Ranger Confidential

by Andrea Lankford

  When word of a blitz got out over the C bands, men ran down the beach like kids let loose on an Easter egg hunt. Jeep Cherokees braked so hard they threw sand. Beers toppled and spilled on floorboards. Red-faced fishermen tripped in their waders as they raced one another to the tide line, their fishing poles swinging wildly. When the blues were blitzing, things got a little crazy. If you knew what was good for you, you stayed out of the way.

  An inebriated and overly enthusiastic cast was surely responsible the day I encountered a twelve-year-old girl with two inches of tri-barbed metal hook in her foot. The hook had penetrated all the way through the meat of her heel, bringing the squid bait with it. It was Memorial Day weekend. I had been a ranger less than six weeks. My understanding of emergency medicine was embarrassing. But I did know one thing: No matter how loud the girl’s mother screamed at me to do something for her daughter “right now!” I was not qualified to pull barbed hooks out of human flesh.

  For this I called the paramedics. After the ambulance arrived, I stood behind the medics and watched over their shoulders. One medic gently wiggled the hook with his gloved hand. The movement jiggled the squishy squid that dangled from the rusty barb and forced a yellow glob of fat tissue out of the exit wound.

  This was when I hit the ground like a sack of rocks.

  The paramedics had to abandon their patient to care for the park ranger lying unconscious on the beach. When I woke up, they were checking my blood pressure and taking my pulse. They shouldn’t have bothered. There is no cure for humiliation. I stood up, pulled my Smokey Bear hat out of the sand, and brushed it off. They’ll think I’m not tough enough, I thought. They’ll say it’s because I’m a woman. Maybe I’ll be fired.

  But I wasn’t fired. “Don’t worry,” my supervisor said. “I’ve felt that way many times. Next time you get that dizzy feeling, just sit down before it takes you with it.”

  * * *

  Coming from Mike Anderson, those words meant a heap-full. Anderson, the Bodie Island district ranger, had survived a gunfight the year before. In spring 1986 a man landed a stolen airplane on a remote airstrip in the national seashore and Ranger Anderson was there to greet him. “I felt in control of this man until he started shooting at me,” Anderson later said. Fortunately, neither man was hit. Anderson started shooting back, and the suspect took off running for the wetlands. A huge manhunt followed. Five days later, the local police pulled an emaciated man out of the reeds. I imagine the fugitive’s first day in jail was downright comfy after the four mosquito-bitten nights he spent in the marsh.

  After hearing this story at the academy, I had expected my new boss to be an intimidating former-Marine type. Instead, when I shook the hand of the Bodie Island district ranger, I saw an attractive man in his thirties with a boyish face and two plump cheeks that blushed easily. Also, he looked a little humbled. The other rangers told me that dodging bullets had unsettled the district ranger, changed him somehow.

  Anderson assigned me to the early shift. It sucked waking up at “oh-five-hundred,” but I was the newbie, and someone had to patrol the beaches each morning to look for sea turtle tracks. When weeks passed without my seeing any of the tracks I was tasked with finding, I began to worry. “How will I know for sure if I see one?” I asked a more experienced ranger.

  “You’ll know,” he said.

  The day I found my first track, I realize how right he was. A blind man wouldn’t have missed these tracks: He’d trip over them. Now I understood why a park visitor had recently reported seeing a sea monster emerge from the ocean. The creature that made these tracks was gargantuan. At sizes approaching three hundred pounds, loggerhead sea turtles are designed for the buoyancy of water, not the tedium of land. It takes hours for a mother turtle to drag her body up the beach, dig a hole, lay up to one hundred eggs, cover them with sand, and then crawl back down to the water. A mother’s yearly journey to lay her eggs brings another meaning to the word “labor.” It shouldn’t surprise us when a turtle lays her nest below the high-tide line.

  One of my duties as a Cape Hatteras ranger was to drive the beaches early each morning and search for signs of freshly laid turtle nests. If I found a nest below the tide line or close to civilization, I dug up the eggs—which resemble Ping-Pong balls—carefully loaded them into a bucket of sand, and buried them right side up in a safer place. Then I documented the location of the nest and kept track of the incubation schedule.

