Wednesday, June 19, 2013

The Angels' Island

On Angel Island people asked me how I got such a great assignment.  Well it wasn’t hard, between the isolation of living on Angel Island itself, totally unattractive to anyone with a family, and the Superintendent's reputation for being a micromanager, there weren’t many takers.  A few Rangers were interested but as soon as they looked into it, they backed off.

I went to Angel Island November 17, 2007, 10 days after the Cosco Busan oil spill.  The island was still coping with the spill when I arrived.  The cleanup on the island’s shore went on for months afterwards.   I had my own personal crisis, having recently separated from Susan.  At Angel Island no one knew her or anything about my marriage and how it ended.  As far as anyone knew Suzette was my girlfriend and she started coming over to the island and was an immediate hit with the island residents, they all seemed to like her. 

The island itself was another beautiful place, 800 acres, about one square mile, sitting in the middle of San Francisco Bay with a view of the City, the East Bay, the San Rafael Bridge and Richmond, and a mile from Tiburon across a very rough piece of water.   

I told people that coming to Angel Island I had had a religious conversion of the Park variety, from the Devil’s Mountain to the Angels’ Island. 

The island was a favorite camping spot of the local Miwok people for over 5,000 years, then part of a Mexican land grant where they ran cattle, and then an Army Camp from 1862 until 1962.  After 1862 it was a Federal island and in addition to the Army post they used it for a quarantine station and an immigration station with detention barracks.  The Chinese, mostly young men, were detained for interrogation about their documents and their detentions ranged from weeks to years. 

Most of the human history was on the edge of the island surrounded at an elevation of about 150 feet by the Perimeter Road. 

Richard Dana in his book Two Years Before the Mast, wrote about Angel Island in the 1830s.  He called it Wood Island.  The Whalers who stopped in the Bay took on wood at Angel Island for rendering whale blubber.  By the time the Army occupied the island in 1862 photographs show it nearly completely bare of trees.  The Army planted Eucalyptus trees around their structures supposedly to prevent malaria and left the rest of the island alone.  Over the 150 years the Army stopped grazing and wood cutting the interior of the island restored itself with a dense covering of live oak and California chaparral.  Above Perimeter Road, we tried to keep the island as natural as possible.  The biologists battled invasive species removing Eucalyptus and Monterey pine. 

The views from Angel Island are the best in the Bay Area.  We could see the City as if we could reach out and touch it, the Golden Gate Bridge, Alcatraz, the East Bay and the North Bay.  From the top of the island I could look over the Berkeley Hills and see Mount Diablo. 

Angel Island was a much quieter park than Mount Diablo.  The only way to get to the island was by ferry or private boat.  We had spaces for 30 boats to moor overnight in Ayala Cove and 10 campsites.  Alcohol was fine on the island.  The café sold beer and wine.  People brought their own, but the costs of getting to the island kept most of the rowdy 20 somethings away.  Public drunkenness was an occasional problem but easily handled. 

There were fewer accidents on the island, but as the only Ranger I responded to all of them.  Even when Eric Knapp joined me in 2009 we still responded together, so the only accidents I missed were when I was off the island.  We only had one serious police incident the whole time I was on the island, a drunk who called in a bomb threat and then said he was armed and was going to kill himself.  Eric and I went searching for him.  We found him in the bushes on the east side of the island and arrested him.  We never found any weapons.

Law enforcement was very low key, most of it was enforcing fees and boating regs for the private boaters who came to the island.

The housing at Angel Island was amazing.  I was given a choice of houses, the Pharmacist’s house in Ayala Cove or the newer Coast Guard house at Point Blunt.  Point Blunt has an incredible view, but it’s windy and often foggy.  .  I chose the Pharmacist’s house, an 1890 two story Victorian house with a wraparound porch.  It was up the hillside from the beach at Ayala Cove.  The house was cold and drafty but beautiful.  Ayala Cove is where all the ferries came in, the Park offices are there, a café, a picnic area and a small beach.

The house is up from the picnic area and 100 yards up the road from the Park Headquarters.  Even though it was within sight of most of the activity of the Park, it was still quiet and out of the way. 

