Ranger Confidential

by Andrea Lankford

  Today rivers and creeks continue to sculpt the landscape. Rainfall freezes behind joints in the granite. Gravity, lightning strikes, plant roots, and earthquakes also do their part so that over time, the rock exfoliates from the granite like layers peeled from an onion. Occasionally these rock sheets crash to the ground, sometimes with disastrous consequences. Since 1857 Yosemite rockfalls have killed at least fourteen people and injured sixty-two.

  The day after the slide, journalists besieged the park. The public information officer directed all media trucks and vans with satellite dishes to a paved pullout under a photogenic view of Yosemite Falls. One morning, the shift supervisor pointed at ranger Bruce Phillips and me. “Lankford; Phillips,” he said. “You two suit up for horse patrol and ride around the media trucks.”

  A park ranger on horseback never fails to attract attention. Cameras click, videotape rolls, parents come running with five-year-olds wanting to pet the horsey. When the hordes of image-hungry reporters and cameramen spotted a pair of park rangers—the only female and African American on patrol that day—riding by on horseback, footage of Bruce and me would show up on all the news outlets.

  “Great idea,” I said with mock enthusiasm. “Bruce and I will be the Equal Opportunity patrol! ”

  “Settle down, Lankford.”

  * * *

  I can’t blame NPS managers for wanting Bruce to represent the agency on television. His uniforms fitted him perfectly and, on horseback, he was too fine: strong shoulders, honey voice, espresso skin—a girl could just drink him up. Bruce and I saddled our horses at the barn and rode out to the media circus. Before we reached the Yosemite Lodge, I decided to impress my attractive partner with my horsemanship. With a clicking noise and a touch of the whip, I squeezed my legs, sending Junior, my patrol horse, into a dirt-throwing gallop over the trail.

  “A real cowgirl never loses her hat,” Bruce informed me when I handed him my horse’s reins so I could retrieve my Smokey Bear out of Leidig Meadow.

  When patrolling Yosemite on horseback, Bruce Phillips was a living tribute to a once-hidden chapter of park history. Prior to the creation of the NPS by the 1916 Organic Act, the burden of protecting the lands set aside as national parks largely fell upon the U.S. Army. Among the first troops to patrol the rugged backcountry of Yosemite, Sequoia, and General Grant National Parks were the Twenty-fourth Infantry and the Ninth Cavalry, otherwise known as the Buffalo Soldiers. Like their white counterparts, African-American soldiers collected fees, eradicated sheep, built roads, and confiscated guns from potential poachers. In 1904, under the direction of Maj. John Bigelow, troops from the Ninth Cavalry constructed the first self-guided nature trail in a national park.

  Among the four hundred Buffalo Soldiers assigned to Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks was Capt. Charles Young, the first African-American superintendent of a national park. Despite the prejudices of the time, Young impressed many white commanders. One Army inspector described him as the best instructor on duty in the parks. A lieutenant colonel credited Young’s leadership for constructing park roads and trails “in excess of that done in previous years with the same amount of money.” Like his contemporary John Muir, Young contemplated the importance of wilderness preservation:

  A journey through this park and the Sierra Forest Reserve to the Mount Whitney country will convince even the least thoughtful man of the needfulness of preserving these mountains just as they are, with their clothing of trees, shrubs, rocks, and vines, and of their importance to the valley’s below as reservoirs for storage of water for agricultural and domestic purposes. In this, then, lies the necessity of forest preservation.

  Proud and ambitious, Captain Young was the highest-ranking African-American soldier of his day. Yet for a hundred years, Young’s side of the national park story went untold. As Yosemite ranger Shelton Johnson, an African American, writes in his essay “Invisible Men: Buffalo Soldiers of the Sierra Nevada”:

  When one examines published histories of Yosemite for example, one would be hard put to find more than a handful of references to either the Ninth Cavalry or Twenty-fourth Infantry. These soldiers lie on the edges of an obscure chapter in a forgotten book. They are not, I believe, the victims of overt racism, but rather casualties of a greater society that simply doesn’t see them. They are invisible men.

