by Eric Blehm
Virtually all the backcountry rangers, and some from the frontcountry, did their part to keep Randy’s spirit alive. In the back of the class during law enforcement training, they quietly discussed the places they intended to search once they were flown to their stations. At night, they gathered around bottles of wine and told stories of “Morgensonia.”
At their stations, they pored over the dusty files and logbooks, seeking tangible pieces of his ghost in the fading, mouse-chewed archives. The backcountry rangers called these words written by Randy Morgenson “The Gospel.”
ALMOST IMMEDIATELY after the search was called off, Chief Ranger Debbie Bird had recommended that Judi file for the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit Program.
Judi, whose life had been in turmoil for three years, was encouraged to pursue a death benefit for Randy, whom she had been in the process of divorcing. But it didn’t sound right to her; it sounded as if she was unwilling to stay with the man, but she certainly was willing to take money to honor his death. She was on the fence until Durkee spoke to her. “The point I tried to make to Judi,” he says, “was that Randy didn’t want the divorce—his letter to the court proved that.” He told her that, whether she liked it or not, she was still married to Randy. Durkee also reminded her that Randy hadn’t felt particularly appreciated for his twenty-eight years of service and this benefit, however late, was a symbol of appreciation. “Judi, Randy would want you to have this,” Durkee told her. “He knew the pain he caused you.”
Judi consented, and in doing so opened up a can of worms. While friends and colleagues kept Randy’s spirit alive, Judi found it exceedingly difficult to prove his passing. She knew Randy was dead, just as she had known when he was having an affair. “A woman just knows these things,” she says.
Admittedly, her heart skipped a beat every time she saw a man with a dark beard approaching her on the street. Numerous times, she’d envisioned Randy knocking on the door, and she would hug him and kiss him…and then, with a bit of Hollywood drama, she’d slap him and beat on his chest and hug him again. Every single time the phone rang, she wondered if maybe, just maybe, it was Randy, ready to come home. She was trapped in the cruel and inescapable whirlpool of not knowing. Her life was at a spinning standstill. Even if she had the desire, she couldn’t go forward with her own life. How could she, in good conscience, move forward in a new relationship without closure? On the flip side, she was gearing up to fight for a benefit based on the belief that there was closure—that Randy was, with certainty, dead. It was maddening. More than once, when she didn’t know if she could go on with the claim, Durkee stepped in.
“Thank god for George and Paige,” says Judi.
Durkee had made it a priority to see that Judi Morgenson received the Public Safety Officers’ Benefit of $100,000 from the U.S. Department of Justice, not only for Judi but also for Randy. With this purpose in mind, Chief Ranger Debbie Bird essentially gave Durkee and Judi the key to the parks’ administrative offices. If there was anything the parks could do, she would try to facilitate it.
Two basic elements are needed for benefit eligibility. One: a body. Two: proof that the officer has been killed while on duty. Without number one, number two cancels out by default. But Bird did some research and found that “proof of death” could suffice in lieu of a body. This was possible if the director of the Park Service or the secretary of the Department of the Interior declared Randy dead.
With the help of Bird and Durkee, the request for an official proof of death was made. Now it was time to wait.
MORE THAN A YEAR after the original search for Randy was called off, there still was no ruling on his death. Judi did, however, return to the Sierra. She’d been invited by Debbie Bird to Bench Lake, an opportunity to meet some of the rangers who had searched for her husband and to pay her last respects as a follow-up search did a final sweep of the area for Randy’s remains.
When Judi boarded the park helicopter on September 22, 1997, she was both nervous and oddly at ease. She felt, in a way, as if she was coming home. As they flew above LeConte Canyon and toward Lake Basin, the helicopter decreased altitude. Looking down at the deep blue waters of the Dumbbell Lakes made Judi gasp, an abrupt physical reaction that gave her chills.
She’d had that “vivid dream” shortly after Randy’s disappearance of him floating with a backpack on at the bottom of a lake. “After that dream,” says Judi, “I always thought he was under water. That vision never let up.” Once they landed at Bench Lake, Judi relayed the information to Eric Morey, the incident commander, who assigned a team to thoroughly check the lake once again. “They didn’t find anything,” says Judi. “They sent out technical climbers from Yosemite to search the cliffs they couldn’t access the year before. Nothing. Not a clue. But he was out there. I could feel it.”
Before the current search began, Cindy Purcell had asked all the rangers to contribute their theories. One ranger wrote, “Have been scratching my head on this search…it does seem to be in the ‘rolling over rocks’ mode.” The ranger then suggested eliminating areas that had been well-searched: “Example—Explorer Pass is a narrow chute. If he had fallen there, chances are we would have found him.” The suicide theory was still alive: “Look closely in areas where he may have jumped, particularly on the north side of Arrow and Marion Peaks…most likely scenarios: a total immobilizing injury…or a swan dive. Other than this, there would only be bone fragments left, with his pack and camping gear being the most likely items to be seen.”
Five days of intense searching by twenty ground searchers uncovered not a single clue.