There is no bridge to Angel Island.  The only way to get there is by boat or swimming.  I had first gone to Angel Island in a kayak from Sausalito and for a number of years that was the only way I got there.  It’s a strenuous kayak trip against strong and rough currents and constant headwinds it seems.  Before I had decided to work there I had only come ashore at Ayala Cove and Camp Reynolds, both on the western side.  I kayaked around the island a number of times, but I’d never really got up on the island to explore.  I’d seen the east side from the Larkspur Ferry and all the houses and buildings at East Garrison seemed mysterious and forgotten. 

So just prior to taking the job at Angel Island I went to the island by way of the Tiburon Ferry.  Once I moved on to the island the regular means of getting on and off were the Angel Island Ferry and the Park’s 50 foot crew boat which ran a regular schedule of 8:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. and 5:30 p.m.   The Ferry ran for the tourists hourly on weekends and during the visitor season three or four times a day during the week.  During the winter the ferry ceased operation on weekdays except for charters. 

Living on Angel Island was wonderful but it was also like being exiled.  Even though it was only a mile from Tiburon and within sight of most of the Bay Area, it seemed very far away.  I enjoy unusual and remarkable things and living on an island was a remarkable experience.   Knowing the boat schedule was very important as it was the only way of getting off the island and back on.  If I needed milk, I drove or walked down to the docks on Angel Island, got there in extra time and waited for the ferry.  There was nothing more frustrating that to get to the dock just in time to wave good-bye to the departing boat.  If I were operating either of the Park boats myself there was preparation time.  It took 10 minutes to get across the strait and then the tying up, disembarking and a four block walk to the parking lot where we kept our vehicles for use on the mainland.  Until the last year on the island I could use the Park’s boat for trips, but these had to be scheduled and announced well ahead of time so everyone had an opportunity.  There were no spur of the moment runs to the mainland.

So that quart of milk took about an hour and a half to two hours if I planned it just right. 
I could have gotten my own boat, but maintaining a boat is a lot more trouble than a car.  People joke it’s like having a second wife.  And there are no public docks available in Tiburon.  Tying up required borrowing space, permission and avoiding spaces when they were needed.  The whole thing made it nearly impossible.  To rent a space was hundreds of dollars and the only thing available was all the way over in Paradise, about five miles away.  Dave had a whole course and qualification system for the crew boat and only a few of us qualified to operate that boat and a 16 foot inflatable with a large outboard motor on it.  Even that ended with a new superintendent in 2011. 

I lived on Angel Island for four years.  At first it was a novelty and I enjoyed it, but as time wore on the inconvenience of it began to weigh heavier and heavier.  The worst part was scheduling a return from the mainland.  After Suzette moved on the island and we had Paloma, if we were to go shopping or just to visit the mainland we would have to schedule it in such a way that we could return to Tiburon in time for the boat.  

There was a lot of waiting around because we had to get there early enough to make sure we didn’t miss the boat.  The islanders were well known at the town library and the café on the corner near the docks. 

I remember one time we went to LA by car.  We drove back overnight so Paloma would sleep through most of the trip and scheduled our return to catch the morning crew boat to the island.  It’s hard to be precise about time with a 400 mile trip and we gave ourselves plenty of time to make the ferry.  We arrived in Marin before 5:30 a.m.  The boat schedule for the island was 8:30.  We went to the 24 hour Safeway in Corte Madera.  We shopped for things we needed and bought some morning snacks and then returned to to the car to wait for the ferry. 

We still had 2 hours before the boat left Tiburon for the island.  Of course, there we were, Paloma, Suzette and me, our luggage and the debris of the trip in the car.  The security guard for the shopping center, drove around us every 10 minutes for the two hours we waited.  We looked like a homeless family living in the car.   That was the worst time but we often felt like a homeless family looking for a temporary camp until it was time to catch the ferry. 

On a busy summer weekend there could be 5,000 visitors to the island or more.  Most of those would arrive by ferry and leave by ferry the same day.  So the earliest visitors arrived at 10:30 a.m. and the latest left at 5:30 p.m.  There was space for 30 boats to be moored and there might be a 100 people in the moorings but they stayed on their boats overnight.  We had 9 campsites distributed around the island and maybe 50 people used those.  During the winter on a weekday or rainy weekend we might have 10 visitors, a couple of moorings and no campers.  Except for busy weekends which were only half the year the only residents on the island were the Park employees and our families, about 25 people. 