  Eighty-five days after I moved my first turtle nest, I found scores of tiny tracks leading from the nest to the ocean. It felt like Christmas morning when I discovered several baby turtles still fighting their way up the sandy banks of the hole. I expected the turtles to be brown or greenish-yellow like their mother, but the baby loggerheads were dark violet, like bruises. I picked one up and held it in my palm. The turtle flapped its flippers on my skin. It tickled, like a child’s butterfly kiss.

  It hurt to think about the chances against this one turtle surviving to adulthood. To a baby sea turtle, the world is a war zone. Even if the nest eludes the noses of raccoons and dodges the destruction of a hurricane, some eggs fail to hatch. Of the ones that do hatch, not all the turtles make it to the water. Ghost crabs snatch the hatchlings in their claws and drag them down into their holes. Gulls swoop in and pluck them off the beach. Once I found the carcass of a turtle baked to death by the hot sun. Of the lucky ones that reach the ocean, not all will escape the hunger of sharks. There are gill nets to avoid . . . red tides and pollution . . . poachers looking for shells for jewelry and meat for soup . . . plastic bags and party balloons that float in the water like jellyfish but once eaten by a deceived turtle lead to an agonizing death.

  Less than 1 percent of sea turtle eggs end up becoming an adult. The turtle I held in my hand came from a nest of eighty-one eggs. The odds were depressing. Yet this turtle continued to flap its flippers against my skin. Undaunted by the giant holding it, stubborn in its desire to reach the water, compelled by a pull as irresistible as gravity, this turtle wasn’t giving up. This turtle wanted to make it. This turtle was so precious.

  How could I not join the fight to keep this endangered species from becoming extinct? How could I not risk my life so that “my” baby turtles could someday return and lay their own eggs? How could I not give up retirement benefits, health insurance, and decent housing for a job this important? How could my parents talk any sense into me? Now that I had been down on my knees in the sand with a baby turtle struggling for its life in the palm of my hand.

  This was my induction. My call to duty. My pledge of allegiance to the park ranger credo: “Protect the park from the people, the people from the park, and the people from themselves.” Up to this point I had been killing time—spending a summer living with my ranger boyfriend on the beach until a better opportunity came my way. Now the stakes were clear. There were things in this park that needed protecting, and it was my job to protect them. Fainting was no longer an option.

  Fueled by the righteousness of endangered sea turtles, I began to attack my ranger duties with a zealot’s vigor. I kicked sand on illegal beach fires. I spoiled the tans of nude sunbathers, confined Labradors to leashes, and confiscated fireworks from twelve-year-olds. I ruined parties by flipping open cooler lids and dumping out the contents, exposing the undersized flounder hidden beneath beer and ice. One day the dispatcher passed on a report so heinous it had me pounding my hands on my steering wheel. North of the park, some moron had tied a rope to a loggerhead turtle and dragged it down the beach behind his truck. The turtle died. Witnesses said the suspect had been driving a white pickup. For weeks after, I stopped and interrogated the hapless driver of every white truck that crossed my path.

  * * *

  You can drive a motor vehicle on many Cape Hatteras beaches, but some sections remain open to foot traffic only. One afternoon a campground ranger and I were lounging on the beach behind our trailers when a ruddy
-faced fisherman on an ATV drove right past three closed to motor vehicles signs and headed toward us. The audacity of this violation had me livid. How dare he? This beach is for piping plovers, tern eggs, and sea turtles. This beach is for fragile plants that keep sand dunes from blowing away. This beach is for children who want to build sand castles without being run over by drunks on ATVs.

  Over my bikini-clad body was this guy getting away.

