by Hope Jahren
When we spoke, Rice was jumpy and broke down several times. “I can’t go anywhere without wondering, ‘Do people know who I am?’ ” she said. One male firefighter who has worked with Rice for five years told me, “It changed her whole life. People know Denice’s story on the forest, so she has this cloud around her. I’ve seen it for four years. I see Denice ‘trigger’ all the time: in classroom settings, out in the woods.”
Ultimately the ranger in charge of the investigation recommended that Beckett should be fired. But Beckett retired before any action could be taken. Meanwhile Rice’s career has effectively stalled. The firefighter who worked with Rice requested anonymity, explaining, “If the powers that be tie me to her in any way, I’ll never promote here again.”
Rice’s ordeal wasn’t unique. Lesa Donnelly said that in her capacity as an advocate, she has been contacted by scores of women in the service in California who allege they’ve been punished for pursuing sexual harassment complaints. One 22-year-old forestry technician filed a claim and several days afterward was visited by officials who searched only her side of the barracks with a drug dog. According to a subsequent complaint she lodged with the Forest Service, her roommate told her that one official had remarked, “You guys must have pissed someone off.” The woman left the service soon afterward.
Elisa Lopez-Crowder, a 34-year-old navy veteran, was hired as a firefighter in 2010. She ran 45-pound sections of hose into the forest and cleared live trees to create fuel breaks. In her first months on the Eldorado, she said, an assistant captain asked her whether she’d been a “bitch” or a “slut” in the navy, and whether her skin was really that color or just dirty. One day while she was clearing brush, she claimed, he hoisted her by her line gear and threw her to the ground; according to a male coworker’s account, he held her down with his foot. The coworker intervened, and later joined her to report the matter to their captain.
The assistant captain was briefly placed on administrative leave. (In a court declaration he said Lopez-Crowder had “tripped” and that “before I helped her up, I jokingly placed my foot on her pack.”) While an investigation was still underway, he was assigned to the same work sites as Lopez-Crowder. About a year later she traveled with Donnelly and other Forest Service women to bring their concerns to USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack in Washington, D.C. Lopez-Crowder said Vilsack apologized and assured her that the assistant captain had been removed from his position; it fell to Lopez-Crowder to tell the secretary that he was still on the Forest Service payroll. A short time later the assistant captain left the force. Lopez-Crowder transferred out of the firefighting division anyway, fearing that she had become a target. “In the years I served in the military,” she said, “I never encountered such discrimination and harassment as I have working for the U.S. Forest Service.”
Alicia Dabney, a mother of three who lives on the Tule River Indian reservation, became a firefighter, like her father and uncles before her, at the age of 26 in the Sequoia National Forest. According to Equal Employment Opportunity complaints she filed in 2011 and 2012, Dabney claimed that coworkers made disparaging remarks about her Latina and Comanche heritage and joked about sexually assaulting women. She said a male supervisor instructed her and another female firefighter to tell him when they began menstruating. At a training academy, other participants left lewd sexual propositions on her voicemail. One day she arrived at work to find the floor of the engine house strewn with printouts that read “Alicia Dabney The Whore.” (She provided a photo of the printouts.)
Some of the harassment was physical. Once a male coworker jumped on her neck, “riding me like a big horse,” she recalled. On an assignment in Texas, she said, a supervisor put her in a chokehold and threw her on his hotel bed. A USDA investigation substantiated the first of those incidents but denied that there had been a “pattern of harassment.” In 2012, Dabney was informed that the Forest Service was initiating her termination, claiming she had omitted part of her criminal record—a misdemeanor vandalism charge—and failed to disclose federal debt on her application. (Dabney maintains that she disclosed both.) In 2013, Dabney left and signed a settlement agreement with the Forest Service.
In 2011 the USDA put the Forest Service into temporary receivership for its failure to adequately respond to sexual harassment claims. For the next year all EEO complaints were handled by the secretary’s office in Washington. Tom Tidwell, the chief of the Forest Service, explained in an email to staff that the change would allow the agency “to better process a series of EEO complaints within the Forest Service that, frankly, we have not handled well.”
