Dappled sunlight beams through the bald cypress along the waterways of the Big Thicket National Preserve, in Southeast Texas, where the trailhead parking lot is filling up with cars despite the fact that the nearby visitor center has been buttoned up tight for nearly three weeks. It’s a beautiful day for a hike, and not just for Texans: a passenger van with a Mississippi license plate idles as a school group wrapping up vacation piles in. A visitor from Beaumont heads up the trail into the woods, while local John Viverette, who lives in nearby Kountze, keeps an eye out for litterbugs.
“I come here all the time,” Viverette says, as his hound, Norma Jean, paces in the cab of his pickup truck. “Since the government shutdown, I haven’t seen anybody here to do maintenance, so I’ve been picking up trash and cigarette butts.”
As the federal shutdown—which entered Day 20 on Thursday—continues, self-appointed cleanup crews have been organized across the state as well as the nation to help care for parks that have remained open, albeit with little in the way of services. Some, like Viverette and the collection of Terlingua residents and businesses on the edge of Big Bend National Park, are volunteers, while in San Antonio, employees with the Bexar County Heritage & Parks Department are working to help maintain bathrooms and collect trash on the properties that make up the San Antonio Missions National Historic Park. “We went ahead and offered because we understand how important these places are to people,” says Bexar County public information specialist Monica Ramos. “If this lasts a year, we will keep doing this so everyone will be able to visit.” Other historic sites under the auspices of the National Park Service aren’t so fortunate: the Palo Alto Battlefield, in the Lower Rio Grande Valley, and the Fort Davis National Historic Site are closed to the public during the shutdown.