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. 

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.

Outdoors

When I 30 years old I felt as if the mountains and the desert were this wonderful world I wanted to explore.  I was on the edge of doing that but I was blocked from going through the door.  How could I get outdoors?  I was looking for the secret door.    What I didn’t know was that I already knew how to go outdoors.  When I was six years old we moved to a house on the northeast side of Burbank two blocks below the Verdugo Hills.  By the time I was 7 or 8 I was joining the other neighborhood kids to go hiking in the hills.  We walked up to Sunset Canyon Drive, went to a break between the reservoir and the houses and crossed into the chaparral.  We never followed any roads or formal trails, we took footpaths made by deer and kids like us.  We went straight up the hill. 

We never made it very far.  Our goal was usually what we called the Big B, a letter of whitewashed rocks maintained by the Burbank High School students that could be seen from the valley below.  The Big B was located on the first ridge of hills before a canyon that divided that ridge from the higher elevation hills behind.  We loved the hills.  It was a place where our imaginations ran wild, where we caught lizards, snakes and horny toads; where we played army, marveled at the tracks of raccoons behind the flood control dam, and threw rocks as far as we could.  . 

When I was 14 I took my sister on a hike and for the first time followed a fire road into the Verdugo Hills.  We made it all the way to the back ridge, an elevation of nearly 3,000 feet.  It was a winter day and white snowflakes were blowing in the cold air.  My younger sister never went hiking with me again.   I was fascinated by this remote world just above Burbank where I could see the ocean to the west and the San Gabriel Mountains to the east and where it snowed. 

It was in the Verdugo Hills that I saw the first bird that really caught my imagination.  It was a Rufous-sided Towhee, a beautiful bird, Robin size, black wings and head, a red and white breast, white markings in its wing and its tail, and bright red eyes.  I remember seeing this Towhee jumping from branch to branch in a bush very near to me and what a treat it was to see this amazing bird.  It was a long time before I learned to see and identify birds and commonly saw birds like the Towhee and other amazing birds wherever I went.  I still remember that first Towhee and being astounded that such a beautiful bird was right there in Burbank. 

My family did almost nothing outdoors.  My father spent most of his free time in his room, reading, smoking cigars, listening to music and studying as he called it.  The furthest outdoors we ever got were trips to the beach and an occasional visit to a city park.

I really didn’t do anything outdoors until I got married.  Cathy’s family did camping trips and picnics in the mountains.  Summers we borrowed her father’s Volkswagen camper van and made trips to her aunt and uncle’s farm in Washington.  We camped along the way.  We went to Charlton Flats in the San Gabriel Mountains for picnics.  We visited the snow during the winter.  But we never got very far away from the car.

I didn’t feel like I would ever get through the door until 1977 when my college roommate, Tony Cole, came over for dinner one night and told us about recent hikes he had done.  He and his father had hiked to the top of Mount San Jacinto, and a peak in Baja California.  I was astounded, someone I knew doing something I only imagined, going to the tops of mountains in the wilderness.  I grilled Tony for how it could be done.  He said it was easy; it only required water and a map.  A few weeks later after Sean’s first communion we had a free afternoon and I took Sean and Ted, 8 and 6, for a walk out of Millard Canyon above Altadena.  We walked up and out of the canyon and on to the Mt. Lowe Road.  We found the door.    

The next week the boys and I returned for our first hike in the mountains.  We hiked out of Millard Canyon and on to the Mt. Lowe Road.  We followed the fire road up past Echo Mountain and further and further into the San Gabriel Mountains.  It seemed like it went on forever.  The boys were game but after miles of going uphill they were ready to quit.  I pleaded with them to go just to the next bend in the road.  Around the bend we saw the Mt. Lowe Campground.  We had made it.  We spent a good hour enjoying our victory.  We explored and enjoyed the view from Inspiration Point.  We were in the outdoors and it had been easy.  I learned the mountains weren’t much different than the Verdugo Hills, just bigger. 

We spent that summer and the next two years hiking any time we could.  The boys were incredibly game.  We peak bagged almost all the peaks between Pasadena and the back ridge, Mount Wilson, Mount Hillyer, South Mount Hawkins, Mount Islip, Mount Throop and many others.  Five thousand feet of elevation gain and 10 mile hikes were our standard.