In the Canyon’s River District, the problems had continued unabated since Cheyenne Szydlo’s 2006 trip. Certain boatmen were repeatedly accused of harassing or assaulting women in strikingly similar scenarios. One young boatman covered his Park Service boat hatch with pictures of topless women and boasted to coworkers, including Dan Hall, about a side gig recruiting college women for Girls Gone Wild–style videos. Hall said that half a dozen intermittent boatmen who, like him, objected to the boat shop’s culture found themselves blacklisted from river assignments. And even in the rare cases when management did take swift action, the targets weren’t always the people you’d expect.
In 2011, Mike Harris, a contract hire then in his late 50s, was training a 40-year-old river ranger named Chelly Kearney to operate a new boat. She said that he directed her to pull to the shore, away from their group, and announced that he was going to take a bath. Then, she said, he removed all of his clothes and invited Kearney to join him in the water. When Kearney asked if they could leave, he put on his life jacket and climbed back on the boat naked. He “stood there with his penis completely exposed,” Kearney later wrote in a detailed letter to park leadership. “I stated to Harris, ‘Do not get on this boat until you put your clothes on.’ He stated to me that he needed to dry his clothes out. I said, ‘No, do not get on this boat without your clothes.’ He finally put on a pair of long underwear pants.” Harris confirmed to me that he climbed onto the front of the boat naked: “I just wanted to sit in the sun and dry out,” he said. However, he said he thought he had permission from Kearney to bathe and didn’t ask her to join him.
Upon Kearney’s return, she said she told a supervisor about the incident. The supervisor, she alleged, joked that they “used to not call it sexual harassment until the guy whipped out his penis and slapped you across the face with it.” Kearney didn’t take the matter further.
The next year, on another trip, a biologist I’ll call Lynn said Harris repeatedly asked her to sleep in his tent when hers started leaking during a rainstorm. After she refused, he set up his tent directly next to hers. Harris told me that he only asked Lynn to join him in his tent once and hadn’t meant the invitation as a come-on. “It wasn’t to have sex,” Harris said. “I think I said something like ‘We could snuggle and that’s all.’ ”
Lynn said she emailed her supervisor about the episode. After a third female employee filed an EEO complaint about his behavior in 2013, Harris resigned. Lynn’s complaint was supposed to be confidential, but she noticed that boatmen she’d been friendly with began to act coldly toward her. And matters only escalated from there.
In February 2014, Dave Loeffler led a joint Park Service–private sector trip. Both Anne and Lynn were apprehensive about being on the river with him. At one point, Lynn said, a passenger inquired about a boatman who’d been let go and Loeffler ranted about “complainers” who had ruined boatmen’s lives. The following day, as the group approached a campsite, Lynn was standing in the bow of her boat when Loeffler pulled her out roughly by her life jacket—a shocking breach of river norms. Anne came up to Lynn on the beach to find her concealing tears behind her sunglasses. Lynn wanted to leave, but at that point there was no way for her to hike out.
On the last night the party celebrated with dinner and drinks. A woman who worked for a private boat company produced a novelty penis-shaped straw she’d received at a bachelorette party and dropped i
t in a colleague’s drink. People laughed and passed the straw around. At one point Lynn was holding it when Loeffler tried to take her picture. Then someone put on music. It was an eclectic playlist, and people danced accordingly: interpretive dance, head-banging, two-stepping. A hip-hop song came on, and the group started talking about twerking. Lynn gave a comically awkward demonstration in her heavy canvas Carhartt pants, puffy down jacket, and rubber boots.
Two days later Anne and Lynn were called into the offices of upper management and informed that they’d been accused of sexual misconduct. In written statements, Loeffler and two of his friends claimed that Anne and Lynn had shoved the penis straw in Loeffler’s face, danced provocatively in short skirts, and, as one complainant put it, behaved “coquettishly” throughout the trip. “I felt I needed to remove myself from this increasingly hostile work environment,” Loeffler wrote in his statement. “They were being so rude and inappropriate to myself and others.” According to notes from the manager assigned to look into the situation, Loeffler said he wanted Anne and Lynn to be “treated similarly” to other employees accused of harassment—that is, with the Park Service deciding not to renew their contracts.