After sunset and before mid-morning it was very rare to see anyone on the island.  There were 80 or 90 deer on the island, hundreds of raccoons, harbor seals in two different locations and a host of owls, hawks, and seabirds.  There were no rattlesnakes, no coyotes and no bobcats or mountain lions.  It was an idyllic place.      

The Superintendent at Angel Island was Dave Matthews.  Before I went to Angel Island I met Dave and decided at worst he had to be better than my supervisor on Mount Diablo.  He seemed like a good guy.  I worked with Dave for three years and at times it got a little crazy.  He was a micro manager.  He was always changing things, couldn’t leave anything alone and something I didn’t expect he was always battling with the forces of evil, park vendors, partners, maintenance people from the mainland and management.  There were things Dave could have done or more often not done that would have made working there easier but basically Dave was a good guy, honest and a reliable friend.    

When I first got to Angel Island Dave and I were the only Rangers.  I was replacing Hector Heredia.  Hector was an odd character, a real wannabe cop, he had been heavy on enforcement on an island where there was a rare need for it.  Dave had to fish him out of trouble with the visitors a number of times.  After I’d been there awhile I began to realize Dave’s MO included surrounding himself with dysfunctional people who needed his help to stay afloat.  His most loyal follower was Jean Orchard, a Park Aide.  Jean had a serious alcohol problem and a year after I got there had to be fired for testing positive for cocaine.  Dave tried to get her a job on the mainland.  His reasoning was that drug testing was an island requirement because of crewing the boats.  It didn’t apply to working as a park aide on the mainland.  The Tamalpais Sector people thought that hiring a coke addict made no sense at all and didn’t accept Dave’s recommendation. 

It was a blow to my ego to realize why Dave so readily recruited me to be a Ranger on Angel Island.  As a 61 year old Ranger over the hill and wounded by Bill from Mount Diablo,  I was another one of Dave’s cripples needing his protection.  

I felt like Dave made a mistake in my case, but that’s probably not true.  I flourished under Dave’s protection.  He excused my failings and appreciated I didn’t do anything without checking with him first.  As a veteran of the military and 9 years in a Japanese environment, I was a well practiced follower and I think Dave appreciated that.   

Dave was a good guy.  I liked him.  He put people and family first, but he couldn’t resist manipulating all of us.  Dave, like me was that frustrating mix of sterling qualities and raging faults.  Dave battled everybody, the district, our vendors, the ferry boats, the Coast Guard, anyone outside of his circle and caused us problems with nearly everyone.  The Coast Guard generally avoided the island and treated us like lepers. 

When we had the fire he insisted that he should take overall responsibility for the investigation since it was his jurisdiction.  Cal Fire, of course, didn’t see it that way at all.  The Cal Fire investigators were very competent and knew what they were doing.  Dave interfered so badly with the Cal Fire investigators that after a month or so they wouldn’t talk to us.  That was also part of Dave’s MO, to get in a power struggle with people we should have cooperated with.    

I  really enjoyed Angel Island and I hated it at the same time.  I hated that the visitors mostly wanted a character like Mickey Mouse at the docks who would wave at them and stand in pictures with their family.  I did that and enjoyed it, but a lot of the time I was the only one at the docks, during the week and in the winter and being a dock aide, smiling and waving wasn’t always that much fun.  It was a day tourist venue and the tourists could be demanding and shallow. 

I also disliked the arrogance of the boat owners, both the ones on the dock who avoided paying fees whenever they could and the ones in the moorings a few of whom displayed an arrogance of property and disrespect for the Park.  On the other hand some of the boat owners were extraordinarily nice and I got to know and appreciate the regulars.  It was one of the pleasures of being a Ranger.    

I liked our vendors.  I got to be good friends with the people at the café.  Maggie, the ferry boat operator is a special friend.  Living in a village was interesting.  I used to say if something happened on the island, it only took 15 minutes for the people on the other side of the island to know about it, unless it was a secret, then it took a half hour.  Being the Ranger for the local Park was also very interesting.  I knew the businesses in Tiburon and the local bank manager.  From doing medicals together I knew the firefighters.  Walking down the street in town whether I was in uniform or not I was well known character and exchanged greetings with people along the street.  That was different than my usual experience of being anonymous nearly everywhere.  

In my second year we got another Ranger, Eric.  Eric was a character.  He had a droll sense of humor.  He had been a Ranger for over 25 years and was pretty well burned out.  He didn’t much like the visitors and he quickly got off on the wrong foot with Dave and kept making it worse. 