About that same time on one of our visits to Uncle Warren’s farm I had seen a Great Blue Heron.  This giant bird rose up out of the reeds nearby and flew right past me.  Warren loaned me a bird book to identify birds on the farm.  I was hooked. 

A couple of years after that I felt confident enough to try backpacking in the San Gabriels and then the Sierras.  Then in 1981 I signed up for the Sierra Club Basic Mountaineering Training Class.  It was more backpacking than mountaineering.  The class ended with a winter hike on snowshoes into the High Sierras.  By that time I had already become an avid birdwatcher with nearly 200 birds on my life list.  BMTC gave me confidence that I could survive in the wilderness. 

In 1982 I did a two week solo backpack trip into the Sierras through Kearsarge Pass.  I spent two weeks in the back country around Gardiner Basin at an elevation near 11,000 feet.  After that I frequently went backpacking to the Eastern Sierras and especially Taboose Canyon.  I skipped BMTC the following year and in 1983 I joined BMTC as an assistant instructor.  Our leader was Claude Lane.  Claude was forming a mountaineering team to climb Mount Rainier that summer and he asked me to join. 

The people he asked were all involved in BMTC.  As instructors we taught rock climbing, snow travel, wilderness first aid, snowshoeing and snow travel skills.  We weren’t mountaineers yet but we were getting there.  Under Claude’s leadership we began training as mountaineers.  Our goal, Mount Rainier was beyond anything any of us had ever done. 

As a team we practiced our rock climbing at Stoney Point.  In a wintry March we climbed Mount San Gregornio, 11,000 feet.  It was so cold and windy along the long ridge at the top that the first hill we reached along the ridge we agreed was the high point and we turned around and went back down.  It was a grueling hike.  We saw people coming out of the same snowy wilderness on cross country skis. Snowshoeing is like hitting yourself in the head with a hammer; it feels so good when you stop.  That was the last time I ever went snowshoeing.  I vowed to learn how to cross country ski after that.    

The next month we did the North face of Mount San Jacinto.  It was a nightmare of permits and passes all taken care of by Claude.  He worked like a demon on the project.  We were a banker, a lawyer, a sanitation engineer, a programmer, a plumber, a printer, another lawyer and a couple of others.  There were nine of us, all in our 30s.  We drove out to San Jacinto in the plumbers van, filled with pipes, tools and nuts.  On the way out, I asked this group of people who were avid hikers if anyone personally knew anyone who had made the climb.  No one did.  We camped in the desert at Snow Creek and at 3 a.m. started out for the peak.    

The North Face of San Jacinto is one of the hardest climbs in North America.  It is 10,000 vertical feet in 5 miles.  We bushwhacked and boulder hopped for hours until sunrise when we began to get into the canyon of Snow Creek.  There were hours more rock climbing up the steep creek.  Midway up the creek I slipped off a 20 foot face into the water.  I was told I came out of the ice cold water faster than I went in.  We finally came to the snow on a snow chute up to the top.  On the nearly vertical snowfield we ran into another Sierra Club group from the Sierra Peaks Section.  SPS and BMTC were rivals in the Sierra Club and we referred to them as climbing Nazis.  The rivalry was strong but friendly and people in our party knew people in theirs.  For an hour or two we competed against each other and then we merged. 

I don’t think either party would have made it without the other.  Breaking trail with 18 climbers was easier than doing it with just 9.  Like most mountaineering it was uphill forever, just one foot in front of the other interminably.  The steepness of the snowfield was incredible.  When we put crampons on the ice turned to slush and when we took the crampons off the slush turned to ice.  We switch backed up the snow chute for more than six hours.    

We reached the summit at 10:15 that night, 17 hours after we had started.  I was banged up from my fall and my left Achilles tendon was badly bruised from stiff boots.  We all had our own battle scars but we made it.  Near the top the climb finally leveled out.  We stopped one time to rest for a few minutes.  When we resumed moving we had to wake up two or three members who had fallen asleep.  We finally made it to the top and found shelter in a snow filled hollow just below the summit.    

We had climbed with nothing but the gear we needed and at the summit we bivouacked in what we were wearing and had in our packs.  We slept on rope coils between us and the snow and tried to shelter with plastic garbage bags.  We huddled together for warmth.  It was cold.  Ever since on hot nights when it’s hard to get to sleep I remember how cold it was that night and enjoy the heat.