JUDI FLEW HOME to Sedona and dived into her art. She decided to turn the garage into a studio. This would mean selling Randy’s 1932 Ford Model B five-window coupe, which he’d held on to since he’d bought it in high school. Before he left for the summer, he had told Judi to “sell it if you can get a good price.” Now, she decided, maybe it was time…
After Randy’s disappearance, Judi realized that she was the keeper of many of the Morgenson family treasures. Randy’s brother, Larry, would call Judi to “check in” on her, but the conversations always ended with him requesting some piece of his parents’ property that had been left to his brother. Some items Judi didn’t mind letting go of, but she felt a duty to protect the memories and to honor Dana and Esther as she knew her husband would have. Eventually, she decided that Larry was more interested in the property than in any updates about her or his brother. After a few years, she asked him to stop calling.
Beyond his parents’ books and keepsakes, there were other things belonging to Randy that she knew he wouldn’t have wanted to sit unused in boxes. In particular, his camera equipment. Stuart Scofield was the one person Judi knew Randy would have wanted to go through his photography treasures.
Scofield arrived in Sedona uncertain about how he would react when he went through Randy’s personal belongings. He hugged Judi, and on cue, tears welled up in her eyes. She explained how tears came easily anytime she encountered someone associated with Randy. After they caught up, Scofield was left alone in the first bedroom off the house’s entrance, which had served as Randy’s main library. An entire wall was filled with books, and boxes of slides, prints, and equipment were stacked around the room. Judi had also directed Scofield to a dresser filled with photography odds and ends.
Scofield admits that before he opened one of those dresser drawers, he had not been prone to metaphysical thinking. That changed when he pulled out a cardboard box about the size of a hiking boot shoe box that was filled with random items such as a flash, battery pack, camera batteries, and lens cleaner. It looked like a neatly arranged care package intended for a photographer. Sitting atop the assortment, centered in the box, was a small pamphlet “like you’d get in Sunday school,” says Scofield, “and on the cover of this little pamphlet was Sermon on the Mount, from the Bible. It totally threw me backwards—back in time to Randy’s Sermon at Mineral King.”
It was the late 1980s, when Sc
ofield and Randy had taught a photography workshop called Wilderness Landscapes. They’d camped at the Potwisha campground inside the parks’ Ash Mountain entrance, and woke with the students early one morning to make it to the nearby Mineral King Valley while the light was still right for photography.
The night before had been a sky show of “fantastic thunderstorms,” and there was still a lot of moisture in the air. Randy had planned to inspire the students by telling them how Walt Disney almost turned the Mineral King Valley into a huge resort. This was the type of thing Randy and Scofield did in their workshops, which weren’t just about how to take photographs. They were, according to Scofield, “about how you decide who you are out in the world as a photographer, and if you’re going to photograph the landscape, how you develop a rapport with the wilds.”
That misty morning, Scofield, Randy, and a dozen students gathered at the trailhead and focused their attention on the stunning Mineral King Valley. Randy discreetly climbed up onto a rocky knoll and began reading what Scofield described as “amazingly powerful passages” that Randy had prepared about this, the site of one of the environmental movement’s greatest battles: Sierra Club v. Morton—the 1972 Supreme Court case widely referred to as Mineral King versus Disney.
Fog rolled in and around Randy as he spoke from atop the granite podium, sometimes shrouding him almost entirely from the students. But his voice, reading the powerful words of Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, was strong and steady:
So it should be as respects valleys, alpine meadows, rivers, lakes, estuaries, beaches, ridges, groves of trees, swampland, or even air that feels the destructive pressures of modern technology and modern life. The river, for example, is the living symbol of all the life it sustains or nourishes—fish, aquatic insects, water ouzels, otter, fisher, deer, elk, bear, and all other animals, including man, who are dependent on it or who enjoy it for its sight, its sound, or its life. The river as plaintiff speaks for the ecological unit of life that is part of it. Those people who have a meaningful relation to that body of water—whether it be a fisherman, a canoeist, a zoologist, or a logger—must be able to speak for the values which the river represents and which are threatened with destruction.
“Who,” asked Randy with a dramatic pause before quoting the rest of Douglas’s most famous line, “will speak for the trees?”
“When he finished, the students cheered,” says Scofield. “The whole scene had taken on these epic proportions—the jagged Sierra crest farther up the valley coming in and out of focus through the mist. It was incredibly moving.” And a mini history lesson: most of the students didn’t know that Mineral King had been the case that raised the question of rights for inanimate objects. Scofield, who has taught workshops for more than twenty years, says he has never seen an instructor move an audience the way Randy did that day. “It was like Jesus on the mountain,” explains Scofield. “Powerful weather, amazing beauty, the fog, the crest. It just all came together.”
And it all came back to him now, vividly, as he sat among Randy’s belongings. Ever since that day at Mineral King, Scofield had referred to Randy’s speech as “Randy’s Sermon on the Mount.” He was suddenly overcome by the unshakable conviction that this care package was not just for any photographer—it was tailor-made for him. “There was no question in my mind,” says Scofield. “It was a message from Randy.”
