Wildlife biologist Kate McCurdy drew the short straw. She grabbed her rifle and tracking equipment and asked her supervisor to assist her with the hunt. A signal from the bear’s radio collar led them to the doomed animal. The biologists and their rifles sent the Swatter and her cubs running up a tree. Kate aimed for the bear’s heart and pulled the trigger. When the Swatter hit the ground, the earth shook.
What to do with the three cubs? Killing an animal she had dedicated her career to protect was never easy for Kate McCurdy. But without their mother’s guidance, the cubs might freeze or starve to death this winter. Killing them now was probably the most humane thing to do. Kate discussed the situation with her supervisor. He reminded her that at this very moment, his wife was at home taking care of a new infant. That day, neither biologist had the heart to shoot three babies. They would leave the cubs to fate. From the limbs of a pine, the three little bears watched the two biologists bury their mother in a shallow grave.
Most likely, on their hike back down to the Valley, Kate and her boss didn’t talk much. “It’s standard procedure when we euthanize a bear that we don’t talk to one another the rest of the day,” Kate told a reporter for the Sierra Star. “We go home early and get drunk instead.”
The night they put ol’ Swatter down, Noel McJunkin didn’t get much sleep. Into the cold hours before dawn, he lay on the hard bunk inside his Little Yosemite Valley tent cabin, listening to the heart-wrenching howls of three little bears bawling for a mother who was never coming back.
The next spring, Kate McCurdy tracked the movements of the park’s bears as they came out of hibernation. Amazingly, the Swatter’s cubs had survived the winter. To pull off such a feat, the three beers probably stumbled upon a rich food source as soon as they crawled out of their den. For the bears, finding the carcass of a large mammal would have been fortuitous—a sacrifice of one life to save three. The biologist was pleased the cubs were alive. But the bears ended up being a disappointment in the end. By Labor Day the Swatter’s offspring were flying the colors of dumpster-diving, people-swatting outlaws.
7
THE RANGER OLYMPICS
Thanks to the frantic knocking, I was awake. Barely. I had a night-shift sleep schedule, and it wasn’t yet nine. In my pajamas and rubbing my eyes, I opened the door. On my porch stood Mary Litell, the tall girl from the day shift, her entire body shaking with fear and fury.
“I am so fired,” she said.
To many in the Park Service, Yosemite isn’t a proper park. It has four million visitors a year—more than a hundred thousand visitors on one summer day—a golf course, two swimming pools, four bars, and a jail. “That’s a town, not a park!” one ranger said when I confessed that I had accepted a job in Yosemite Valley. In the Valley District alone, on a typical summer night there can be more than fifteen thousand employees and visitors, as many as ten campsite-marauding bears, scores of wanted felons, ideally no more than three registered sex offenders, and, if you are lucky, four park rangers on duty to keep them all from killing themselves or one another.
During the 1990s, Yosemite visitation levels were peaking while staffing levels continued to decline. Back then a Valley ranger had to leave her phone off the hook to get a good night’s sleep—and had to pack up and leave the park without telling anyone where she was going just to get a friggin’ weekend off.
So I wasn’t as sympathetic as I ought to have been the morning a newbie summer ranger woke me after less than four hours’ sleep and stood in my kitchen, worried sick that our superiors were going to fire her over something she had done less than ten minutes ago.
I did, however, understand why the girl had lost it.
In May I had left a supervisory position at Zion National Park to work in Yosemite Valley. Not long after I arrived, the assistant superintendent, the second in command over Yosemite’s eight hundred or so employees, called me into his office to discuss the “Valley thing.” He informed me that every time a woman worked night shift in Yosemite Valley things went sour. (Many years earlier, a female ranger came to work to find the severed head of a cat sitting on her desk. Few women assigned to this district had lasted more than one season.) The assistant superintendent said that he had pressured the supervisors to hire me—the only permanent, full-time female law enforcement ranger in the Valley District. He told me I was a “test case.”