Eric was called the ghost because he was hard to find.  But when I needed Eric he was always there.  There were a few times when we went out on gunfire or other questionable calls, where we didn’t know what we were going to and I always felt safe with Eric at my side.  He was experienced, competent and courageous.  Other things about Eric didn’t count much in comparison to trusting him with my life, which I did without hesitation. 

He and Paloma had a special relationship.  To her he was Uncle Eric and anybody who is friends with Paloma is OK.  Paloma also got the benefit of being in a village where everyone knew her and loved her. 

Monday, June 10, 2013

Working on the Devil's Mountain

We showed up.  That’s what Rangers do on Mount Diablo.  When there was a call for help, I responded and if I was the first on scene I was in charge until someone better trained or experienced showed up. 

I learned first response was pretty easy.  Was the patient breathing?  Did they have a heartbeat?  If they didn’t we gave them CPR, which for me didn’t happen again until my last summer at Angel Island.  Then we protected the spine, stopped the bleeding and took care of the patient.  We kept them calm until transport arrived.  At Mount Diablo that could be 20 minutes or more. 

After Gary it seemed easy.  All of my patients were breathing and while they might have been in pain with broken bones and gashes, they all survived.  That’s pretty good.  Mostly our treatment was to give people oxygen, hold their hand and tell them they were going to be OK.  It was amazing how positively patients responded to just those three things.   

In my time at Mount Diablo only one call was immediately life threatening, a case of heat stroke.  The young man had Kleinfelter’s syndrome which includes poor spatial sense.  The best he could tell us from his cellphone with a dying battery was that he was near a tree.  Dispatch finally got him to describe an old water tower he could see.  That put us in the general area.  There were 30 or 40 firefighters out combing the area.  Two of the firefighters I followed up a very steep hill.  The young man was at the top of the hill.  In a brief moment of triumph we compared ages and found out we were all over 50.  We found him and all the younger firefighters were down below us.    

The Highway Patrol helicopter came in and hovered over us.  We got the patient out and they started cooling him as soon as they got him in their aircraft.  He survived.  In my career there were motorcycle accidents, bike accidents, falls, heart attacks, and drownings.  Just showing up, staying calm, and being there, made the situation better.  I liked finding people, calming them down, taking care of them, working with firefighters and other police, helicopters, boats, and ambulances.  I learned it was something I could do and something I enjoyed.  I didn’t want to see anybody hurt but if they were I wanted to be there.  . 

At the end of my first year I went to EMT training through the Parks.  We did two semesters of training in a single month.  The classes were all day and weekends.  It was intense.  At the end I qualified as an EMT.  I became a trainer for medical responses.  I got to be good at it. 

The biggest issue in law enforcement on the mountain was the ban on alcohol in the Park.  Not all parks ban alcohol but we did.  It is a park by park issue.  At Mount Diablo we had 11 miles of narrow winding mountain roads used by bicyclists and cars.  Banning alcohol saved lives. 

At night we patrolled the campgrounds.  A lot of people equate camping with heavy drinking.  We tried to nip that in the bud.  It varied in difficulty.  Sometimes it could be a very negative situation.  Most of the time we caught them.  We gave them the option of pouring it out or a ticket and confiscating it.  They usually poured it out and that was the end of it.  There were a lot of young men in their twenties and sometimes they would try to be cute; sometimes they were belligerent.  I didn’t much enjoy the alcohol enforcement though there was a cat and mouse aspect to it.  We had signs all over the Park and the Park Aides would tell people as they came in.  It was on the camping reservation form.  So everyone knew about the ban before they came to the Park. 

I enjoyed foot patrol in the campgrounds at night.  It was like being invisible.  The campers stood around their campfires or a lantern and their night vision was gone.  We walked the campgrounds without flashlights.  We could walk right up to the edge of a campsite and no one saw us until we stepped into the light.  Catching people in the act was easy and their surprise was a small victory for us.  There was an element of humor in it which not all the campers got.    

The ban on alcohol made the campgrounds much more family friendly and eliminated those loud all night parties that make camping so irritating some times. 

Campfires were also a problem.  We allowed campfires during the off season but during the fire season, from May until about November, they were strictly banned.  A lot of campers thought they had to have a campfire even during fire season when the chaparral is tender and dry and campfires are just plain dangerous.

