Nature Noir (20 page)

It was a paradoxical moment. While the pace of settlement and the indignities of modern life in cities already made it clear to people like Hedges and Hayden that the remaining slices of the unfenced West were endangered by and would soon be needed by their countrymen, the park's creation predated by four years the 1876 slaughter of Custer's Seventh Cavalry by twenty-five hundred Cheyenne and Sioux warriors in Montana Territory—a very frontierlike event. Still, by then the United States was linked coast to coast by steel rails and copper telegraph wire, and the thirty to seventy million bison that only recently had thundered across once endless seas of grass on the Great Plains were well on their way to extinction. Of the handful that survived in the United States by an 1889 census, the largest herd, of about two hundred, had taken refuge in Yellowstone, where they would ultimately be saved.

That, then, is the official version of the beginning of national parks.

But in fact the first national park wasn't one at all. It was a state park called Yosemite, and the first California state park ranger there predated Yellowstone by fifteen years. And I wouldn't have known this if it hadn't been for Finch's midlife crisis.

***

Our American River canyons were the inverse of Yellowstone: they were preserved only by stays of execution. Our work in them was frequently dangerous, and we rangers depended intimately upon one another for safety. For years we spent more of our waking lives with each other than with our wives. Yet we communicated our feelings to each other in only the most indirect ways—by casual inference, in pointed jokes, and with innuendo—and the thing most unsaid between us was the daily agony of risking our skins for nothing. In the face of this, to preserve our mental health, each of us learned to cultivate interests outside our jobs.

I had my writing, a wife, and eventually two children.

O'Leary had a wife, a little boy, and a beautiful home he'd built with his own hands. He and Bell were co-owners of a salmon boat they kept trailered in our truck shed. A picture of O'Leary at the helm, motoring across a coastal inlet against a fog bank with a full catch, hung on our office wall. He seldom beamed like that at work.

Bell was a hunter, passionate about pheasant and turkey season and his nervous, amber-eyed vizsla bird dogs. On summer evenings he played softball with a team sponsored by a local cabinet shop. He had a wife, a son, and a daughter who dreamed of becoming a ballerina.

Sherm Jeffries had his wife, two daughters, his church, his fly-fishing.

MacGaff had courted his wife in the mountains and each summer they'd go camping at the place where they met. He kept a garden and made his own beer. But more than anything, his accounts kept the ship of his life on an even keel, and he trimmed and balanced them the way a sailor trims sail. Each day he knew the exact balance of our park budget, the exact number of days until his retirement, and the precise amount accruing to him in his pension plan. He could quote to the nearest quarter-hour his vacation hours. He maintained himself in a state of robust good health not as an end in itself, we all suspected, but as a way to hoard a mountain of unused sick leave for which the department would have to pay him when he retired.

Below the dam's waterline each of us was left to work out his salvation in his own way, and one of MacGaff's ways was to keep an inventory of everything he might be able to salvage from the place before it went underwater. At one location where the Bureau had burned a former resident's house, MacGaff would note a tumbledown chimney. Later the bricks would disappear, and a few weeks after that they'd reappear in a decorative path and a little brick wall around a flowerbed at his home. Elsewhere in our canyons he'd come upon a pile of large planks, the remains of a former resident's barn. Sometime later they'd disappear. Sometime after that, raised beds in his garden where he grew strawberries would be surrounded by neat plank boxes. MacGaff kept notes on these sorts of resources in a notebook in the breast pocket of his uniform. It was legendary. One ranger claimed to have inspected it one night when MacGaff went home, leaving his uniform shirt draped over a chair. According to that ranger, it contained entries like "firewood: large fallen oak limb, Windy Point, approx ¼ cord."

And so it did not escape notice when MacGaff began taking a five-gallon plastic bucket with him when he drove away from our station each morning. Each evening when he returned, he'd carry the bucket—now obviously heavy—from his government Jimmy to his own pickup. The next morning the empty bucket went back in his Jimmy before he went on patrol. Eventually it was learned that MacGaff had graveled his whole driveway, one bucket at a time, from an abandoned gravel quarry five hundred feet beneath the dam's waterline.