  I ordered my friend to run home and call for an on-duty law enforcement ranger. Then, barefoot and wearing nothing but a white crochet bikini, I ran toward the man on the ATV, stood in his path, threw my hand up like a traffic cop and yelled, “Park ranger! Stop right now.” I was alone and out of uniform, but the man didn’t challenge my authority. With a stunned expression, he waited politely for the on-duty ranger coming to write him a ticket. Ten minutes later, when my male coworker arrived on the scene, I displayed my catch with pride. After my fainting fiasco, I needed this demonstration of my ability to gain compliance from those who break laws in a national park.

  Many years passed before I grasped what my male coworker surely noticed right away. The ATVer’s cooperative attitude had less to do with my “command presence” than with the unaware yet ingenious way I had blocked his escape—with my long legs spread wide in front of his ATV, my hands pushing back against his handlebars, and my posture giving him an incredible view of what little cleavage I have.

  4

  AS YOSEMITE FALLS

  Near the door to the Yosemite Valley Ranger Station sat a huge cross section of an ancient tree. According to the sign, the sequoia had been a thousand years old when it fell in 1919. Plastic labels tacked into the wood pointed out rings of tree growth that corresponded to the years of major human events, such as the Battle of Hastings in 1066, the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the start of the Civil War in 1861, and the year Yosemite became a national park—1890. During the summer of 1993, park ranger Mary Litell passed this exhibit so often during the course of her workday that, before too long, she forgot it was there.

  One deceptively calm evening, after passing the tree exhibit on her way home from work, Mary crossed the street and walked along the backside of the Pioneer Cemetery. There, underneath the shade of five evergreens, a large but otherwise unpretentious hunk of granite marked the grave of Yosemite’s first park ranger—Galen Clark, who became the park’s first civilian guardian in 1867. From Clark’s grave, with three good kicks you could have sent a pinecone into the yard of the cabin Mary shared with two male coworkers. But tonight the ranger would not make it home before dark. Just as she turned the corner near Clark’s headstone, she heard the screaming.

  Behind the Park Service corral, a colossal wall of granite formed a natural amphitheater that intensified the panicked cries for help coming from a ledge three hundred feet above the ground. The anguish in those screams quickened the ranger’s pulse and sent a jolt of empathic fear into the hearts of the patrol horses resting in their stables. Sprinting toward the sound, Mary ran into a group of neighborhood kids, children of park employees. The kids had been playing in the woods behind their houses. Now they carried haunted expressions on their faces. “He fell,” they said, pointing to the cliffs.

  Later it became clear what happened. Hours earlier, two young men, brothers, had leaned as far as they dared over the handrails to watch the water plunge over Yosemite Falls. From the trail they spotted what looked like a shortcut down to the valley. They stepped off the trail. The farther they went, the more difficult the route became until the brothers were scaling the rocky benches under the Lost Arrow Spire. Here there were no handrails, and the mellow feeling from the marijuana the men smoked at the overlook had long since faded. The decomposed granite was flaking off in their hands. Their feet were sending rocks crashing down the nearly vertical slab. When one of them fell, his brother started screaming.

  Mary ran up the bouldered slope. Where the granite became scree, she met rescuers Rick Folks and Mike Ray. At the base of the cliff they found something caught in the lower branches of an oak. The large mass tangled up in the tree branches was a man—a very messed-up man. No way was he alive.

  Mary yelled up at the man’s brother, who was still screaming, and told him to stay put; the rangers would come and get him. Using her park radio, she described the situation to the dispatcher as Mike Ray climbed up to where the tree branches met the scree. Mary watched Ray reach his fingers toward the crumpled man’s throat to confirm that this was indeed a fatality.

  The rescuers were startled when the man inhaled a wheezy breath.

  Mike Ray had aspirations of becoming an emergency-room doctor and knew exactly what to do. He opened the man’s airway. Then, using his own body as a backboard to protect the patient’s spine, he curled the man out of the tree. Two paramedic rangers arrived, and within minutes an airway tube was down the patient’s throat, an IV line was in his vein, his body was on a stretcher, and he was being carried down through the difficult terrain. The ranger-medics worked their injured patient with an urgent calm. Their steady voices told Mary and the other less-experienced rangers what to do.

