The Inquirer and Mirror

Nantucket's Newspaper

August 25, 2005

by Catherine Fahy

He Learned His Job At His Grandpa's Knee

                                                                                     
Chris Iller, Nantucket Conservation Foundation properties maintenance supervisor and Unity College alumnus, at the entrance to Tupancy Links off Cliff Road. Iller’s grandfather Bob McGrath held that position for more than 20 years before falling ill several years ago.

Photo by Nicole Harnishfeger

Chris Iller started training for his dream job sitting in the truck beside his grandfather, former Nantucket Conservation Foundation properties maintenance supervisor Robert McGrath.

A generation later, Iller is the one sitting behind the wheel of a Conservation Foundation truck as the person in charge of managing more than 8,700 acres of protected land on Nantucket.

“How cool is that, to have my dream job at the same time I’m protecting the island?”

Iller said Wednesday at the Robert W. McGrath Conservation Property Management Center in the Oswald Tupancy Barn off Cliff Road.

The center is named after his grandfather, who drove a tow truck for Don Allen Ford before the Conservation Foundation hired him in 1981.

“He used to throw me in the truck and drive me around,” said Iller, who liked it so much he went on to earn a degree in park management from Unity College, an environmental college south of Bangor, Maine.

“How many people get to go out and do exactly what they want to do?” he asked, smiling in a long sleeve denim shirt with the foundation logo.

Not that he was hired as soon as he graduated. Iller said when he applied to work on the maintenance crew in 1996, the Conservation Foundation didn’t hire him.

“I was a little surprised by that, but maybe they had enough staff or maybe they wanted me to go out and see the world a little,” said Iller, who bided his time driving snow grooming machines on the night shift at Killington Resort in Vermont.

The Foundation finally hired Iller in January, 1999. By then he’d been living on the island since 1998, when he met his wife, Jenny (Hudzik), a native Nantucketer. The Illers now have a 2-year-old daughter, Madison, with a second child on the way at the end of September. Chris said he and Jenny and another Conservation Foundation family also expecting in September call them “blizzard babies.”

Iller himself was four days shy of being a native Nantucketer when his parents moved to Bedford, N.H. on Sept. 4, 1973. Instead, he was born Sept. 8 in Manchester, N.H. Looking back, he said he had the best of both worlds – skiing in the winter and going to the beach on Nantucket in the summer.

Now, as the land management supervisor, Iller oversees a four-person staff in charge of prioritizing maintenance on a mind-boggling amount of land - from mowing and burning to building fences, checking buildings and simply patrolling.

The Nantucket Conservation Foundation, founded in 1963 with less than an acre of land, is a membership-supported non-profit conservation organization that now owns nearly a third of the island. As the island’s largest landowner, the foundation is controlled by a board of trustees who oversee land acquisitions from individuals, organizations, estates, bequests and trusts.

Iller said the biggest challenge is accepting that he can’t be everywhere at once. But since he’s put some of the more high-traffic tracts on a monthly maintenance schedule – Sanford Farms, Tupancy Links and the Bird Sanctuary on North Beach Street among them – it’s been better. “The best part of our job is that every day it’s different,” he said.
This time of year the biggest problem is morning-after party messes, with the added concern that a bonfire from one of those parties might ignite a brush fire. “We’re really frightened about that,” Iller said.

While Iller continues to learn about land management, he also learns about people. “What you need to learn about land management is what you need to learn about people because there are so many different views on how land should be managed,” he said, using the fact that some people want to ride horses at Tupancy Links as an example.

“The soil is too fragile,” he said. “People forget we’re not just here to keep developers off the land.”