Getting Drunk the Park Service Way

I’m in a reflective mood these days. Here are some more reflections and memories of my National Park Service years. The other day while I was driving over to Grand Junction, there was a accident in the opposite lane of Interstate 70 near Thompson Springs. On scene were an ambulance, a highway patrolman and a life flight helicopter was just leaving with someone who must have been in pretty bad shape. It brought back memories. Those of us who worked as rangers in Resource Management were often called on to back up the Law Enforcement rangers in some fashion that didn't put us in harm's way. At various times responding to automobile accidents and other incidents, I did some things that I’d never done before and haven’t done since. Numerous times I directed traffic on a road that was strewn with wreckage and suddenly down to one lane. I drove the ambulance, lights flashing and siren blaring, away from an accident site with a heart attack victim on board. I was directed to drive as fast as I possibly could without being unsafe. I drove the fire truck to accident sites numerous times because it had all of the victim extraction equipment on board. I stopped traffic and secured the road so that a life flight helicopter could land and load and take off. Several times I saw horribly mangled victims, some dead, some alive.


Most days we spent minding our own business. Resource Managment rangers managed the bear and other animal populations, killed weeds, and dealt with over-enthusiastic visitors doing various brainless activities threatening to the resource or their lives. But when a call came on the radio reporting an accident, a search, or an emergency of some kind, we would drop what we were doing race and off to be of assistance to the over-stretched rangers. It seems when the shit hits the fan, there is no substitute for a few extra people in uniform with a badge and a radio.


RM rangers do unusual things. We trapped varmints from buildings, rescued owls hit by cars, removed bats from residences, looked for eagle chicks that fell from the nest, hauled dead deer, elk and bison from the road, hauled dead bison out of the Yellowstone River, cut trees that had fallen across the road, manned roadblocks because of fire or snow, and tried to keep the visitors from feeding the bears. We released ravens and magpies caught in fishing line, cleared trails in the backcountry, set bear hair snares for DNA studies, and patrolled the geyser basins. I once cleaned up the mess in a thermal hot pool because an elk calf had fallen into it. I had the misfortune of finding a cow moose beside the road, hit by a car, with a broken foreleg. She had tried to run but could not get up on her remaining legs. She looked at me with those big brown eyes while I shot her in the head.


But nothing was stranger and more bizarre than helping to train the new seasonal rangers. Each year there would be two or three new rangers who had never before served in law enforcement in any capacity. They were fresh from one of the NPS academies and had never done an actual traffic stop. Our part in the training process was not informative or instructional in any way. Other, more professional rangers did that. Our involvement as Resource Management rangers was to get drunk. Yep. Bill and I got drunk for the Park Service. Here’s how it happened.


We were given about thirty US government dollars to go and get ourselves some beer, wine or liquor of our choice at the Hamilton store. Bill, my partner, who looks like Steve Martin and is almost as funny, got a few six packs of Corona and a fifth of bourbon. Another RM guy was with us, but he was our guardian and so he stayed sober. We retired to Bill’s residence and proceeded to drink un-responsibly.


After an hour or so of drinking, they took us over to the maintenance yard inside the locked gates. They set us in the driver’s seat of a car (without the keys). We were supposed to be drunk drivers and the Sub-District Ranger asked us to be somewhat co-operative as the new rangers acted out a traffic stop. We answered questions, blew into the Breathalyzer, walked the straight line, pointed to our nose with our eyes closed, and counted backwards. All went well and if we were real drunk drivers we would have been arrested and booked. Bill and I were having an absolutely wonderful time. I can’t remember if anyone else was quite so enthused. But we drank another beer and they asked us to do it again. We traded rangers and Tara, the Sub-District Ranger asked us to be un-cooperative drunks this time. That was a little harder. I am normally law-abiding, friendly and cooperative with law enforcement when I have been stopped because I think it only makes sense. There is no percentage in pissing off the gendarmes. But I tried my best to cooperate by being un-cooperative. It was fun to be a bad boy with parental blessing. I tied screwing around but the ranger was pretty cool and I was put in my place.


But Bill...now Bill was spectacular. He’s a very funny guy, always upbeat and ready with a snide comment or a joke. He’s smart and witty. He teaches high school back in Maryland and has probably taken more shit from teenagers than anyone I know. I think he remembered every piece of shit flung at him over all those years. He was like sassy drunk lawyer who had a legal argument to deny every request. Bill couldn’t walk the imaginary line because he couldn’t find it and went looking for it. He blew in the wrong end of the breathalyzer. He counted in prime numbers instead of backwards. I think at one time he was doing knock-knock jokes. He had a smart-ass answer for every question and then a smart-ass question followed that. You know the old trick where you point at someone’s tie and then when they look down you tweak their nose. I think Bill did that. He had me feeling sorry for the new ranger. If there hadn’t been an audience standing by, that guy might have shot Bill on the spot. It was funny and pathetic. But it was good training for those new rangers and I imagine every traffic stop after that was much easier. And we were glad to help.