The actual climb of Mount Rainier two and a half months later was physically easier, psychologically and technically it was new territory but for sheer physical demands, San Jacinto is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life.  The next morning we took the Tram down the mountain. 

After San Jacinto we were ready for Mount Rainier. 

June, 1983 we all flew up to Washington separately and met at the Rainier Lodge.  The next day we went out with one of the approved guides who taught us crevasse rescue.  It was great; we kept dropping into a crevasse and then being rescued.  A glacier from inside is a beautiful thing.  On my turn inside the crevasse I remember thinking that whatever force opened the crevasse could also close it.  I put that thought out of my mind as an unproductive.  We all learned how to set up rope systems to pull someone out.  Of course, in the end, with all these complicated rescue methods, the guide told us, most commonly it was the ‘champagne cork’ method.  Two or three people grabbed the rope and popped the fallen climber out.  It turned out we didn’t use those skills on Rainier but it was good to have them.   

The next day we started out from a trail head on the White River on the north side of the peak.  From the river the trail led us on to the Emmons Glacier.  Mountain climbing is more than anything else just walking uphill and uphill and uphill and then more uphill.  And that’s what we did, with 60 pound packs, wearing crampons we climbed the glacier in rope teams of three.  The path up Emmons was well marked and we followed it.  In the late afternoon we made it to Steamboat Prow.  Steamboat at 9700 feet is a rocky outcrop where Emmons Glacier and Winthrop Glacier come together.  From there it is another 4, 700 feet up to the peak.  Even half way up the view is incredible.  We stayed at Steamboat for the night.   

Most major mountains have accident books, books of things that went wrong on the mountain.  Mountaineers read these books as cautionary tales.  My favorite accident was told to us by Claude.  A climber was cooking at his camp at Steamboat Prow.  He wasn’t roped in, as we didn’t.  The camp site is on a flat piece of ground.  A gust of wind blew the top off his small camp pot.  He reached out to catch it and was never seen again.  I liked the story because it reminded me the mountains are unforgiving and it only takes a moment. 

Claude was our leader and read all the books for us.  In fact Claude did all the planning, getting permits and scheduling, not just for San Jacinto but Rainier as well.  Claude was a mainframe computer person.  It was before everyone had emails but we got printouts with volumes of information every time we met.  He was amazing.  It was his trip and we were fortunate to be his friends and able to come along.  After the Mount San Jacinto trip and before Mount Rainier Claude had an appendicitis attack.  We all went to see him in the hospital.  With his appendix out he immediately began planning to return and climb Rainier with us. 

We appointed Paul Ivonovich our temporary leader but Claude stayed with us and was in charge of everything but the actual climbing. On a mountaineering team the leader has absolute authority.  Like military discipline the agreement is whatever the leader decides everyone else follows without question.  Sometimes there’s no place and time for a discussion on a mountaintop.   We trusted Claude and we trusted Paul who was our second best climber.   Claude came along with us on the trip.  We all assured him that if he wanted to do it, we all would make sure he made it to the top.  He was weakened but determined. 

At Steamboat we managed to go to sleep and the next morning at 3 a.m. we started for the top.  Mount Rainier is 14,410 feet and we had more than 4,000 feet of snow and ice to do.  Most of the climb was just like the hike up to Steamboat, uphill and more uphill, but this time we were over 10,000 feet and it required twice as much effort as below.  At 13,000 feet we came to the bergschrund at the top of the glacier where there is a huge crevasse between the rock of the mountain and the beginning of the glacier.  We walked across a ledge at the top of the glacier where the bergschrund was on one side, a crevasse that looked bottomless and on the other side was the steep side of the glacier with a nearly vertical fall of 2 or 3 thousand feet before it began to level out.  The path was about 2 feet wide, plenty of room to walk, but it took concentration to stay on the path and not think of the fall on either side.    

Mount Rainier was a real challenge.  As Southern Californians it was unlike any mountain we had ever been on.  The biggest challenge was in overcoming the unknown.  As it turned out the bergschrund was the only difficult piece to the climb.  We got past it and walked to the top.  The top of Mount Rainier is a large flat sandy area cleared of snow by the constant wind.  We walked around a bit, enjoyed the view, congratulated each other and waited for the rest of the team to catch up.  Claude made it up last with his rope mates.  He had begun to suffer from altitude sickness and had the beginning of edema.  The cure for edema is to head for lower elevations immediately.  Claude got the best rope team we had and they took off down the mountain as fast as they could go. 

