DREAM A LITTLE DREAM : Sea Change

Two years ago, Lori Winston was a Massachusetts social worker who wanted a little change in her life. She got it. Now 48, Winston is a National Park Service ranger assigned to the barren, wind-swept but starkly beautiful Channel Islands.

“I guess it is a little different,” says Winston, a divorced mother of a 21-year-old son. “But I was ready for a change, and it seemed like the challenging things are the things you get the most out of. And I thought being a park ranger would be fun.”

Some of her friends thought it was a little strange for a woman her age to go running off to be a park ranger. But she doesn’t regret a thing. “This is great,” she says. “Right now, I really don’t want to do anything else.”

She often works on the Park Service’s 30-foot patrol boat out of Ventura, patrolling the islands for people sneaking in to fish the protected waters. (A graduate of a 10-week law enforcement course, she is a sworn peace officer authorized to carry a firearm.) She’ll occasionally spend a week at a time stationed on Santa Rosa or San Miguel islands, protecting the uninhabited islands from unauthorized intruders and guiding weekend campers on rugged 15-mile hikes.

As a seasonal ranger who works six months out of the year, Winston earns $11.40 an hour. The accommodations aren’t exactly plush, either. For example, while serving on San Miguel Island, the northernmost of the Channel Islands, Winston sleeps in a converted metal shipping container.

There are only 12 rangers at the park, so much of her work is solitary. But Winston says she never gets bored: “Sometimes one of the biggest problems is finding enough time for yourself.”

“It’s really beautiful here,” she says. “And the rest of the world seems so far away. Sometimes we’ll listen to the L.A. traffic reports on the radio and just laugh.”