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. 

New Ranger

As a newly minted Park Ranger, I showed up at Mount Diablo with little or no confidence. I wore civilian clothes the first week until I qualified at the firing range with my pistol. The next day I showed up to work with a badge and a gun. It took a long time to get used to wearing a gun. Like any police officer my gun was loaded and cocked. It was as we call it hot, ready to fire. Police pistols do not have safetys. I had a lot to learn before I’d feel comfortable as a Ranger on Mount Diablo. I had been through the training. I graduated from the Academy right in the middle of my classmates at number 10, but the Academy was just that academic. From now on it was the real thing.

My first three months and a little more I was under the direct and constant supervision of my Field Training Officer, Cameron Mitchell, a wonderful gentleman and a very capable Ranger. The six months of the Academy were really just to prepare us for Field Training and our probationary first year. Cameron put me in situations that were very difficult but we always managed to get through it and he was always there when I got stuck. We even chased a suspect on city streets, I was driving, at speeds over a 100 mph. I still don’t think that was a good idea, but we did it.

During the field training, the Ranger running the gift shop stayed where he was. Then as I was getting ready to take his place, another Ranger transferred into Diablo and he had less Park seniority than I did. So he got the museum and gift shop. It turned out well. Vince was a good guy, put a real effort into the museum, and used it as an opportunity to learn skills that served him well when he became a supervisor.

The first weekend while patrolling Mt. Diablo I was the first on scene for the worst motorcycle accident I have ever seen. Gary had come down the mountain on a new scooter and going too fast had missed the last turn before Junction. The bike had gone into the drainage ditch beside the road and he was slammed from side to side until it came to a stop 20 yards further down.

I pulled up in my truck and went to see what we had. Gary was a mess, He was surrounded by the people from the cars that had stopped. The whole scene was chaotic. I showed up but I wasn't ready for a situation like this. The victim was unconscious and was smashed like a rag doll. People were all around him and one person seemed to know what they were doing.

I got down with the victim. Everything in me told me to run in the other direction. I had been trained but I had no experience. Only moments after I arrived Carl Nielson, a Ranger with over 20 years on the mountain, arrived on scene and we began treating Gary. And that was it, Carl got the motorcycle helmet off and his airway straightened, he inserted an oropharyngeal device, a small plastic insert that keeps the airway open and I began pumping the victim's chest. And that’s what we did, I did chest compressions, Carl did breaths with a breathing mask, an apparatus with a mouthpiece and a big blue bladder that could be squeezed for the breaths. One of the bystanders, a nurse, kept her hand on the victim’s pulse, which she told us was what my compressions were doing and nothing more.

As we were doing it, I felt lost. In my mind, I thought I was supposed to be in charge and I had no idea what to do. In hindsight, of course, Carl was there and we did what needed doing. When we started the CPR Gary’s face was a pale white and his lips were blue and with the pumping on his chest, color returned and seemed to come and go with the compressions that I was doing. Everything I had was concentrated on this human being, broken, unconscious and unable to breathe without our help. .

Other Rangers arrived on scene. The chaos around us evaporated and we were keeping Gary alive. Cameron asked if I wanted to be relieved, but I was OK, and I wanted to stay. The paramedics eventually arrived and took over from us.

They prepared a syringe and put it into his heart. It must have been some sort of adrenalin, because Gary immediately began breathing on his own and they packed him up on a gurney and transported him down to Junction where he was flown out of the Park on a helicopter.

The Highway Patrol investigates serious accidents on Mount Diablo. I picked up whatever bits of trash were still there and waited for them. After a couple of hours a patrolman arrived.

We made small talk, kidded around a little. He looked at my gun and said he felt safer being in the wild as long as I was armed. I told him it was a State Park and if he was attacked by a mountain lion, unfortunately they were protected and Highway Patrolmen weren’t. If it came down to one or the other I’d have to shoot the patrolman. He was laughing about it, but as I learned from experience most highway cops, city cops, even sheriffs are uncomfortable in the wild. The Park was our domain and our comfort there was what made us Rangers.

Afterwards I drove down the hill. I might have done a little patrol or just finished up my shift. It was the first time I experienced that sudden shift from life and death to routine that over time would become normal to me. I went home and that was it. The Rangers were tough, and I would have liked to talk to someone about it, but no one was around. It was over and we had done what we could.

