Meet the Madawaska Kid: How Chris Joyce became an HCT volunteer

A conversation with Harwich Conservation Trust (HCT) volunteer Chris Joyce is likely to cover a lot of ground. That’s because she has had a bunch of fascinating adventures and, as someone recently said at the HCT office, “Chris isn’t afraid to say ‘yes’ to new experiences.”

She grew up in Madawaska, Maine, way up north, across the St. John River from Edmundston, Canada. Chris was born in Edmundston, because that’s where the hospital was. Madawaska is a paper mill town and it was in full bloom when Chris was growing up. It was a good place to be a kid, but the winters were pretty tough.

Listening to Chris talk about Madawaska kind of sounds like a happy Stephen King story, if there is such a thing. She and her friends would walk across the bridge to Canada to buy candy and ice cream.

Later, she drove through the Maine countryside to release her father’s homing pigeons 100 miles from Madawaska, then went shopping with friends in the bustling metropolis of Presque Isle. Sometimes, this pigeon posse would leave malted milk balls in stranger’s mailboxes, an odd but delicious bit of mischief.

A western twist of fate

After college, Chris ended up in Boston for about a year, but then an evening with friends, which may or may not have involved libations, changed everything. “We decided we’d go to San Francisco,” she said. “And then I checked the next morning. I asked, ‘do you remember what we said?’ Yep. Are we going? Yep.”

The slightly haphazard plan to go west worked out great. Chris enjoyed a successful career in management for a Bay Area utility company for many years, gleefully retiring at age 55. She then volunteered for a yacht club that was located near McCovey Cove, where home run balls sometimes land after leaving the San Francisco Giants’ stadium.

Chris had visited Cape Cod over the years, and eventually was drawn back east to our sandy peninsula where she bought a home. She began volunteering for HCT around 2013.

There was so much more ground to cover with Chris, like discussing her longtime plan to marry baseball star Sandy Koufax and lamenting the recent passing of Grateful Dead guitarist Bob Weir, but we had to get down to business. So, we shelved these and other topics for future fat-chewing sessions, and asked Chris about her work with HCT:

How did you become an HCT volunteer?

I was standing in line at Dunkin’ Donuts in Harwich Port. And the fellow in front of me (former HCT staffer Ryan Mann) had a jacket that said “yacht club,” on it, something like that, and I asked him if he was involved with sailboat racing. He said “yes” — but it was January, so there wasn’t anything going on. He said he would introduce me at the yacht club, but then said, “in the meantime, would you like to volunteer at the Harwich Conservation Trust?

And so, I filled out an online application or background thingy. Came in for an interview, and then I started working for the land steward, helping with herring counts and organizing some of the land documents.

What HCT projects are you working on now?

I’m keeping addresses up to date. If we have mail returned or emails bounce back, I’ll find out what’s going on and update appropriately. This is important, because without good addresses and email addresses, you can end up wasting a lot of time and money. We want to make sure we can stay in touch with people.

You’ve been an HCT volunteer for more than a decade. What inspires that kind of dedication?

It’s our mission. I wouldn’t have been here this many years if I didn’t like the idea of saving and restoring land.  And I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t like the people. It always feels like a fun club when I come into the office.

Why is preserving land important to you?

I think it’s because of where I grew up. I saw the terrible pollution from the paper mill. I went down to the St. John River and saw all these dead fish. And then watching that industry start turning around, and not just clear-cutting, and starting to preserve the land that they had.

And it’s a tough go here on the Cape because there’s not much land left, and so many people want a piece of it. So, when we can carve out these spaces, it feels good.

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