Both women protested to the managers that they were being retaliated against for their previous reports of sexual harassment. Nonetheless, the park launched an investigation, although both superintendent David Uberuaga and deputy superintendent Diane Chalfant would later acknowledge in an official report that it may not have been thorough enough. In particular, the investigators weren’t made aware of the history between Anne, Lynn, and the boatmen.
In a meeting Lynn said Chalfant told her that Loeffler’s charges couldn’t be retaliatory, since Lynn’s previous sexual harassment complaint was confidential. Both Lynn and Anne were informed that their contracts would not be renewed. In Lynn’s termination letter, Chalfant wrote, “We cannot afford to have team members in our employment who are not on board with management’s expectations and requirements.”
“What happened to [Lynn] was the most horrifying thing I’d ever seen,” said Chelly Kearney, who had made her own efforts to draw attention to the treatment of women on the river. About a year after she resigned in 2012, she wrote a 29-page letter to Grand Canyon chief ranger Bill Wright documenting multiple instances of harassment, assault, and retaliation and describing a culture that protected male harassers while allowing victims to be targeted for retaliation. The Park Service requested a formal EEO investigation, but the final report was never distributed beyond the uppermost level of park management and no disciplinary actions were taken.
Following Lynn’s and Anne’s dismissal, Kearney tried again. She forwarded her letter to Uberuaga, writing that she had witnessed a “disturbing and pervasive level of hatred” toward Anne and her boss and that Anne should be protected by federal whistle-blower laws. She received a brief response from Uberuaga thanking her for her concern.
Some former park employees now ruefully refer to the fateful party as “The Night on Cock-Straw Beach,” and the incident became an unlikely rallying point. Hall sent around an email asking a core group of former park employees and colleagues in private rafting companies to gather names of other women who’d been harassed or run out of the River District. With Donnelly’s help, 12 women and Hall wrote to secretary of the interior Sally Jewell, requesting a formal investigation into the “pervasive culture of discrimination, retaliation, and a sexually hostile work environment” in the River District.
Where Donnelly had tried for decades to get federal authorities to intervene more decisively in the Forest Service, the DOI responded quickly. In October its Office of Inspector General launched an investigation that grew from the 13 initial complainants to include multiple interviews with more than 80 people. Their final report would identify 22 additional victims or witnesses. It included accounts of Cheyenne Szydlo’s 2006 trip with Loeffler, the Halloween party where Edwards took the photo up Anne’s skirt, the twerking incident that led to the complaint against Anne and Lynn, and several allegations involving a boatman that a former employee identified as Mike Harris.
The women’s complaints, the investigators said, were “extremely credible.” The investigators also determined that Chalfant, the deputy superintendent, had allowed the complaint letter signed by the 12 women and Hall to make its way to some of the accused boatmen, in violation of policy. In an interview the lead investigator, Greg Gransback, criticized the park’s handling of the accusations against Anne and Lynn. “If you compare what had happened to these two in the past and what they were accused of, I mean there’s just no comparison. It’s apples and oranges,” he said. “The park got it wrong where they went overboard.”
In a February response to the investigation, the Park Service’s Intermountain Region didn’t contest any of the details in the report and admitted that in many instances appropriate action hadn’t been taken. In the OIG report two boatmen whose actions are clearly consistent with those of Loeffler and Desrosiers deny all allegations made against them. (I was unable to reach Desrosiers directly despite contacting the Park Service, former colleagues, and two family members.) Boatman 3—whom a former employee identified as Loeffler—told the OIG that he “acknowledged making sexual remarks to women, but said that he did so only when he sensed a ‘mutual attraction.’ ” James Doyle, the communications chief for the Intermountain Region, said he couldn’t discuss individual allegations against employees and added, “We maintain a zero tolerance for sexual harassment and hostile workplace environment.”
During the year and a half that the investigation was underway, the park made some changes. After Bill Wright transferred out of the district, his role was filled by a woman. The policy for staff boat trips was revised. There would be no alcohol permitted and an outside supervisor would be required on all expeditions. Dave Desrosiers retired in May 2015. According to its response to the OIG, the park is introducing a detailed plan to improve its sexual harassment policies and considering disciplinary action against managers who mishandled complaints. All employees are now required to wear “standard uniforms” on river trips.