  Thanks to the diligent research of Ranger Johnson, Captain Young and his men are no longer invisible.

  * * *

  After Bruce and I performed our token appearances in front of the media trucks, it was time to give the horses a break. Like park rangers, park horses are susceptible to burnout. Everybody wants to say Hi and take a picture. Everybody wants to rub their noses and stroke their manes. You know it is time to call it a day when your horse lays his ears back or lifts his head real high so the kids can’t reach him.

  Communicating with a horse is one of many skills taught at the Yosemite Mounted Patrol School. Bruce and I learned what little we know about horses from Steve “Kid” Ybarra, a world-champion mule packer, and Billie Patrick, a horse patrol ranger with a fantastically long blond ponytail. Horse school was far from glamorous: six weeks of mucking out horse stalls; six weeks of Ybarra humiliating us for having nothing under our hats but hair; six weeks of sore rears, aching backs, bruised egos, and Wellington boots that smelled of horse piss. But I loved it anyway. You can see it in my hokey, flag-bearing graduation photos.

  Patrick and Ybarra could rattle off the histories, confirmations, and personalities of every patrol horse that ever came through Yosemite Valley as well as they could recall their own birth date and Social Security number. Billie Patrick said that the horse named Danny was “too touchy” for the less-experienced riders. Once Danny went so far as to kick a Porsche, denting it a little. Billie said Danny needed a confident rider, but everybody knew the real reason she didn’t let anybody else ride him: Billie Patrick was in love with the “touchy” sorrel with the heart-shaped blaze on his face.

  Danny’s penchant for kicking things weighed heavily on Billie’s mind the day a little boy with muscular dystrophy motored up in an electric wheelchair. The wheelchair buzzed and clicked. The boy was flailing his arms about in jerking motions. He couldn’t help it. He didn’t have full control of his muscles, and he was so excited. His parents looked at Billie expectantly. Their son wanted to pet the ranger’s horse.

  Horses spook easily at unusual sights and sounds. A honking car or a tarp flapping in the breeze can send them running for the barn, bucking and kicking the whole way. Yosemite patrol horses have practiced maintaining their composure in the midst of patrol sirens, angry mobs, and gunfire. But you can never predict how a horse will react to something it has never encountered. Danny had kicked a Porsche for the hell of it. Billie had no clue what the horse would do to a kid in a clicking wheelchair.

  Tightening her grip on the reins, Billie slowly maneuvered Danny toward the boy. Danny studied the wheelchair-bound boy for a moment with one of his big eyes. Then the horse dropped his head right in the child’s lap. The boy lovingly hit and slapped Danny’s face, and Billie blinked back a few tears. He knew. The horse just knew.

  Ybarra and Patrick made patrol assignments by matching the personality of the ranger to the personality of the horse. So it makes sense that Bruce ended up with Duke—a handsome prince of a horse. But I’m still trying to figure out why I always got stuck with Junior—the surly beast that made a mule look like Miss Congeniality.

  They said Junior took on the personality of the ranger who broke him and that Junior the horse, like Dan Horner the ranger, would argue with you about whether the time was fifteen minutes after or a quarter past. One afternoon Junior started giving me grief. With his ears laid way back, he would run me in circles and kick up a fuss every time I asked him to do something. I’d rein him left, toward Yosemite Lodge, and he’d go right, toward the barn.

  To hell with this,
Junior was saying. I’m heading back to the barn.

  Touching a spur to his belly, I reined Junior back to the left. Somebody call the Humane Society, I was telling him, because I’m fixing to commit animal cruelty. But the damn horse insisted on going right.

  Then we got the call: rowdy drunks threatening park visitors in the picnic area. All the road patrol rangers were busy. It was up to Junior and me to deal with it. Once we arrived, a beefy dude, red-faced and drunk, charged at us like an angry bear. He pointed a finger at my face and told me where I could take my law enforcement authority and shove it.

  We had the attention of all the picnickers now. Like them, I wondered how the lady ranger was going to handle this one. Why didn’t Billie assign me Duke or Danny today? Arresting this Neanderthal was going to be difficult enough without my mutinous horse sprinting for the barn as soon as I dismounted. Then Junior did something unexpected. He stepped toward the guy, stamped a hoof on the ground, and blew a fierce puff of air through his nostrils.