That summer, four women—one full-time and three seasonal hires—worked as law enforcement rangers in Yosemite Valley. We called ourselves “Valley Girls,” and it didn’t take long for us to compare notes. Women talk. Women exchange knowing glances. Women tell one another things some men would rather we didn’t. That summer we shared stories about a ranger who hit on three of us, all within one week. We warned one another about the ranger who, after having too much to drink, wouldn’t leave a Valley Girl’s room until he was pushed out the door. And we dropped the bombshell: Park managers think female rangers are test cases!
The assistant superintendent was a black man in his forties. Surely he had more than a textbook understanding of what it means to be a test case. I’m convinced he meant well. But when he told me that I needed to prove that women could handle working in Yosemite Valley, it was like squirting lighter fluid on what, up to that point, had been an insignificant grease fire. He might as well have taken a piece of white chalk and drawn a line outside the ranger station door, popped off a starting pistol, brought a megaphone to his mouth, and shouted, “Let the I-can-do-anything-better-than-you-can games begin!”
The boys added insult to outrage when they said things like, “You were hired because you have breasts,” and “Don’t get your panties in a bunch—honey,” and “Why is there so much tension between us?” drawing out the word “tension” so that it was as much a croon as it was a snarl. You can’t begrudge a woman for entertaining fantasies of the boys crying during the girls’ victory lap in front of a cheering crowd after one of them said, “Let’s make it Boys vs. Split Tails” during a Trivial Pursuit game and you shot back with, “Okay, fine. Split Tails vs. Teenie Weenies it is,” but your supervisor turned to you and said, “Settle down Lankford.”
To make matters worse, the seasonal rangers like Mary desperately wanted full-time permanent jobs—jobs that came with health insurance, retirement benefits, and decent housing—jobs the Park Service wasn’t handing out like peppermint candies. You had to fight for them. Thus Yosemite Valley became a granite arena staged for fierce battles of competency: who shoots the best, who works the most overtime, who handles the gnarliest body recoveries, who heli-rappels the most, who saves the most lives, who can run the eighteen miles to the top of Half Dome and back the quickest, who’s the best horseman, who’s the bravest rock climber, who makes the most arrests, who solves the most felonies, who can back the ambulance into its narrow garage without knocking chips of wood off the door jams.
On one of my rare nights off, I met Mary on the porch of the Mountain Room Bar to gossip and complain over beer and cigars. At a particularly boozy point in this conversation, the Valley Girl puffed skillfully and blew out a series of smoke rings. Then she pointed her cigar at me. “And get this,” she said. “Not long after you arrived, I asked him what he thought of the new lady ranger from Zion and he said, ‘Well, she has an awesome body.’” Mary spat out an errant strand of tobacco. “How sexist is that?”
Intellectually I couldn’t have agreed more. My peers should judge me by my performance, not my looks. “That is so lame,” I said, scrunching my face in disgust and indignation. But God help me, in truth I was thrilled. Oh. My. God. Someone thinks I have an awesome body!
My first night on the job, the shift supervisor assigned me to ride with ranger Kent Delbon. Well aware of Yosemite’s reputation for being hard on female rangers, I was nervous; but the tall, clean-cut young ranger with the soothing voice put me at ease immediately. That evening, Ranger Delbon reveale
d his well-developed soft spot for underdogs. He conversed in Spanish with immigrant visitors, communicated in sign language with a deaf firefighter, and swerved to miss a chipmunk crossing the road. He also showed off his ability to coax a patrol car to do his bidding. At the end of our shift, he zoomed into a hairpin turn with a stunt driver’s precision, forcing me to push back on his shoulder to avoid landing in his lap. “That’s how I get close to my dates,” he said with a wink.
The next night I partnered with Jessica Rust, the other female ranger on my shift. Jessica was more Beverly Hills than Yosemite Valley. She reminded me of a tropical beach. Her manicured nails were delicate pink seashells. Her skin was an unblemished caramel, exquisitely contrasted by an expensive bob dyed the color of golden sand. Her perfume smelled as sweet and faint as hibiscus on a breeze. Her eye shadows were layered with the subtle complexities of a Hawaiian sunrise.
The guys called her “the Princess.”
I always felt coarse and plain working alongside the Princess, but the nights I partnered with Jessica were the most fun. I never asked the Princess how she felt about her nickname, but I watched her do her best to break the spell of it. Right off the bat, she cautioned me about becoming romantically involved with our coworkers. “The guys are all right,” she said, “as long as you don’t go out with any of them.” I figured she ought to know since, at my best count, she had dated at least four of our male colleagues.
