed secure.

I had gotten my first inkling that Mark’s troubles might be bigger than I imagined in Rock Springs, Wyoming. I was there to coordinate the May meeting of the Board’s Executive Committee.

During our free time, I went for a drive around the Flaming Gorge Reservoir with Dan Chu, one of Mark’s favorites and the guy in charge of NWF’s field staff. That job gave Dan a pipeline to the Board and NWF’s internal politics. Like most of the executive staff, Dan didn’t trust me because of my role as Mark’s handmaiden. But on this day, after I shared some of my job frustrations, Dan told me cryptically that there were things going on that I didn’t know about. Then he floored me: “Mark will be gone by the next annual meeting.” That was just ten months away. He sounded so certain. How could he know that? How could he be so sure about such a prediction? But Dan clammed up.

Where Dan Chu told me that Mark’s days were numbered –
three months before it happened.

In the months leading up to the August Board of Directors meeting, Mark seemed more nervous than usual. As we parted before heading out, we had no way of knowing it would be our last conversation in the headquarters we had built together. I looked at him and offered my unsolicited encouragement: “You should be ok. I just can’t see any problems for you with the Board.”

It was heartfelt and what I believed, but it shows how little I knew about what was going on behind the scenes at NWF. Mark had insisted that I steer clear of Board politics and that I play the bad cop with his staff, and now I couldn’t have warned him of what was coming even had I wanted to. 

Big Green Kabuki

The August Board meeting looked to be a good one – we had planned field trips to a fish hatchery, a riverboat ride, and a salmon bake on the spacious front lawn of the Skamania Lodge overlooking the Columbia River. NWF’s Northwest regional staff were queued up to make presentations about their latest accomplishments, and I forced them to rehearse in front of me to make sure they could stay on schedule. It proved a moot concern.

The first night, Wednesday, the Board’s Executive Committee met over a private dinner that lasted uncharacteristically late. The next morning, they resumed their private meeting until midafternoon.

Because I had been in the dark regarding a secret Board conspiracy to get rid of Mark, I had a hard time grasping what was happening. Soon, however, it became evident that a small group on the Board had come to the meeting intending to do just that. Word also leaked out that Ed Clark had rescinded his resignation from the Board. His broadside against Mark had found new supporters.

Friday’s meeting of the full Board started with Mark giving his regular update report. Judging by the body language of Board members, his enemies were obvious; they were the ones who wouldn’t look at him. Mark had on his game face, but the strain was apparent. He had arrived for the morning meeting with nary a word to anyone, a man under siege.

After his routine CEO report, my carefully constructed meeting agenda was discarded and all staff except Mark were told to leave. We hung out in the hallway, awaiting news.

Throughout the morning, the closed doors would swing open to disgorge one director after another heading for the bathroom. Each face was some version of withdrawn, gaunt, serious, exhausted, and beaten. I wasn’t surprised. Backing Mark into a corner was a dangerous undertaking. He wasn’t going to make it easy for them. Later, several Board members would call it the worst day of their lives.

The Board’s chairperson, Becky Scheibelhut, appeared blindsided by the get-rid-of-Mark attack. She sure hadn’t signed up for this back home in Indiana. She had no experience in running a bloodthirsty tribunal.

A sweet, simple, gray-haired grandmother, Becky had been hand-picked by Mark for her rise from her local, Indiana outdoors club up through the ranks to become NWF’s top volunteer leader. She epitomized his “one big vision” of training and empowering ordinary citizen conservationists.

Becky – reluctant hatchet-woman.

During one of Becky’s breaks from the meeting’s drama, she saw me sitting alone in a deserted hallway and walked over, expressing her bewilderment at the situation exploding on her watch. She said the Board was being told that “all the staff” have lost confidence in Mark. “You too?” she asked, her eyes hoping to be contradicted.

I measured the political implications for me of whatever I said, but decided it was a time to simply tell the truth. I looked up at her sadly and said, “Yes.”

Becky nodded and went back to her distasteful role of doing what had to be done.

Midafternoon, about an hour before the meeting concluded, Mark sought me out and explained what was happening. For the first time in a long time, and for the last time ever, he talked to me as the friend he once had been.

The upshot, he told me, was that the Board had voted to reinstate Ed Clark to the Board. This was an obvious rebuke to Mark and his remaining defenders on the Board. In addition, the Board had appointed a committee charged with negotiating with Mark either an employment contract or terms of his separation.

Mark was angry, feeling set up and betrayed, although by whom I wasn’t sure. He felt his “business record” spoke for itself and dismissed charges of staff morale problems as not significant, conceding to me only that for the past two years he had neglected staff as a “constituency.”

By the end of the day, most staff at the meeting assumed that Mark was being fired, but nothing was for sure. Despite the tension and uncertainty, everyone tried to put on happy faces for the social events, which included meeting and greeting those local environmental leaders attending as a result of my personal invitations during my ill-fated trip to Portland. Saturday morning’s field trips went as scheduled but were rife with tension, every hushed conversation viewed as a potential intrigue.

Mark put out the word that staff were to convene Saturday afternoon. The meeting would be in a classroom set off in the fir trees away from the conference center building. Groups of ones and twos and threes converged on paths through the hushed woods, sunlight filtering through the tall conifers. It felt like we were heading to a funeral.