There wasn’t much other law enforcement.  Car break-ins were a periodic problem.    We increased our patrol in the parking areas and thankfully they were never more than sporadic.  We never caught anyone.  We instituted searches for potential suicides who were last seen heading for the Park.  Often police shootings are what we call suicide by cop, threatening cops with a lethal weapon and trying to provoke the cops into shooting.  Potential suicides are dangerous to cops.  Twice there were tense situations with armed suspects but both times I wasn’t on duty. 

I did two arrests and a detention while I was in the Park.  One in the back country on an outstanding warrant for gun possession, another for drunk driving and the detention of a potential suicide with a butcher knife.  Detention is much like an arrest except we took the subject to the County Psych Ward instead of jail. 

We did searches.  We found all of our subjects or in one case he turned up at home.  We knew the Park well and people tended to get lost in the same places, so the searches weren’t that challenging most times.      

Most of the time I drove around in the Park, driving on my side of the mountain from South Gate up to the summit and back down toward North Gate.  If we needed to go to the Mitchell Canyon side of the Park we took a backcountry dirt road closed to the public or drove freeways through Walnut Creek and  all the way around the mountain.

I think my favorite duty was closing the Park, particularly on a winter evening.  The Park closed at sunset.  There were gates at the bottom of the mountain and we started the closing by locking the incoming gate and putting spikes up at the outbound lane to prevent people from coming in. Then we’d go to the top of the mountain and work our way down.  We’d run into a visitor or two and ask them to move on and like a sweep work our way down to the bottom going in each picnic and parking area looking for laggards.  At the end we closed the outbound gate.  We could go as fast or as slow as we wanted.  There was a routine to it.  The mountain was beautiful and the night animals, coyote and bobcats would begin to come out.  Owls perched in the same spots every night.  It is a beautiful park. 

I did some interpretation, certainly not enough.  I also walked through popular areas and chatted with the visitors, pointed things out to them, but most of the time I was on patrol.  I did Ranger hikes with Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts.  I gave lectures and impromptu lectures.  I talked to visitors.  It seemed to me as a park visitor I always enjoyed talking to a Ranger about the Park.  Before I was a Ranger I didn’t meet many Rangers.  I tried to make myself as available as possible.   

Working in a park can be easy or overwhelming depending on the supervision.  At Mount Diablo we had a supervisor who made the job harder for all of us.  As a new person and an inexperienced Ranger I was particularly vulnerable to being bullied.  More because of his own problems than any problem I had Bill, my supervisor, picked my work apart.  I checked with the other Rangers and in their opinion I was doing OK for a newbie.  I was reliable and I was developing the skills I needed.  It never seemed to satisfy Bill.  Bill’s own performance was marginal at best and he was being harassed by the superintendent.  The superintendent who was an amazing type left the rest of us alone. 

Greg, the superintendent, had executive hair and he was tall.  He had no social skills.  After a year he still didn’t know the names of the six Rangers who worked for him.  The rest of us started calling Vince, one of the Rangers, Victor.  That was what Greg called him.     

One rainy winter day before the 8 a.m. park opening Jeremy’s wife Nikki drove down the hill as she usually did to take her son Chris to school.  Nikki was about 8 months pregnant with Kaylee.  Greg was driving behind her on his way to his office on the other side of the mountain.  At the bottom of the hill Nikki got out to open the gate in driving rain.  Eight months pregnant she got back in her car and drove through.  Normally in these situations the second car would stop and close the gate.  Greg, the superintendent, drove through the gate, around Nikki’s car and down the street.

Greg made life uncomfortable for Bill and Bill made my life uncomfortable.  It seemed like I never got clear directions on exactly what I should be doing.  It was as much my fault as my supervisors but Bill would give me assignments to do stuff I didn’t understand.  The paperwork and the ways of getting things done in Parks was complicated and everything seemed opaque, even getting my truck fixed.  It just took forever and involved submitting paperwork and redoing it and resubmitting it and redoing it again and again.    

I felt incompetent, the same way I had felt as a banker thrown into the branches when I first completed credit training.  I didn’t know what I was doing and I was getting beat up my boss.  In this case, at Mount Diablo unlike the banks I got reassurance from my coworkers that I was doing just fine. 

From my perspective now, after having been a Ranger for seven years, I was doing OK.  As a Ranger I have some outstanding abilities. I do well with people, in day to day contacts and in high stress situations. I learned how to act in cop situations with experience but mostly with just common sense and a sense of duty to do what needs to be done. 