On Wednesday Gary died from his injuries. I felt that I had been totally inadequate to the situation but I had shown up and I had stayed. We had done OK, everyone told us we had done good work, but I just felt devastated by the whole thing. I hadn’t known what I was doing. Carl had taken over and told me what to do. Thank god he was there.

It took weeks for me to sort it out in my own mind. I continued to show up and I continued to get the experience I needed to improve my skills. Gary’s accident was the worst accident I attended until my last summer as a Ranger at Angel Island. More about that later.

Looking back on the accident with Gary it was a major accomplishment that Gary left the Park alive. We gave the medical staff at John Muir the chance to save his life. They would have saved him if it had been possible and it wasn’t, but he was alive when we sent him to them. And I had been a part of that. No matter how unsure I was doing CPR, the timing, the number and all those details, it worked. I felt sorry for Gary, but it was apparent at the accident that alcohol had been part of it and I didn’t feel any responsibility for what Gary had done to himself.

Later in my training for EMT, the next level up, they made the macabre joke that when you needed to do CPR the victim is dead, has no heartbeat and isn’t breathing. They told us, “You can’t make it worse.”

After my baptism of fire I settled into the routine of the Park. I was on my own or at least patrolling solo in my own car. My schedule was 3 p.m. to 11 at night, Wednesday through Sunday. I worked afternoons and evenings through the weekends with Monday and Tuesday off. My shift partner was Jeremy Olsen.

Most of my shift I was by myself and handled situations on my own until Jeremy or someone else arrived. In Parks whenever we heard something happening on the radio, we all headed in that direction to give whatever assistance we could. Jeremy and I did campground patrol together most times though sometimes separately or alone. Cameron was around for advice but we didn’t work together. Gradually I became comfortable and more self reliant. Being a police officer is like riding a motorcycle. It’s easy to relax and enjoy it, but it does require always being vigilant for the unexpected.

Jeremy was three years ahead of me in being a Ranger and about 30 years younger than I am. Mount Diablo was a very competitive place. Jeremy was discounted by some for his supposed lack of skills and polish and as a newbie I didn’t really count for much either.

In fact Jeremy was a very decent man and not a bad Ranger. He was young and sometimes inconsistent. He was brash and certainly lacked polish, but he was a wonderful warm and sincere young man. And he had skills people didn’t see or appreciate. He was the best shot of all of us. He knew how to handle himself in cop judo which we called defensive tactics.

Jeremy had real courage and heart. I never regretted having Jeremy as my patrol partner. He often left me frustrated. He could be lazy, he could take a normal situation and turn it into a mess, and he could be inconsistent in on how he did things. He was out of condition and slow on his feet. When we went searching for people I was the one who went into the bush while he worked the edge.

But in every situation where I needed help, Jeremy was there. When I was in over my head on a medical or searching for someone with a gun, I knew Jeremy was there and he wasn’t going to desert me. We’d succeed together or we’d fail together and when it counted we did what needed doing.

One time we had a serious injury deep in one of the canyons. A woman had been thrown from her horse. Jeremy met me where the paved road stopped and we took off in my car. My Jeep Cherokee was better on the back country roads. We bounced down the badly pitted road into the canyon, crossing the creek over and over. We were going as fast as we could but not so fast we would break the axle. As we bounced along I looked at Jeremy and he was having as much fun as I was. I think Jeremy was the one who said, “I sure hope this lady is OK.”

We did get to her. She was in pain and we packaged her up and met a helicopter that flew her out. She was injured but like all of our patients after Gary, she survived. We did what we needed to do for her.

Jeremy eventually became a supervising Ranger. Working with Jeremy I learned how to handle all sorts of situations. We did the best we could and I learned to come back another day and try again.

After seven years as a Ranger I was tested a few times. I was fortunate; I passed. Most importantly I learned that whatever skills I had would have to do until help arrived. Like most cops I was well trained and required to keep my training current. Every situation was different and I did the best I could and for me that worked. I feel lucky but I also feel satisfied. I did what most of us do, I showed up and gave it my best shot. I retired satisfied. I had passed the test.