Susan McLaughlin and her son find their calling in a lost loved one’s job.

IN a way, ranger Gary McLaughlin still watches over the parched landscape of Anza-Borrego Desert State Park. A career ranger, he patrolled the park for five years before dying of cancer at 49.

Now his wife, Susan, has taken over his old beat, maneuvering a truck along dusty desert roads, around the creosote bushes and spike-headed palm trees. She likes helping visitors find their way around these 600,000 acres of sparse land.

On her chest she wears a silver star, inscribed with her husband’s old badge number.

“My husband always joked that I would become a ranger after he retired,” she says.

But that day never came.

McLaughlin, 52, an outgoing mother of two, says her decision to become a ranger was less a tribute to her husband of 18 years than a discovery of her own career path.

“I always enjoyed where he worked and where we lived,” she says.

But she was shocked when her eldest son, who in his teens always dreamed of fleeing the secluded park life, made the same choice.

“I guess I always took that lifestyle for granted,” says Callan, 23, who entered the ranger academy in Pacific Grove, Calif., a few years after his mother earned her badge. When he graduated in July, it was his mother who pinned the badge to his chest.

State park rangers don’t always enjoy the same recognition as their national park counterparts, who lead tourists around famed landmarks in Yosemite or Yellowstone.

These rangers work in remote outposts -- among the redwoods at Grizzly Creek near Eureka or the jagged rock faces of Red Rock Canyon north of Mojave -- and earn less than most law enforcement officers. The job is a challenge, a combination of outdoor educator, cop and conservation worker.

The ranks of the state’s 588 full-time rangers include several relatives. Father and son rangers. Husband and wife rangers. But as a widow who took over her husband’s old assignment, McLaughlin may be unique.

“I can’t recall any one else doing that,” says cadet training officer William Hambaro, who trained McLaughlin and her son.

When her husband was alive, McLaughlin worked as a park volunteer, teaching children about nature and raising money for interpretive programs. They lived in small towns near Benbow Lake State Recreation Area in Humboldt County, Standish-Hickey State Park in Mendocino County and finally the desert in San Diego County.

These sites aren’t the stars of the state parks system, but they were places that made the McLaughlins feel part of a close-knit family of park employees who shared dinners and conversation after long days on the trails.

All that came to a halt when Gary died, and McLaughlin was faced with raising two teenage boys on her own.

With a bachelor’s degree in health education, she took office jobs, transcribing medical records for a hospital and keeping the books at a country club. She missed her husband, but she also yearned for the life she shared with him. “When we lost him,” she says, “we also lost that life.”

McLaughlin realized that swapping the park life for office jobs left her with an emptiness that drove her back to the outdoors and the workers she values more as family than colleagues.

“People tell me all the time that it’s the best job in the world, and they’re right,” she says.

After her youngest son left home in 2001, McLaughlin signed up for the park ranger academy. At the graduation ceremony, she was presented with a badge engraved with Gary’s old number and assigned to Richardson Grove State Park in Humboldt County. Two years later, when an opening came up at Anza-Borrego, she jumped at the chance to work at her husband’s old park.

Though it’s a harsh stretch of desert, she knew the park and the nearby community and felt at home there. But she never dreamed her oldest son would seek out that same life.

When he was growing up, Callan moved often due to his father’s job, bouncing among several small rural towns bordering state parks. As a teenager, he grew restless and dreamed of moving to a big city. After his father died, he took a summer job as a park aide at Benbow Lake. He also washed dishes at a restaurant and bagged groceries. Later he earned an associate of arts degree in kinesiology with plans to be a teacher or a cop.

After his mother attended the academy, Callan wondered if he really wanted to work in a big city, behind a desk in a stuffy office. Like her, he realized he missed the outdoors.

“I didn’t tell anyone how I felt,” Callan says.

In June, during Callan’s last month at the academy, his mother took classes to become a training officer. The ranger and her cadet son sat on a couch during a break in lessons, a respite from their shared passion.

She wore an olive-grey uniform, a gun belt around her waste and a silver badge on her chest. Callan wore the same uniform but without a gun belt and badge. He is tall with a crew cut, the look of a burly Marine recruit. “Our dream was that he would be a teacher or a basketball coach,” she says, looking at her son.

Callan feels comfortable in the setting, but offers a caveat. He keenly feels the pressure of going into what has become in some ways the family business.

“I don’t want to be judged by what my parents did,” he says.

McLaughlin looked at her son and smiles. “I think his dad would be proud of him,” she says.

Callan looks down and nods.