Later, Judi showed Scofield some of the endless files that Randy had kept on virtually every aspect of his life—files that held documents from grammar school, high school, college, the Peace Corps, his correspondence with Wallace Stegner and Ansel Adams, his ranger training, his mother and father, and an extensive documentation of his photography, including the workshops he’d taught.
When Scofield saw those files, he was further convinced that the box was indeed a message from Randy. “If he had wanted to file that Sermon on the Mount pamphlet away as part of his history, Randy kept files of things like that,” he says. “That is where he would have put it. If you assume for a minute that he did want me to find it, he would have known that Judi would have had me go through his camera equipment, but may not have gone through his files. And sure enough, Judi invited me out to do just that. Randy knew. He was thinking about either disappearing or taking his life when he packed that box. He wanted me to have something, a piece of him.
“It worked, all right—that little pamphlet hit me like a ton of bricks.”
Scofield shared with Judi the story of Randy’s Sermon on the Mount, but he wasn’t entirely forthcoming about his belief that the pamphlet had underlying meanings. Judi was grieving, and he didn’t want to add to her burden—certainly not that Randy may have been planning his disappearance or his death.
Scofield did, however, have one other theory, though it was “out there.” He considered it possible that Randy might have put this box together simply because “he sensed something might happen to him.” Perhaps if Scofield had brought up that theory, Judi might have told him the “message” she herself had gotten from Randy, a message delivered, appropriately, within the pages of a book—the novel he’d given her before he left for the mountains.
I Heard the Owl Call My Name had sat on her nightstand until the third or fourth day of the search. She had by that time spent her anger and accepted, or more accurately “knew,” that something had happened. She describes the novel, but only after explaining that Randy always read slowly. “Because he loved the language, he’d savor the language,” says Judi. “He didn’t do anything quickly. He felt you’d miss things if you went too fast. We were open to things, not the mystical New Age stuff here in Sedona, but being in the mountains and spending that much time by yourself…you can tell by his writings he was really in tune with the cycles of nature. You get into those cycles and you become very aware of them, especially when your mind is quiet. It’s very Zen. Everything slows down and you can hear things. You can hear yourself.”
The novel was, in Judi’s words, about “a young minister who was sent by a bishop to British Columbia to live with some native Indians whose tribe was slowly disappearing, losing its old ways and its people. He went there to help them, and in the process learned a lot about life and death and how to accept death. Toward the end, he heard the owl call his name, which was a myth that they had in their tribe. What it meant was that he was going to die. The minister didn’t know it but he had terminal cancer.”
“Subconsciously,” says Judi, “maybe Randy knew. When you’re tapped into the kind of emotional pain he was going through, you are really in tune with other things in nature. The things around you, you just know things—maybe even premonitions. Shortly after reading that book, I had the dream about him being in that lake, under water. So, you get tuned in.
“I think Randy might have had that feeling. Maybe he felt that. Maybe the mountains called his name?”
Some would consider this metaphysical hogwash. In fact, after some time had passed, Judi herself began to discount the possibility that Randy had tuned in to something, remembering that Randy knew she liked owls and had perhaps seen the book and thought of her. Nothing more.
Judi might have thought differently if she had known about Randy’s patrol the season before he disappeared. On September 17, 1995, Randy had hiked from LeConte Canyon down the White Fork to Woods Creek Crossing and then camped in Paradise Valley. Forest fires were raging in the parks. It was raining ash and smelled of acrid smoke. The sun barely cut through the darkness, and then, come nightfall, Randy’s headlamp beam created the same effect as car headlights during a snowstorm. Because of the ash, Randy slept inside his tent, which was unusual.
In the morning, Randy was awakened by an owl calling. It was a surreal day, with silver-and-white ash so thick on the ground it looked like snowfall. He wrote in his logbook, “A great horned owl calling in the wee hours before dawn; eerie smoky dimness, and the owl calling—Paradise.”
Coincidence? Randy might have said, “Only the owl knows for certain.
”
But what is known is that great horned owls are common in the parks. It stands to reason, then, that Randy would have mentioned great horned owls calling dozens of times over the years. According to his station logbooks, however, during the entire course of his ranger career, he’d never mentioned hearing the great horned owl—or any owl, for that matter—“calling,” and he’d documented literally thousands of other species, describing in detail their songs, voices, music. Never an owl. Never its call.
Was it a coincidence, then, that nine months later, he gave his wife I Heard the Owl Call My Name as a parting gift on the last day she ever saw him? Did it strike as anything less than odd that of the hundreds of books lined up on his bookshelves, of the thousands in the bookstores he frequented, he would pick a book whose main message is that of a man’s ability to sense his own coming death—if he listens.
Randy had heard an owl calling and described it as “Paradise.” Did he hear anything else? Was there a message? In the wilderness, nobody listened more attentively than Randy.
ON JANUARY 14, 1998, the director of personnel policy and the solicitor of the National Park Service informed Judi that they had completed their review and “found that circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Ranger Morgenson support the presumption that he is no longer alive.”