My Thanks to Ian and Jo

I got this picture in my e-mail basket today from Ian and Jo in Rivel. I just can't believe it. I am so impressed with their creativity. I don't think they knew my birthday in advance, so they must have had to act with incredible speed. After they read the blog and found out it was my birthday, they must have called Paris and arranged for the banner to be made up. My God, it's a big one and it must have cost beaucoup euros. Ian didn't say how he did this so I am making some guesses and presumptions at how they managed to pull this off. They must have driven up to Paris non-stop from Rivel and picked up the banner just before the banner manufacturing shop closed for the night, crammed it into the Volvo and raced over to the enduring symbol of France, l'tour de Eiffel. Then (I'm still making assumptions) Jo must have distracted the gendarmes while Ian somehow got that huge banner into the freight elevator. I'm sure it was nip and tuck getting the banner secured but knowing Ian and Jo they came prepared with winches, cables, ropes, carabiners, connectors and all the paraphernalia they would need to secure that banner to the Eiffel Tower. I suspect this took all night and they probably had to climb down the outer framework, no doubt in black suits or some kind of camouflage, to avoid the security personnel. All this in a stiff wind. Just look at how that big banner is flying in the breeze. That's got to be a thriller climbing around on the Eiffel Tower in a wind like that. I'm sure there were some tense moments when things didn't go exactly as planned. That's when you have to improvise. I can only guess at their fear, because I know Ian can hardly stand to be on a ladder, but they obviously overcame their paralysis. Then they had to get down on the ground, just as dawn was breaking, get in a boat on the Seine (I'm looking at the bridge in the lower left.) and take a picture. All without getting caught. Masterful. Either that or the photo is computer generated. In any case, I appreciate the effort, and yes, I did have a Bon Anniversaire. Thanks Ian and Jo.

Reflections Upon the Beginning of My Sixtieth Year

It’s a paradox, I know, but the days of my youth seems like a long time ago. I can barely remember grade school, junior high and high school. Yet, my college days seem like only yesterday. They say time flies, and it flies faster as you get older. Well, whoever "they" are, they are correct on this one. I remember that my childhood summers lasted an absolute eternity. They didn’t just seem to last forever, they did last forever. You could not imagine in June that September would ever come. Now, a summer is over in three months. Winters, however, do seem to last an eternity. Go figure.


My thoughts are disorganized. I look back on sixty years and I don’t know whether to reflect on the past, my good fortune, the changes in my health, the memories I have, or should I think about the future.


Sixty isn’t so old anymore, people live longer, more productive lives. And they have additional productive years. I’ve heard that in the Middle Ages, a 40 year old man was quite old and his life expectancy was measured in months. Yet, I can’t escape the fact that I’m not quite as agile as I was, my memory and hearing are fading, my balance is diminishing. My right knee is shot and I suppose knee replacement surgery is in the future. I can feel some arthritis in my hands and other damaged joints. I ask myself, what it will be like in ten and twenty years. Well, probably worse not better.


I can reflect on my incredible good fortune. I’m here, and despite the above paragraph, I’m in pretty good health. I had the good fortune to have had childhood asthma and a dislocated shoulder. Why is that good? Because otherwise I would have ended up in Vietnam. There is no guarantee I would have survived that debacle, that strange excuse for foreign policy. I suspect I would have been a poor to mediocre soldier and would have come home with disabilities if I had come home at all. Fortune was not so kind to some of my friends who suffered or died in Vietnam, died drunk on the highway coming home from the bar, or took their own lives.


I had the incredible good fortune to marry Nancy. Somehow I failed to impress, or I managed to escape the clutches of women who came before her. I will not discuss this any more except to say, if not for Nancy, I probably would writing this on skid row somewhere.