There were times when I dealt with belligerent citizens badly but there were times when I did it well.  Overall looking back I did a pretty good job.  I wish I had been able to do a better job.  I wish I had more support, time and opportunity to have been more of what the public expects of a Ranger, an organizer, reaching out to people.  I reached out to some visitors but sometimes it seemed I had to sneak around to do it.  At Mount Diablo my best skill wasn’t appreciated that much.    When I went to Angel Island things weren’t perfect, but they were better.    

Before I became a Ranger I had dreamed of how cool it would be.  It was a difficult and hard job and made less enjoyable by paperwork and bad management. 

I got to wear a uniform and a gun.  That in itself was quite an experience.  I enjoyed the sensation to be out in public as a police officer.  At first I enjoyed going to restaurants or cafes.  But after awhile being in public outside the park became a strain.  It seemed easier to avoid doing anything outside the park.    Being more a Ranger than a cop, wearing the iconic hat, was better particularly with children. 

I enjoyed working at Mount Diablo and I didn’t enjoy it.  I loved being in the Park; being in nature all day long.  I got to see nature not as a visitor but living in it and working in it.  I got to see the things that took patience and being there, that evolved day to day, week to week, month to month and even year to year.  It was fun, for the first time in my life, I was working with people who enjoyed the same things I did.  Together we learned and shared the natural and human history of the Park and the local area.  

I have never lived in a more beautiful setting than on Mount Diablo.  The Park is 20,000 acres,  just enough to be a viable wild space.  We had bobcats, foxes, eagles, rattlesnakes, and coyotes.  On Mount Diablo in the late summer and fall, the tarantulas came out and began their trek in search of female mates.  My first year there was a particularly good year for tarantulas and they were everywhere. 

We had six different species of oaks in the Park.  For the first time I became aware of the blue oaks, the new leaves in spring, their fullness in the summer and their stark bareness during the winter.  We had interior and coastal live oak, both evergreens.  We had mall oak.  We had black oak and on the edges of the Park a few valley oaks.  The oak trees were often old and gnarled.  I felt blessed to stand near an oak that had lived for hundreds of years.  I was able to observe the wonderful ecology of the California oak and chaparral community.  There was fog on the south side of the mountain, coastal live oak, knobcone pines and riparian, turning to scrub on the sun blanched east and south sides.  I got to know the California buckeye.  On Mount Diablo the buckeyes lost their leaves in July and August and visitors would complain to us about the dead trees.  They were adapted to California seasons dropping out during the harshest time of the year when there’s been no rain for months and the temperatures can be in the triple digits.     

I enjoyed just being on the mountain, hiking, walking, sitting in one place, bicycling or driving my car slowly from Southgate to the Summit.  I got to see the drama of nature in all kinds of weather, at all hours, plants growing, the scenery changing, and animals in their environment.  I got to see foxes running away and bobcats that would stop and stare menacingly.  One time closing at the top I saw eagles, a pair, in a mating dance  in tandem inches apart flying against the sunset.  I watched them for nearly an hour.  They knew their dance was beautiful.  Their consciousness of their own majesty was for me a glimpse of the divine.  Mount Diablo is truly a sacred place.       

At the Park we had wonderful volunteers.  One gentleman, who had already made his living elsewhere devoted himself to making a wonderful junior ranger program.  The president of our cooperative association had been a high ranking Secret Service agent and was dedicated to doing everything he could to keep the Park beautiful and accessible.  Rich was inspiring.  He was a man of considerable stature and presence who anywhere he walked always picked up trash as he went. 

At 60 years old I was proud of my strength and endurance as a Ranger.  Rich, a few years older than I am,  invited me out to do a survey of the signage in the Park on foot.  The other Rangers teased me betting that I wouldn’t be able to keep up with Rich.  I managed to stay with him, just barely, from the bottom of the mountain to the top and traversing back and forth on our way up with no regard for the steepness of the trail.  It was a challenge.  I was exhausted and relieved when we made it back to the car.  I wasn’t Rich’s equal but I could keep up at least on Mount Diablo,  After I left Mount Diablo Rich and a friend of his climbed Mount McKinley.

