"If I included my time, it's over a million," he said.
And romance can hit hard against reality. Rains can wash out gravel driveways that the curators are not allowed to pave. It's up to them to shovel or plow snow from a half-mile-long entrance area. Some contend with frequent power outages. Maintenance is constant.
Not only could O'Brien not kill the groundhogs that devoured her Swiss chard, but the Mullars gave up maintaining a greenhouse because deer coveted everything inside.
"Sometimes they would actually crash through the glass there," Leonard Mullar said.
Children of curators grow up with a freedom foreign to their classmates and an insider's appreciation of nature.
Hannah Gonzales, O'Brien's daughter, was in grade school when her family moved to the park, where she and her brothers helped work on the house but also rode mountain bikes on park trails, jumped into swimming holes, fished, and waited in their cars while wild turkeys toddled out of their path.
Those experiences, and being rattled by condo living, led her and her husband, Rey, in their 20s, to become curators of a house near her mother's.
"We never had a reason to run away and play Huck Finn because the park was our lives," she said.
Mike and Brigitte Hisky live in Patapsco Valley State Park with their two teenagers.
"No one realizes what I mean until they see it. They are like, 'Where is everyone else's house?,' " said 14-year-old Gina Hisky.
"We go in the hot tub, at night you see the stars and everything. We scream. And no one can hear," Gina said.
Passers-by have been generally friendly. Plenty are lost.
"We are almost like the unofficial welcoming committee," Mike Hisky said. "People ask how to, how do you get to the river? They want to go fishing."
The state cannot find curators for all the houses it wants restored.
There's been no interest in a turn-of-the-century African-American schoolhouse in Fort Frederick State Park in Washington County, a small clapboard structure that sits on a half-acre near the park's maintenance complex; or for a little frame house in Doncaster State Forest in Charles County that was believed to have been used by the Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.
An open house in April for an 1810 house and outbuildings in the Grove Farm Wildlife Management Area in Cecil County drew just 10 visitors, a substantial drop-off from 75 the year before, and one proposal.