Finch had his union work. In 1979 state park rangers were the lowest-paid law enforcement officers in California and, fed up with low wages and capricious discipline from desk-jockey superiors, Finch decided to organize. Gathering around him a cadre of dedicated colleagues—O'Leary was the first, and the union treasurer—Finch negotiated pay parity with other cops, recourse in the face of unfair discipline, bulletproof vests, better guns, and new patrol wagons before the old ones fell apart underneath us. Then, in a final flourish, he got us sixty dollars a month physical fitness pay if we could pass an annual exercise test. But eventually the state park rangers' union was gobbled up by a larger union of state employees and Finch resigned his presidency in disgust. Now he had only his job in our doomed canyons, and his fortieth birthday was coming up, too.

For the first time since I'd known him, Finch seemed sullen, preoccupied.

One day in the kitchen I asked him, "What's eating you, Dave?"

"I don't know," he answered. "The ol' midlife crisis, I guess."

The boundaries of parks and wildernesses are really just lines on a map. In practice they are permeable to air pollution, tree diseases, and the peregrinations of eagles and mountain lions, feral cats that hunt songbirds, and domestic dogs that chase deer. Most of all, park boundaries are permeable to human behavior, because people bring their problems with them when they come. Those who commit crimes in a park are generally the same who transgress against their fellow citizens elsewhere. And since the 1960s, with population and social problems growing outside their parks, rangers increasingly spend their time defending not trees and animals but the experience of their visitors—their peace and quiet and safety—from other visitors.

One summer evening Finch got dispatched to investigate shots fired in the campground at Upper Lake Clementine. O'Leary and I responded to back him up. Finch got there first. At the bottom of Upper Lake Clementine Road in those days, what we called a campground was nothing but some tracks in the sand through a jungle of willow and giant bamboolike arundo, ending on a beach where people set up their tents. We had a campground host living in a camper at the entrance to keep an eye on things.

When Finch got there the host, a man I will call Bob, told him that a particular group had been shooting a large-caliber revolver in the campground for over an hour. Bob gave Finch his detailed notes with descriptions of the people and their vehicles. Then, just as Finch made ready to leave, a brown pickup truck drove by, headed out of the campground.

"That's one of the trucks!" exclaimed Bob.

Finch gave chase, hit the siren, and stopped the truck on the road out of the canyon. He had no idea at that point where the gun was. Approaching cautiously, he found that the truck's single occupant was a woman. She looked nervous. Finch questioned her about the gunfire.

"What gunfire?" she asked. When someone says that about a .44 magnum going off repeatedly in a campground, you know you're close to the suspect.

But before Finch could go any further with his investigation, a man drove up on a motorcycle. He had an open beer clamped between his thighs. He demanded to know what Finch was doing with his wife. The man fit the description of one of the shooters. He was conspicuously drunk, so Finch detained him for drunk driving.

O'Leary and I arrived. We got a brief account from Finch of what had transpired so far. No sooner had Finch finished than another pickup truck drove toward us. It too matched one of the vehicles Bob had described, and when it pulled up alongside us we found its driver as drunk as the first two. O'Leary and I detained him as well. Like shooting, drunk driving is dangerous in a campground, where it's possible to back your car right over someone in a sleeping bag in the dark.

By now things were getting a little hard to keep track of. It was easier for three officers to carry out one arrest than it was for us to arrest three unpredictable drunks at the same time. Then, as O'Leary was walking the second of the drunks to Finch's Jeep, a fourth member of the party appeared on foot.

"What are you assholes doing? Leave him alone!" she slurred, making a beeline for O'Leary, as the latter attempted to pour his prisoner into the Jeep's back seat.

Finch stepped into her path. She shoved him. He stood fast. Behind him O'Leary was still struggling with his man, who wasn't following directions. I was over with the first woman Finch had stopped, trying to keep her out of the fray.

The other woman kept on shoving Finch and screaming, "You fucking assholes, you fucking assholes!"

"It's time for you to leave," Finch told her in a voice that was loud but surprisingly calm. "Walk away and stop interfering, or I'll have to arrest you," he said.

"Fuck you, you fuckers! Leave him alone!" the woman answered at the top of her lungs, pawing at Finch to get at O'Leary.

Finch had had enough.

"That's it," he said, grabbing one of her wrists as he reached for his handcuffs. But she wasn't going for it, and the fight was on. Now she was trying to bite him. O'Leary closed the door on his prisoner and turned to help Finch. I told the first woman to remain in her pickup and went to help Finch, too.