Probably my favorite thing to do in the Park was a short hike with pre-teen youngsters.  I loved showing them the trees, finding wildlife and listening to them tell me about what they saw and what they enjoyed in nature.  For youngsters around four or five years old my wearing the hat and the uniform was as good as being Santa Claus.  They were so excited to be talking to a real Ranger they stammered with excitement.

After a few months at Mount Diablo it became obvious that the house at South Gate was available.  Bill wanted to keep it open to use it as a draw for another Ranger and after all I was brand new.  Carl figured out it was a union issue and I had senority.  The house was mine if I wanted it.  And I did.  It saved me a lot of commute time, I was living in Oakland commuting 45 minutes to get to the Park and the house was darn near for free.

The house itself was a 1940s government house, green with a green roof.  It was a rectangle divided into a living room, a kitchen and two bedrooms.  It sat on a flat promontory above a deep canyon.  The promontory gave a view of the canyon, the valley below and the hills beyond.  Of course, being a government house it was situated such that the large living room window looked out on the road and the nearby hillside, almost no view at all. 

It was a wonderful place to live.  The disadvantage of living in the Park was that I couldn’t leave the job at work.  Home was at work and work was at home.  Every so often I’d have someone come to the door in spite of signs saying don’t disturb the occupant and ask a stupid question.  Where can they get maps?  Once or twice an actual emergency came to my door, but for a government house sitting directly across from the gate and the fee collection hut, I was remarkably undisturbed.  It helped that in the evening we locked a gate nearly 3 miles down the road and in the evening no one could come in.  There were wonderful walks just outside my door and the canyon itself was incredibly beautiful and steep. 

Susan moved in with me shortly after I got the place.  She immediately began complaining about the heat, the roofing, she needed to have painters come in and paint.  Susan left for work and for weeks it seemed I was left in the house with a painter, or a housecleaner, or had to stay and wait for the internet service.  She always had somebody coming to the house for something.  Susan insisted I follow up on her complaints to the maintenance chief or my supervisor.  Susan made living in the Park difficult and when she left it became much easier.   

The last summer I was at Mount Diablo it seemed Bill began to pay me special attention demanding I do things his way and looking for things I wasn’t doing.  I was Bill’s special project at work.  It was a downward spiral and I knew it might end in losing my job. 

Relations with Bill were terrible, he was always on the edge of writing me up, the things I was actually good at, he made sure or tried to make sure that I wasn’t able to do it without interference or being diverted.  It got worse and worse and I was in charge of signage for the Park.  I wasn’t a decoration or crafts guy, so putting information in the broken info stations wasn’t something I was good at or could even get started on doing exhibits.  I put maps in them and that was as much as I could figure out.  The highway signs involved figuring out the incredibly complicated system of ordering signs in the State bureaucracy and making justifications for them and so on and there was a sign dispute between the cooperative association and Bill which I didn’t know about and I was in the middle of that. 

So even when I ordered the signs, I wasn’t able to tell anyone they had come in and the order wasn’t what Bill had been forced to agree to in a meeting with the association.  So the whole thing was just a mess and as a bureaucratic novice and someone who doesn’t like doing that stuff anyhow, I wasn’t good at it and Bill was pushing and pushing and pushing.  I was getting nasty assignments and just felt like I was one of those employees on their way out. 

I thought of becoming a union steward, not so much to fight it as just protection for my position, screwing a union steward usually isn’t a good idea.  

Like my days in banking when I finally did learn to become a loan officer, I was learning to become a Ranger.  In banking it had been rough in the beginning.  I think I’m a slow and careful learner and so it was as a Ranger.  At the end in both cases I was pretty good at what I did.   

So I chose to go to another park.  When Bill learned about this he tried to convince me to stay.  I knew it wouldn’t change our relationship, but it was typical of Bill, he was clueless.  Here he was working to make me as uncomfortable as possible, to brand me as incompetent, but he didn’t want to lose me. 

After two years at Mount Diablo I transferred to Angel Island.  The superintendent there was Dave Matthews.  Dave had been the supervisor before Bill at Mount Diablo.  The reviews on him were mixed.  Carl and Rich really like him.  The cyclists who used the Park hated him.  Some people liked him and some didn’t.  He had a reputation for being overbearing and irritating everybody needlessly.  Supposedly he was hard to work with. 

I went to see Dave at Angel Island a couple of times and got a good impression of him.  So in November, 2007, after two years at Mount Diablo, I went to work for him.