Three weeks later, Chris Robinson, the most hyperactive ranger in the Valley, sent our Chevy Impala airborne over Humpback Bridge. We were responding to a motor vehicle accident with critical injuries and Robinson, a risk-taking lead climber, insisted on driving. He practically rocketed us the twenty miles to the scene. To avoid being shaken like a martini during the “flight,” I braced myself up against the passenger door with one arm while the other hand pushed back on the shotgun locked solidly in a steel rack mounted to the floorboard.
“Not too gripped next door are we?” Robinson shouted over the siren.
Oh, yeah, I was gripped all right. But I’d be damned before I let a male coworker know it. Hiding all indications that I was terrified, gripped, or had in any way noticed the hard trunks of western red cedars that lined both sides of the serpentine road, I said, “You seem to be handling your skids fairly well.” I must have pulled off an Academy Award winner, because Robinson furrowed his brow. “This car’s a sack of shit,” he said, pressing down on the accelerator. “The tires are bald. I’m holding back.”
When Robinson skidded us to a stop in front of the accident scene, the Impala’s headlights lit up a tragic tableau: a mangled motorcycle next to an equally mangled man splayed out in the middle of the road. I walked toward the crumpled body to check for signs of life. “Come help me with this one,” said the ranger who had arrived first. “That one’s eleven forty-four.”
Hearing “1144,” the California code for a fatality, I left the motorcycle driver so that I could care for the passenger, who was still alive. Later we learned that these men were concession employees. After a night of drinking, they had decided to go on a long motorcycle ride in the dark over the park’s curviest roads. Now the passenger’s leg looked as though it had been run through a paper shredder. There were so many ripped strands of blue jeans mixed in with his bones, blood, and flesh, I couldn’t tell what was fabric and what was human tissue. Our patient was talking to us, and that was a good sign. But he seemed much too calm for a severely injured man lying next to a dead friend, and that worried me. I was grateful that Robinson, a skilled paramedic, was there. He started an IV while I cut off the patient’s blue jeans. The other ranger pressed a large piece of gauze to the patient’s bleeding extremity.
According to my female coworkers, the ranger holding pressure on the leg wound was a philanderer of the vainest kind. True to form, during my first week on the job, he deliberately flexed his bicep under my fingers when I grasped his upper arm to tell him something. I liked it—the bicep. It was the right size, plenty firm, and full of promises a man ought to keep. Ah, but this splendid muscle came attached to a super-competitive ranger with political connections and Machiavellian ambitions. A wise woman gives a man like that a wide berth. I, on the other hand, shook a red cape in front of him at every opportunity.
Bullish masculinity aside, we all felt the strain at one time or another. When Ranger Bicep leaned over to hand Robinson something from the medical kit, he exposed the chink in his armor. His knee was pumping franticly—up down, up down—faster than anybody can consciously move. I recognized this as “sewing machine leg” because I had experienced it myself. Not that night, but several times before. Every ranger suffers from a nearly out-of-control adrenaline pump at some point in his or her career. But Ranger Bicep would rather I hadn’t noticed. Something about this one had gotten to him.
To place our patient’s leg in a splint, Ranger Bicep pulled traction on the motorcyclist’s nearly amputated extremity. I heard wet, crackly sounds as flesh and bone fell back into place. The alcohol in our patient’s blood system must have been taking the edge off. He was as polite as an English butler asking permission to remove the salad plates when he looked at Ranger Bicep and said, “Excuse me, ranger. But would you mind not pulling so hard?”
After we dropped our patient off at the Yosemite hospital, Ranger Bicep stayed behind to help me sponge off the bloodstains. Once the ambulance was clean and restocked, we sat down across from each other in the back. Right then it all seemed funny—unbearably, hysterically funny. “Oh, ranger, I hate to bother you. Really I do. I know how incredibly busy you are. But I have one tiny request. Could you not pull so bloody hard on my bloody leg?” We laughed away what we could of the night’s horrors and rubbed the water from our eyes. Outside the ambulance bay, the pink blush of a new day glowed behind Half Dome. Ranger Bicep made a sarcastic comment about seeing another Yosemite sunrise. It was my first summer in the valley, so I didn’t get it. He explained, “When you see a Yosemite sunrise, it means you missed another night’s sleep because of another brutal call.”