By now it had grown quite dark, and distracted by the scuffle, none of us saw the woman I'd left in the first pickup get out and sneak around the other side of Finch's Jeep, where she opened the back door we had mistakenly left unlocked and let both prisoners out. O'Leary and Finch and I were struggling to handcuff the screaming woman when we looked up and saw both men out of the car, staggering around in their handcuffs, yelling about police brutality. Having worked the second woman into her cuffs, O'Leary and I left her kicking at Finch and went to corral the men. Another struggle ensued. We dragged them back to the car.

Eventually we had all four drunks in the back seats of our vehicles. We were sticky with sweat and covered in dust. The combination made mud. We radioed for a brace of tow trucks. In the impound search we found the gun, a loaded .44 magnum revolver, under the driver's seat of the first pickup Finch had stopped. Why hadn't it been pulled in the melee? Just luck, we guessed.

After Finch departed from the union, his quest for diversions diversified. He became an avid collector of old ranger badges and uniform insignia.

One day I came into the office at the lower end of our compound and found him at his desk. Spread out in front of him and across a typing table to his left were old photographs and hand-tinted postcards.

"What's all this? New hobby?" I asked him.

"I've been looking for old photos of rangers—the first rangers. I got these from a guy at a badge collector show."

"Who's this guy with the beard, standing in front of the tree?"

"That's Galen Clark, the first Guardian of Yosemite," answered Finch.

I picked up the photo.

"Pretty wooly-looking—a real frontiersman, with the beard, that rifle, and the mountain man costume. Early national park ranger, huh?" I asked.

"Nope, state—
state
park ranger. The first. His actual title was Guardian of Yosemite. Yosemite Valley was deeded by ol' Abraham Lincoln to the state of California as a public park in 1864."

"I thought the army took care of Yosemite."

"That's true," replied Finch, "but they didn't get there until 1891. Our guy Galen was there first. From what I can tell, he was the first ranger in the United States, and he was a state ranger, just like us."

The actual mechanics of defending Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks did not emerge fully formed. In 1866, when Galen Clark was appointed by the California Legislature to be Guardian of Yosemite, he was one man living in the midst of a spread-out community of homesteaders, innkeepers, hunters, and sheep-herders making a living off the land he was supposed to be protecting. The lumber for the settlers' habitations and guest accommodations, the grass and hay for their horses, and the wild and domestic meat and vegetables that graced their tables most often came from park territory. As a result, much, maybe most, of the energy expended by Clark and the other first guardians went into controlling the depredations of their fellow residents.

Still, from the very beginning the pattern was familiar. Researching his roots, Finch traveled to Yosemite, where he learned the circumstances of Galen Clark's first known arrest. In 1870, Clark apprehended two men who had cut down a huge pine tree. He took them before a judge in Mariposa, where they were convicted and fined twenty dollars each. Finch also located a report by Clark's successor, James Hutchings, to the California Legislature of 1882.

"Here it is—listen to this," he told me one day from his desk. "'Sometimes we are visited by rough characters from the mountains who, when crazy with liquor, not only become nuisances, but sometimes endanger human life.' Sound familiar?" he asked.

"Some things don't change," I replied.

"Yup," he said, smiling. "Some things never change."

But Clark, Hutchings, and the other solitary guardians could never effectively patrol and protect the hundreds of square miles of the early parks. In 1875 it was reported that four thousand elk had been slaughtered by wildlife poachers in Yellowstone the previous winter, and five years later, an estimated ten thousand annual visitors were under no practical supervision in most of the park. They, their innkeepers, and their guides went around cutting down trees, shooting animals, and chipping souvenirs from the rock formations of Mammoth Hot Springs. In an attempt to remedy the situation, a local mountain man, Harry Yount, was appointed to guard Yellowstone. He resigned after only a year, complaining that the task was hopelessly large for just one man. A series of government investigations of conditions in national parks during the following decade resulted in scathing reports on the failure of civilian authorities to protect them properly. Some stronger force was needed, and into this void, in 1886 at Yellowstone and in 1891 at Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, were sent detachments of U.S. Army cavalry, whose superiors had long expressed an interest in the job.