  Mary and five rescuers carried the basket stretcher down the rugged slope. The critically injured man had been unconscious until now. He began to squirm. A medic shouted, “Grab his hands!” Before anyone could stop him, the patient grabbed the plastic airway tube the medics had slid down his throat and pulled it out of his own mouth. He said, “Jesus.” Then his heart stopped beating. The rangers initiated CPR, but it was obvious to all but the newbies that this one wasn’t going to have a happy ending.

  That night the doctor at the park clinic told Mary that even if the guy had fallen onto a table in front of a team of trauma specialists prepped for surgery, he still wouldn’t have made it.

  It was disappointing. Mary was a cross-wearing Catholic. She had hoped for one of those times when God slaps his palm on his forehead and says, “Oh, shit, John Smith? I meant John Schmidt!” so he sends in a couple of rangers to correct his mistake. She had seen a miracle like this only a week earlier when the dispatcher had reported a severely injured man “under the Green Dragon.” No one had been optimistic about that guy making it either. “Green Dragons” were those diesel-fueled, tour guide–equipped, open-air trams that caterpillar the valley roads all day, slowing traffic and pulling a long chain of green-and-yellow cars filled with tourists. If a man was under one of those, his number had been called.

  Emergency sirens echoed off the valley walls as the rangers raced to find the green dragon with the man under it. There were several to check, and they were scattered all over Yosemite Village. But every tour guide the rangers contacted swore up and down they hadn’t run over any stray tourists that day. Precious lifesaving minutes ticked by. Rangers radioed in their frustrations to dispatchers who were very confused. Then Mary got an idea.

  Minutes later she found him lying unconscious under bloodstained granite along a rock-climbing route called “the Green Dragon.”

  The guy should have died. In a race against the setting sun, the rangers medically stabilized the climber and got him flown out of the valley before the stroke of darkness turned the park helicopter into a pumpkin. As she watched the rescue helicopter fly into the sunset, Mary decided this ranger gig was a keeper.

  * * *

  Mary was a ranger who had to learn things the hard way. Like Rule Number One: Measure your head before you order your ranger hat—or you’ll have to stuff paper towels inside the headband to keep the hat from falling down over your eyes. Rule Number Two: If you must wear mascara to work, make it waterproof—the guys will laugh at you when you turn into a raccoon during a water-sprayed rescue mission under Yosemite Falls. Rule Number Three: Say “I don’t know” if a park visitor asks a question and you don’t know the answer. There will always be a crowd standing around you when a camper asks, “Oh, ranger,
what kind of squirrel is that?” If you draw a blank and say, “Uh. A bushy-tailed squirrel?” a guy with a video camera will be there to say, “It’s called a California gray squirrel,” the disgust dripping from his voice.

  Mary Litell was no Jane Goodall. That’s for certain. But then rangers would have more time for studying the natural history of Yosemite squirrels if people would just stop falling off cliffs. But people will continue to fall off cliffs as long as leaves continue to fall off trees. And over the years, layers upon layers of stories about people falling off cliffs have accumulated into fat files of multicolored papers stuffed into brown cardboard boxes stacked head-high in a walk-in closet inside the special agent’s office. And these stories, which the rangers once typed onto quadruplicate-copy government forms and now type into government computers, are as surreal and melodramatic as any of the so-called legends the Ahwahneechee and their descendants passed down orally from generation to generation over the past two hundred years.

  * * *

  A young Swiss woman traveled to America with her bold and athletic boyfriend, a Czechoslovakian climber. During their days at Yosemite, the Czech climber grabbed his ropes and climbing equipment and set out to climb the Lost Arrow Spire over the course of several days. Before he left, the climber asked his girlfriend to occasionally monitor his progress through a pair of binoculars.

  On days one and two, the climber’s girlfriend eyed the cliff face, watching her lover ascend the route. On day three she lost sight of him. On day four she spotted a rock climber’s haul bag hanging from the rock. On day five she saw no sign of her boyfriend, and the haul bag was in the same spot as it had been before. On day six, when she saw that the haul bag had not moved, the girlfriend was beyond concerned; she was frantic.