Wow. What a ride we’ve had. Had we gotten married at a different time in history we might have fallen into a trap somewhere along the line. We might have had a passel of kids (not that there is anything wrong with that) and found ourselves too tied down to make the changes we made in our lives. Someone said, maybe Samuel Clemens, that the only regrets they had in life were the things they didn’t do. We took that to heart and made changes in our lives. We changed occupations and careers, we changed houses and states, we exchanged a cabin for a house in France. We have lived in some beautiful places: on an island in Puget Sound with a high bank beach overlooking the Olympic Mountains; in a cabin in Montana that we built ourselves overlooking the north end of the Absorkas and the Yellowstone Valley; in various places in Yellowstone National Park where the nights were so dark and quiet we could hear only the wind and wolves and elk; and of course in Leran, a place we couldn’t have imagined just three years ago. That list doesn’t include Boulder, Bozeman, Livingston, Moab and Seattle which are gorgeous places to live.


And we’ve accumulated memories. I have worked some amazing jobs (and some dreary ones). I’ve been a sign painter, a graphic designer, a truck driver, a Park Ranger, and a clerk at a hardware store. Some of those jobs I did really well and enthusiastically, and some, well you know how it is. We’ve built a couple of houses from the ground up, remodeled others extensively, some beautifully and some very badly. We took some amazing trips into Paria Canyon, the Grand Canyon, various mountain lakes all over the west. We floated the Colorado, the Green, the Wenatchee, the Yellowstone, the Tongue. We’ve been to damn near every state. I’ve missed only Alaska, Delaware and Rhode Island. We traveled to Italy, France, England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Mexico, Cuba, and Canada. We try to figure out how we can trade the house in Moab or Leran so that we can end up in Australia, New Zealand, San Francisco, Paris, London. Time is running out.


The people I’ve known, oh boy, what can I say. There are too many to mention and I’ve forgotten some for sure. Most are still with us but some have passed on. For the most part, its almost impossible for me to talk about those still trudging around on the planet, even though I know I should. My Mom and Dad I still think about very often and I wish that they had lived longer. I was barely an adult when my mother died and I probably had only a handful of adult conversations with her. She was someone who I regret I didn’t appreciate enough when she was around. My father died too early as well but we managed to get to the point of speaking to each other on equal terms instead of indignant father and sulking son. My brother-in-law Darrell also left us too early. He was always an inspiration with his wisdom, good humor, easy laugh and great generosity.


Before this begins to sound like a celebration of my life (maybe it’s too late) I need to examine a particular memory. When I was young we had a cleaning lady who came once a week. Alma Bowling was black and I think from Mississippi, and rode the bus to the stop near our house. She halfway raised my sisters and me. Alma would fix us lunch and she’d sit down and eat with us and we would talk. She scolded us for not putting our dishes in the sink, praised us for schoolwork we brought home, got us heading back to school on time, and wouldn’t let us eat lunch if we didn’t wash our hands. She was probably appalled that we didn’t say grace, but she never said anything to me. Once in a blue moon she would work for Mom at a party, serving and cleaning up, I think more because my mom knew she need the money than my mom needed the help. Every once in a while Alma would miss her bus and Mom would jump in the car and drive her home. We loved her like family and the last time I saw her at my sister Peggy’s wedding, she was a very old woman. A day jumps out in my memory. It must have been Spring Break at college because I was home in Denver. Perhaps it was April 4th or 5th, 1968. Martin Luther King had just been assassinated. Alma was devastated, and I think angry. I was confused. We talked about race relations and Rev. King for awhile and I was very uncomfortable having that conversation, and I don’t think I was ever more conscious of my race in my life. All I could do was shake my head. I remember muttering something like, "Why do they keep killing all the good people?" But we’ve come a long way. When I was quite young I remember my grandmother from Missouri could say out loud, at a reunion, "I got no problem with niggers as long as they stay in their place." We laughed behind her back because even then that was absurd. In a few weeks, I think we are going to elect our first black president. (More accurately, our first mixed race president.) I know my grandmother could not have imagined that. I think Alma could have.


So, Happy Sixtieth Birthday to me. May the world and especially our country continue to change for the better in the next sixty years.

Strange view of France

I was looking on the internet for a map of France and this came up. You may remember the website "Strangemaps" where we found the map of the kissing habits of various French regions. I found it there, and if you are at all interested in maps, you should go to the site. http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/



The painting on a helmet has a nice globe-like quality, however, its not a globe but is instead the map of the Western Front of WWI.



From the commentary on the Strangemaps website: "This helmet is a nice example of trench art, showing a map of the Western Front. The brim of the helmet is marked ‘H.G. Booth, 110th TMB AEF France 1918-’19’. Henry G. Booth was a cook for the 110th Trench Mortar Battery. AEF stands for ‘American Expeditionary Force’.
The helmet map shows
England (with London, Winchester, Dover, Southampton, Hull and Liverpool indicated)
Holland (‘Amstradam’ marked)
Belgium (one city highlighted, name not legible)
Luxemburg (a bit too large)
the Alsace (shown separate from Germany and France; the city of Metz indicated)
the north of France (with Calais, Lille, Le Havre, St Malo, Brest, Paris and three other cities shown) and
part of Germany (Cologne, Coblenz, Mayence – i.e. Mainz).