I was left with two climbers who had struggled across the bergschrund.  We came down carefully, not too fast and giving everyone the space, assurance, and time to get past it.  I was pleased with myself.  I was one of the stronger climbers and I had managed to hold my own fears in check.  I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience. 

We all gathered at Steamboat Prow.  We had made it, including Claude.  Everyone was fine.  And then we hiked out, a very long hike down Emmons Glacier and into the woods along the river until finally we reached our cars.  We were completely exhausted and full of elation at our accomplishment.    

For me it was the accomplishment of a lifetime.  I had finally made the varsity.  I had been a strong and supportive member of the team and we had triumphed.  It was as if we had won the championship.  The experience changed my life.   

After the climb I went on to embarrass myself with very heavy drinking, an almost involuntary reaction to being without any booze for over two days and the incredible high of having climbed the mountain.  Remembering the success of the climb and the embarrassment I felt at my drinking were an important piece of my getting sober six months later. 

In December Claude and Ann, Claude’s special friend on the team, got married and had a party to which we were all invited.  I went to the party sober and it felt great. 

After that I made numerous solo backpacking trips.  I had become a real outdoorsman and I had a growing reputation among my friends as someone who could show them the wonders of the mountains and deserts.  I led hikes, took friends hiking in the San Gabriels and the Sierras.  In 1989 I joined a group with professional guides and climbed Mount Baker, near Bellingham. In 1992 while cross country skiing in the San Gabriel Mountains I met Steve and we formed our own back country partnership.  Later that year in April we skied to the top of Kearsarge Pass at 11,000 feet in the Sierras, and back down. 

So in 2005 when I started the Ranger Academy at Asilomar I had been outdoors for almost 30 years.  One of our instructors in the beginning of the course told us “We’re going to teach you how to be cops.  All of you are already Rangers or you wouldn’t be here.”   In my case, I knew that was true.  It was true for my classmates as well.  

Photo Mt. San Jacinto:  http://www.traditionalmountaineering.org/Photos_SnowCreekRoute_sm.htm

Photo Mt. Rainier: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Mount_Rainier_from_southwest.jpg

Becoming a Ranger

In 1999 I quit banking after nearly 30 years.  Enough already.  I took a year off to see what would happen and within a month writing happened.  Essentially I acknowledged what I really wanted to do and tried it, as I’ve done again now in retirement.  I wrote regularly for a year.  I wrote short stories mostly and posted them on Zoetrope.  I think they’re good but they’re not good enough.  I sent some off, I got good reactions, but not great but as a writer I learned a lot that year.  At the end of the year I went looking for work and in 2001 I had the good fortune of getting a job as an on call counselor at San Francisco Juvenile Hall. 

On call counselor is a part time position , no benefits, where I could work no more than 1096 hours or six months in any twelve month period.  As I’ve learned it is the normal first step to becoming fully employed in the public sector.  At Juvy the pattern for people who became full time counselors was to work the hours as six months straight and then be taken on as a provisional counselor, benefits but not full civil service protection.  The transition was accomplished by staying under the radar and becoming provisional because you worked more than 1096 hours and personnel didn’t stop it. 

I made the mistake of pointing out to a supervisor that I was close to my 1096 hours.  That week I was laid off along three other counselors.  I collected unemployment and the thought occurred to me I should at least look for other employment even though I was assured I would be rehired at Juvy either full time or brought back as an on call the next year.  So one morning while surfing the internet, I asked myself what I wanted to be when I grew up?

Park Ranger!  I went online and quickly found California State Parks.  They listed Park Ranger as an open position for which they were taking applications.  I could apply online.  So I did.  Two or three weeks a notification of the test came.  It was in February.  In November I was rehired by Juvenile Hall as a full time counselor along with three others who had been laid off.  Within a couple of months I was enrolled in the POST course for Juvenile Corrections Officers.  In the jargon of law enforcement, counselors are badged peace officers, but not sworn, that is they don’t carry weapons and they don’t have full powers of arrest.     