The OIG team was more than familiar with sexual harassment cases: Gransback had worked on the inquiry that resulted from the 1996 Aberdeen Proving Ground scandal, when 12 army officers were charged with assaulting female trainees. Still, Gransback told me that even he and his seasoned colleagues teared up when they heard Grand Canyon women describe the fine line they had to walk to do their jobs, “between not being hated and not being desired.”
In the Tailhook case, he noted, the accused military members had developed a Top Gun mentality, believing they were too important to be taken down. He observed the same dynamic at work among the boatmen. “They became almost untouchable,” he said. But the military, Gransback pointed out, has made “drastic changes,” including evidence-based sexual harassment and assault prevention programs. So far neither the Park nor the Forest Service has proposed anything so extensive. (Since June 2015 the Forest Service’s California region has strengthened its protocols for sexual harassment training and reporting, a spokesperson said.)
In my conversations with the women, they expressed great pride in their strength. For years they had performed dangerous, physically demanding jobs. Many of them had faced life-threatening situations. All of them had operated within environments in which women had very little room for error. The harassment they described had not only brought about personal humiliation or the loss of a job or even a career. It had shaken their entire perception of themselves—as tough and resilient, able to handle anything that man or nature could throw at them.
They lost other things too. After her boat trip with Loeffler, Cheyenne Syzdlo found herself avoiding the river. “When I’d hear people talk about how much they loved river trips, I’d be like, ‘Oh God, I hated them, I hated them,’ ” she told me. Then, in the course of our conversations, she came across an email she’d written to a friend after her second time in the Grand Canyon,
before she’d ever met Dave Loeffler.
In her message Syzdlo described the thrill of riding huge rapids in the bow of an inflatable boat. She remembered how even the most experienced guides would pause and become tense, studying the water before steering them in. She recalled the night her group camped on a sliver of beach when a thunderstorm suddenly erupted, sending loose boulders tumbling down the sheer cliff face. She and her colleagues had huddled in their tents and contemplated the possibility that they might die, and then, when the morning dawned damp and bright, laughed as they fished their supplies out of the river. “I’d never thought about that second trip again because the third trip did change everything. It was magical,” she told me. “It’s so primitive and you feel so free. You never experience that in life.” She’d forgotten about it for nearly a decade, but that morning on the river, she hadn’t wanted to leave.
JON MOOALLEM
The Amateur Cloud Society That (Sort of) Rattled the Scientific Community
FROM The New York Times Magazine
Gavin Pretor-Pinney decided to take a sabbatical. It was the summer of 2003, and for the last 10 years, as a sideline to his graphic-design business in London, he and a friend had been running a magazine called The Idler. The Idler was devoted to the “literature for loafers.” It argued against busyness and careerism and for the ineffable value of aimlessness, of letting the imagination quietly coast. Pretor-Pinney anticipated all the jokes: that he’d burned out running a magazine devoted to doing nothing, and so on. But it was true. Getting the magazine out was taxing, and after a decade it seemed appropriate to stop for a while and live without a plan—to be an idler himself and shake free space for fresh ideas. So he swapped his flat in London for one in Rome, where everything would be new and anything could happen.
Pretor-Pinney is 47, towering and warm, with a sandy beard and pale blue eyes. His face is often totally lit up, as if he’s being told a story and can feel some terrific surprise coming. He stayed in Rome for seven months and loved it, especially all the religious art. One thing he noticed: the paintings and frescoes he encountered were crowded with clouds. They were everywhere, he told me recently, “these voluptuous clouds, like the sofas of the saints.” But outside, when Pretor-Pinney looked up, the real Roman sky was usually devoid of clouds. He wasn’t accustomed to such endless blue emptiness. He was an Englishman; he was accustomed to clouds. He remembered as a child being enchanted by them and deciding that people must climb long ladders to harvest cotton from them. Now, in Rome, he couldn’t stop thinking about clouds. “I found myself missing them,” he told me.