  Following my partner’s cue I said, “Turn around and put your hands behind your back.”

  The belligerent man looked into Junior’s steely eyes and said, “Okay, ranger, whatever you say.”

  I dismounted and laid the reins on Junior’s neck. While I handcuffed the man, Junior stood beside me, still as a statue. He had a job to do. The barn could wait.

  10

  THE TELL-TALE BACKPACK

  As one special agent put it, “For a young ranger, Mary had an uncanny knack for making good cases.” Every day, as soon as the shift supervisor let the day shift out of morning briefing, she ran out into the park, sniffing the air and rummaging through all the dark places until she hunted down something weird or smelly, clamped her cuffs on it, and brought it back to the ranger station. The Valley Girl captured thieves and wanted felons. She tackled runaway BASE jumpers. She busted dope dealers, violent drunks, and wife beaters. One year she tracked down an arsonist with hundreds of cigarette lighters in his car. Her first summer, she ferreted out a particularly worrisome weenie-wagger.

  Earlier that spring a man had exposed his penis and masturbated in front of a little girl wading in the shallows of the Merced River. Long after all the other rangers had forgotten about this incident, Mary caught a glimpse of a man wearing khaki pants and no shirt lurking around the start of the Four Mile Trail. She didn’t even see his face. She just knew it was the guy. As soon as she got out of her patrol car, the shirtless man took off up the trail. She chased him up several switchbacks before he stopped. With nothing but a hunch to go on, the ranger snapped an instant photo of the man, wrote down his identification information, and let him go. A few days later, the little girl’s mother positively identified the man in the photo as the one who had exposed himself to her daughter.

  Another day she spotted two life-size G.I. Joes sitting in the back of a pickup truck parked in the pullout at Cook’s Meadow. There’s nothing illegal about wearing full camouflage and combat boots in a national park, but you could say it is the kind of thing that might draw the attention of a park ranger. Mary casually strolled up to the two young men sitting in the back of the pickup truck, flashed her friendliest ranger smile, and said, “Hi, there. Nice day isn’t it?”

  She poured on the Ranger Rick shtick until the G.I. Joes in the pickup truck became fidgety—rubbing their noses when answering questions; not looking her in the eye; sneaking a hundred glances at a red backpack in the bed of the truck. It didn’t require a PhD in behavioral science to pick up on it. Those men were looking at that backpack as though the namesake organ from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” were beating inside it.

  “So, it looks like you guys have been doing some hiking?” Mary asked.

  “Oh, yeah,” one man said. “We’ve been here before.”

  “That’s a nice backpack,” she said, pointing at it. “Whose is it?”

  Mary’s question could have been a swarm of bees the way those men reacted. They jumped out of the bed of the truck, ran to the cab, slammed the car doors, rolled up the windows, cranked the ignition, and said, “Sorry, we gotta go!” while Mary stood there and watched them drive away, the red backpack bouncing around in the truck bed.

  The ranger wanted to grab that backpack and search it like a dog wants to grab a rope toy and shake it, but lacking probable cause to detain these men, she had to let them go. Mary couldn’t stop thinking about that red backpack. What was in it? Drugs? That was the most likely thing. But those guys were wearing camouflage. Maybe they were poachers, or archaeological site looters called “pot hunters.” Jeez, there was no telling what was in that backpack—jewelry snatched from the Ahwahnee gift shop, a stash of stolen wallets and credit cards, peregrine falcon eggs, rare plants, black bear gall bladders worth a fortune on the Asian black market. Or maybe, just maybe, those two guys were a couple of psycho serial killers and the reason they didn’t want anyone looking inside that backpack was because a human head was rolling around inside it!

  What was in the backpack? God, it was killing her. That red backpack was not only going to keep the ranger up at night wondering, it was going to haunt her for the rest of her life. What was in the backpack?