Once we closed the ambulance doors, there was nothing to do but go home.
“So,” he said, “I’ll see you tonight.”
“Yeah,” I said. “See ya later.”
It was an awkward separation, an abrupt end to an odd intimacy.
A year later we were worse than bobcats thrown into a cage with badgers. One afternoon, Ranger Bicep stood in front of my patrol car and lectured me about my bitchy attitude. In return I offered him my psychoanalysis of the source of his misogynist tendencies. Struggling to hammer home his point, Bicep grabbed the hood ornament of my Crown Vic and proceeded to twist the ornament this way and that, working it to the tune of our quarrel, until the metal piece snapped off in his hand. The sight of it in his palm appeared to wound him. He stopped arguing and handed me the hood ornament before walking away. Instead of turning the hood ornament over to the mechanic, I kept it. “Girl,” my pathetic trophy said, “you may be a test case, but, by God, you aren’t the only one being tested!”
* * *
Within this mercurial battle-of-the-sexes crucible, Mary Litell was scrapping for her own equal opportunity: the chance to compete for the gold in the ultimate ranger event—the Iron Man of ranger prowess—a high-angle rescue on El Capitan. Mary was a talented rock climber, she was a ranger, and it was the 1990s. If she wanted to risk her tight little tush by hanging it out over the edge of a three-thousand-foot-high cliff, she had the Equal Opportunity Act–given right to do so. But the boys weren’t making room for her—at least not on the most glamorous missions. For months she had watched them run out of the rescue cache with backpacks full of rock climbing gear. For months she’d gritted her teeth in the rotor wash while they practically thumbed their noses at her from the open doors of the helicopter. And one morning, just as Mary finished washing her patrol car at the start of her shift, a supervisor drove up with one
of the boys in the passenger seat and told her to give the male ranger her vehicle (it happened to be the newest vehicle in the fleet) as soon as she finished wiping it dry with a rag. Then, as if that wasn’t infuriating enough, the male ranger smirked at Mary and said, “Thanks for washing my car.”
Thaaa-whap! The wet rag from Mary’s hand hit the supervisor’s patrol car with a violence that made him flinch. Then she reared back with the long-handled scrub brush as if it were a spear, but the male ranger was able to roll up the car window before she could hit him with it. The supervisor said, “What the—?” but he was interrupted by a tirade about discrimination and playing favorites. The Valley Girl’s sentences were seasoned with so many “sonofabitches,” “m-fers,” and “sexist bastards” that the supervisor had to gather up all the authority he could muster before he could bellow, “Settle down, Litell!”
Mary didn’t settle down. Not until the male ranger was out of the car, bowing like a Japanese businessman, and showering her with apologies. “But I like you,” he said.
After telling me this story, Mary sat down at my kitchen table, let out a fragile sigh, and said, “It’s been nice working with you.”
“They aren’t going to fire you!” I said, laughing at her. “Not over something that benign. Remember the summer ranger who allegedly shot himself in the leg and then claimed he’d been in a gunfight? The only thing they did to him was not invite him back to work the next summer. And everybody says one of the district rangers had an affair with a subordinate, but he still has his job. And what about the ranger they accused of accepting sexual favors from a confidential informant while on duty? Didn’t they give that guy a promotion?”
8
A GIRL IN BOYS TOWN
Mary Litell’s first Yosemite job, working at the recycle stand, was more than gross; it was disgusting. Four million people leave behind a lot of trash. But she could glance over her shoulder and see her deliverance—Yosemite Falls plunging over the Valley’s north wall. The half-mile cascade of water and rainbow was visible from Mary’s workstation. With a downcanyon breeze she could see, smell, hear, and taste the fifth-tallest waterfall in the world. For scenery like that, you’ll pick loaded diapers and used condoms out of piles of greasy cans and bottles. You’ll sling trash bags into the back of a slimy truck while it spits the backwash from beer-soaked cigarette butts at you.
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