Inside, Mark seemed oddly defiant, given the circumstances. He started with a strained metaphor, comparing the Board meeting to a kabuki drama. He said it’s about what you don’t see. No one could understand what he was talking about.

He explained that the Board had taken two specific actions. First, was Ed Clark’s reinstatement to the Board. Second, the Board “also passed a motion of confidence in me.” He paused, then continued, “It’s important that I be honest with you about what happened…” I don’t remember anything he said after that.

Mark’s explanation left everyone scratching their heads. How did a “motion of confidence” square with being fired? But, in fact, technically, he was right. A motion had been introduced (by the wealthy Mexican director who had been personally wooed by Mark to join the Board) to charge the Board’s Executive Committee to either negotiate an employment contract with Mark or, if that failed, a severance agreement. Another director, who was sympathetic to Mark, amended the motion to add a vote of confidence in Mark. That all passed, though not unanimously.

NWF Board of Directors – 2003
(Ed Clark – front right)

I have no idea what they were thinking with that duplicitous “vote of confidence” in Mark; obviously, it wasn’t true. Within an hour after Mark’s staff meeting, I learned that the Executive Committee intended to place Mark immediately on administrative leave. I noted in my journal:

Notwithstanding the mask MVP displayed to staff, they intend for him to be out within two weeks. Meanwhile, MVP is either seriously delusional about the reality of his predicament or he is giving it his ultimate spin for his benefit in negotiating an exit. I think the first, but am not certain.

That day, my tangled, 21-year relationship with Mark ended. I never learned what he thought I did or said that made him abruptly shun me, but from that day forward, it was clear he wanted nothing more to do with me.

Throughout the entire Board meeting, I had assiduously avoided any Mark-talk with Board members. Even when some had not-so-subtly invited my criticism, I had deflected the conversation and changed the subject. I did not, however, rise to Mark’s defense. I couldn’t.

From my notes written at that moment:

I’ve tried to remain honorable to Mark while protecting my integrity and my loyalty to this institution. That’s not easy. It probably was not lost on Board members that I didn’t privately decry the pending actions. When they learned that “all the staff” have lost confidence in MVP, that includes me and I don’t deny it. It’s time for a change at the top. Quickly.

Mark’s animus towards me remained a mystery. I’ve always assumed he blamed me in some way for his downfall. But I wasn’t his Brutus.

More likely, however, his shunning me was as simple as my refusal to fall on my sword for him. To madly declare like a Samurai, If Mark goes, then I go! Hara-kiri!

During the first days of our environmental partnership – two decades earlier when Mark still saw me as a mentor – I had advised him: “You have to fight another day. Nothing’s worth falling on your sword.” I had assumed that the “not even you, Mark” part went without saying.

* * *

Just like that, he was gone. Gone from NWF. Gone from my life.

Within a week, I shared a “confidential epiphany” with my friend, CFO Larry Amon, who was named by the Board to be the acting-CEO:

On a lunchtime bike ride today, it hit me. A feeling I had forgotten existed. I’m happy at work. I can’t remember feeling like that since the headquarters building project three years ago.

We can do this. I’m anxious to get started. We can put this place together in a humane way that makes sense and works.

I felt lucky to have survived, lucky that I hadn’t quit to move to Portland just before the ax fell on Mark. Others hadn’t been so fortunate. Several senior vice presidents recently had been forced out by Mark. NWF’s education senior vice president had been job hunting and accepted a position just before Mark was fired.

But wait. My mistake. Mark wasn’t really fired, as his widely distributed resignation letter of September 3, 2003, made clear. From his irony-free zone, he wrote: “Obviously, it is a painful decision for me to leave the staff of an organization I know so well and love so much. But it is time…”

He told the Washington Post: “I accomplished everything I set out to do… I thought why not go out on top.”

Now there, I said to myself, there is some real theater. Big Green kabuki.

Unfortunately for Mark, during the nearly three weeks between the Board meeting and his “resignation” announcement (while he and the attorneys were negotiating his separation agreement), the rumors had spread that Mark was out. While details remained murky, few could have assumed that Mark’s unexpected vanishing act had been of his own doing, as NWF officially pretended.

His survivors celebrated. Few mourned. Mark made it easy. From my journal (omitting my colleague’s name):

I heard the story last night about when ­--- went to deliver the notice from the Board that placed him on leave after the meeting. --- called and Mark said if --- showed up that he would consider it, on advice of his attorney, “criminal trespass” and the worst form of aggression by NWF. --- still hasn’t gotten over that one.

NWF’s fictional account of Mark’s departure reminded me of Chico Marx in Duck Soup: “Well, who you gonna believe, me or your own eyes?”

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Readers’ reviews:

From former environmentalist colleagues:  

·         “Riveting. I couldn't put it down.”

·         “A real page turner. If you need to hide from attorneys, we’re available.”

·         “Well written, unvarnished, and artfully constructed. Parts poignant, others deeply disturbing.”

·         “I just finished most of Wayne's book. I think I must have PTSD. I'm sick to my stomach.”

From a former environmentalist Board of Directors member:

·         “I think you got it right.”

From a former journalist colleague:

·         “What a motherfucker of a book it is. Holy shit!

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