  Back to patrolling the park roads, Mary tapped her fingers on the steering wheel. Maybe she hadn’t handled the contact right. Maybe she had made a mistake. Maybe she really did have probable cause to search them and didn’t realize it. She was still beating herself up over letting two psycho serial killers escape to murder again when she noticed the car in front of her. Unbelievable. It was the pickup with the red backpack. Those G.I. Joes said they were leaving the park, so why were they back on this road leading into the Valley? Mary eased her patrol car up to the pickup’s rear bumper.

  When the driver noticed the ranger car in his rearview mirror, he became so nervous he couldn’t drive. He wove the truck all the way across the traffic lane until the tires crossed the double yellow. Hallelujah! The driver had given her a reason to pull him over.

  Standing at the driver’s window, Mary said, “What’s going on here?”

  “Uh. I uh. We . . .”

  “Do you have drugs on you?”

  “Uh. . . . No.”

  As soon as a backup ranger arrived, Mary asked the guy driving the truck if it was okay to search the cab for weapons. “Sure,” he said, “no problem.” The ranger checked the floorboards. She looked under the seats. She opened the glove box. There she found a little metal tube about the size of a lipstick case. “What’s this?” The guy shrugged. Mary handed it to her male partner.

  “It’s a CO2 cartridge,” her partner said. “You know, an explosive, like a firecracker.”

  Possession of firecrackers and other explosive devices is illegal in a national park. This was enough probable cause to search the truck and everything in it. The ranger jumped into the back of the pickup and started tossing stuff behind her like a dog throws dirt in pursuit of a bone. As soon as she found the suspicious pack, Mary grabbed it, pulled down the zipper, and stuck her hand inside. Out she came with a metal pipe, six inches long and two inches in diameter. The pipe had metal caps on both ends and a fuse coming out of it. She held this prize up in the air, turned to her partner, and said, “Catch.”

  The ranger caught the pipe, took one look at it, and said, “Jesus, Mary! It’s a bomb!” Not really sure what to do, and still in shock that his partner had tossed him an explosive device as if it were a can of beer, Mary’s partner jammed the bomb into his pocket and stood watch over the G.I. Joes, who were now handcuffed and sitting on the curb. The Valley Girl kept searching. She found a fishing tackle box full of bomb-making paraphernalia. She found a book on how to build bombs. She found dated photographs of the two men grinning proudly from the top of Glacier Point.

  The NPS special agent arrived on the scene. Good, it’s Sullivan. Surely this righteous bus
t would make up for that day in Boys Town when she grabbed his arm like a scared little girl and said, “Homicide? I’m not sure if I can do this.” Mary caught Special Agent Sullivan’s eye, nodded to her partner, and said, “Check this out!”

  The male ranger pulled the bomb out of his pocket.

  “Holy Christ!” the special agent shouted as he dropped to the ground.

  Sullivan quarantined the entire area, shutting down traffic on the road. A flak jacket–clad bomb squad from Fresno detonated the bomb. It wasn’t a huge bomb, but if you were planning on staying attached to your ass, you would avoid putting it in your back pocket. The special agent warned the Valley Girl to remember that next time she decided to play catch with bombs.

  The G.I. Joes went straight to jail, where one of them quickly squealed. He said they had been planning to take the bomb up on one of the popular hiking trails and light the fuse. Days later, rangers and county deputies conducted a raid on one suspect’s home. They found bombs in the freezer. They found bombs hanging from the ceiling. They found books on bombs and lots of gunpowder. Investigators wondered if recent visitor reports of explosions on the Nevada Falls Trail might have been something less benign than routine rock falls.

  11

  MARY, THE SPLIT-TAIL CLERK-TYPIST

  If you aspire to become a permanent full-time-with-benefits park ranger with the NPS, you had better pack for an arduous quest. First you must satisfy the requirements of the Division of Human Resources. To satisfy the Division of Human Resources, you must follow guidelines set by the Office of Personnel Management. And according to the Office of Personnel Management, a person may not apply for a permanent full-time-with-benefits park ranger position unless she has “career status” as a permanent full-time-with-benefits federal employee. In other words, in order to apply for a job as a permanent full-time employee, you have to be a permanent full-time employee.