You can get a slightly better view by clicking on the photo to enlarge.

Fifth Leran Walkers Expedition

Julian Gray sends his second report from Leran about the 5th Leran walking expedition. I'm going to take a stab at some of the pictures. I think that's the bridge in St. Columbe and also a view of St. Columbe from above. The photo of the reservoir is Lac Montbel, we are told it's the largest man-made reservoir in Europe (it's minuscule by American standards, and looks tiny from this viewpoint). For those of you who don't know Julian, that's him in the blue shorts with the map case around his neck. Thanks Julian, for the report. Keep em' coming.

Dear Doug and Nancy

Life goes on in Léran. We attach some nice photos of the 5th Léran Walkers expedition on Wednesday 1 October. They were taken by our son Tom who is with us for a couple of weeks.

We started the expedition at the bar Le Rendez-vous - where else? It was supposed to be open at 09.30 especially for us, but Marek forgot to tell the Wednesday crew about our assembly and he had to rush to the rescue at 09.40!. After coffees and pre-ordering of sandwiches for our lunch, no fewer than 21 people (many you know like Chris and David, Alan and Eileen, Norman and Shirley, Nigel and Barbara, Neil and Celia, David and Bea, Bill and Sally and dog Gemma, Henny etc, others were delightful Australian visitors) set off in five cars to Mireval, a tiny village in the hills a few kilometers south-east of Leran. We assembled on a ridge with fantastic views north and south, and set off down a very steep hill to Le Peyrat, where we found a disused railway track to the east that took us to the banks of the river Hers. After 1.5 hours stroll along the river we reached St. Colombe sur l'Hers, where we turned sharp left up a steep hill to regain the high ground overlooking the Lac du Montbel to the north. Our path west took us back, eventually, to Mireval and our cars.

We reached the bar in Léran at almost precisely 13.00 hours and enjoyed our sandwiches, lively conversation and several pichets of vin rouge, vin rosé and vin blanc. During lunch we said a special communal "salut" for absent friends in Moab, including Fergus!

Love from us both,

Gwenda and Julian

The Nutfest in Lavelanet

The other day, Nancy and I received our first dispatch from Leran recording the goings-on back in France. Julian Gray and a group of fun-seekers from Leran went to the Hazelnut Festival in Lavelanet and he sent about 30 pictures. Consequently I had to pick out just a few to reproduce here. Julian, doing his best Edward R. Murrow impersonation, sends the following report on the festivities.

Dear Doug and Nancy,

You have probably already had lots of photos, from those of us left behind in Léran, of the Fete de la Noisette in Lavelanet last Sunday. Twenty-four of us went from Léran in three minibuses and we had a great day.

The photos show departure and arrival, the tall guy is Chandler, from Canada, who was last year's hazelnut-spitting world champion - he lost this year by 1.5 metres - his best was only 6 metres against the new champion with 7.5 (or thereabouts).

Other pics show market stalls selling interesting bread, knives, local cheeses and the biggest biscuit in the area in process of production, an old Renault truck (pre 1914 war), the market hall where the main celebrations were held, various officials in their costumes (the full Noisette hat and cloak is rather smart don't you think), the jazz band, half-eaten food - foie-gras, cassoulet, cheeses - and then the party games with a line of people sitting on the floor passing other people overhead, one at a time, from one end of the room to the other.

We miss you and Fergus. Old Smokey is being pressed into valuable service from time to time, with great care.

Love from everyone and "woof" to Fergus.

Julian

Hazelnut-spitting champion? I would never have imagined a hazelnut spitting contest much less a champion.............and from Canada. Oh, mon Dieu. France must be ashamed at this additional blow to her prestige. First, the Tour de France and now the hazelnut spitting competition. Sacre Bleu. Where will it stop? But you don't say where the new champ hails from. Perhaps, he is French, n'est pas? Oh yes, Julian. The Noisette hat and cloak are smart and radiate authority, but you know they don't hold a candle to me in my monk costume. We're sorry we missed it. Maybe next year. May I also point out that yours is the first and only report we've gotten about the Nutfest and we appreciate it. Good photos, old chap. I hope someone will be there for Quiz Night at the Le Rendezvous and report back with words and pictures.