Putting new sand in the hourglass

MONAHANS Deciding to make a drastic career change, David Dotter faced the usual questions.

Why would an art professor want a job in the state’s parks and wildlife department? Isn’t that too different?

“But it’s not,” Dotter said, recalling his thinking before joining the staff at Balmorhea State Park last year. “You’re really trying to teach people why these parks are important, why we are trying to preserve these lands, why we’re trying to protect these animals. So much of it is education.

“I’m just teaching different material.”

It was his modus operandi then and has been since becoming the Monahans Sandhills State Park superintendent in June.

Dotter sees what many else see at the park about little southeast of Monahans: Sand. Lots of it.

He just sees it differently and believes more can see the park’s appeal, too.

“Let’s face the facts: it’s not a lake,” Dotter said. “People go to lakes because they’re just naturally attracted to water. They want to swim. They want to boat. While this doesn’t have that same allure, it’s probably in many ways more interesting from a unique standpoint.”

Dotter’s enthusiasm for the park is partly why Mike Hill, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s Region 1 director, hired him.

Hill liked his experience as a police officer at Balmorhea’s park, his teaching background and his ability to manage a park’s fiscal aspects.

“In most superintendents, they need the ability to function effectively in a small-town environment, where everyone knows everyone and everybody knows everybody’s business,” Hill said. “David has a great personality.”

The small-town feel was part of the appeal of changing careers, Dotter said.

He had taught mostly ceramics in the Metroplex, at schools like Tarrant County College, El Centro College and the Craft Guild of Dallas.

At El Centro, he was in downtown Dallas, in the middle of the hustle and bustle, blocks away from Deep Ellum.

But in his free time, Dotter loved hunting and hiking, the outdoors. He met others who loved it, too, but they seemed uninformed in the specifics of the mountain they were climbing or the animal tracks they were walking alongside.

Dotter, the educator, decided his classroom could be outdoors.

“It was time for a change,” he said. “… It seemed like people were losing that knowledge.”

At Monahans, Dotter is aiming to increase the number of educational programs. The park is working with Midland’s Sibley Nature Center to develop programs, he said.

The park’s five full-time employees are asked to wear many hats. In addition to overseeing day-to-day operations of a state-run facility, Dotter is also the police officer and spokesperson.

It is part of an effort to maximize the use of his expertise. Diane Jarrett, a clerk who’s worked at the park for more than nine years, has recently begun writing an outdoors column for a local newspaper.

“We are pushing for education as well as the fun areas,” Jarrett said. “There’s so many interesting birds, flowers. It’s just wonderful out here.”

Opened in 1957, the park has 3,840 acres of sand dunes, with activities such as camping, hiking and sand surfing.

But, Dotter admitted, the park’s most interesting features — small animals, diverse plants, 70-foot sand dunes — are not easily visible from Interstate 20, nor immediately considered by passers-by.

“I’m as guilty as anybody else that just drove by,” he said. “But then when I made that turn, right there by the Section House where everyone sand surfs, I thought, ‘Wow, maybe I didn’t catch all this up there.’ ”