I was actually still in training when I went to take the State Parks Ranger test in February at Half Moon Bay.  A Ranger from the local State Park was there.  To my surprise he was wearing a large sidearm.   I had no idea State Park Rangers were armed and that’s when I learned Rangers are full fledged police officers with police academy training and the same powers as a Highway Patrolman or any municipal police officer. 

I struggled with the idea of being a cop with a gun but from my experience at Juvy working with police officers and asking myself how I really felt about it, I realized I really wanted to be a police officer.  I had wanted to be a police officer since I was five years old.  In daily practice I’m mostly a pacifist.  But I knew from juvenile hall that I could subdue kids when I needed to.  As a twenty year old facing the draft I had asked myself if I was a conscientious objector.  I really searched my conscience and the answer was no.  I believed armed force was sometimes necessary, in wars of defense or protecting the innocent, and the same held for police officers.  I knew then and I know now, that under the right circumstances I am willing to take a human life to save lives. 

I daydreamed of being a Park Ranger and a police officer and it became very attractive to me.  I couldn’t believe State Parks had no age limit for Rangers.  They thought that even though I was 56 years, that was just fine. 

In State Parks all superintendents are peace officers and one career path in State Parks is to work one's way up through maintenance to Maintenance Chief and then go through the Academy, become a peace officer and a superintendent.  So Parks had experience with people going through the Academy when they were well into middle age.  Many senior superintendents in park management had followed just that career path. 

Even though I really wanted to be a police officer and a Ranger I told myself I would just stay with it through the agility test as a challenge.  After all I really was 57 years old.  The agility test required normal good physical condition which most of my adult life I had maintained into my 50s with running and cycling.  In training I injured my left shoulder and worried about trying to carrying weights while running in one of the tests.  In June, 2003 my shoulder had healed enough that I did barely pass that test.  As I was doing the step test I realized in my training I had trained wrong and I ended up struggling through that test.  The rest of the test was relatively easy.  At the end we had to dive in a pool fully clothed, retrieve something from the bottom, and swim to the far side.  After passing everything else the dip in the pool was refreshing.  Lots of people didn’t pass the test and I felt 10 feet tall among all those 20 and 30 somethings.  I passed!

In December I went ahead and met with a retired Ranger who did the background check and in February of 2004 I took the pysch test.  As San Francisco had done the State asked about my experience in the service but instead of a short conversation and passing me as the psychologist for the City  had done, the State wanted my service medical records.  I was devastated.  I thought that was their bureaucratic way of getting rid of me.  No, a personnel clerk told me, I could send off and have my service records sent to the State.  So I did, but I wrote off becoming a Ranger.  I settled into Juvenile Hall and adjusted my thinking that I would stay there until retirement.  I even became a union steward. 

In August, two years after I had first applied, State Parks asked me to meet with a psychologist who by coincidence also contracted with San Francisco Juvenile Hall.  He was very interested in my experience on unit B4 with the 17 year olds, and then he passed me.  I didn’t hear anything from the State but in December I got a panicky phone call that said my background check was expired and could I quickly meet with an investigator and if I passed it again, could I attend a class starting January 2^nd in three weeks time?  

I couldn’t believe I was crazy enough to consider going to a Police Academy at the age of 58.  Then I happened to pick up Lance Armstrong’s biography and the message I got was, Go For It!  So I did.  I got notification that I passed the background two days before Christmas.  I spent the next week trying to get together the uniforms I needed and January 1^st, 2005 I l drove to Pacific Grove near Monterey and the California State Parks Ranger Academy.  

Three Wives

Cathy

When I first met Cathy, she was just gorgeous.  What an exciting young woman she was.  She was obviously smart, a bit zany, and had her feet firmly on the ground.  It was in 1966 and we still weren’t quite out of the thin tie 50’s mentality, but Cathy was at the vanguard of the 60’s.  My hair was short and my shirts were buttoned down.  Cathy was already on her own track.  She wore long dresses she made herself, wore her hair long and expressed herself freely.  She was an artist and loved books and movies.  She worked at Penny’s part time, was going to Mount St. Mary’s on a scholarship and came from a working class family.  She did all the cooking for her family and was a great cook.

I had never met anyone like her and she was crazy about me right from the start.  We were both out there, but we didn’t realize we were both pretty conservative.  Neither one of us used drugs.  I smoked marijuana maybe two or three times before I joined the service and I don’t think Cathy smoked her first joint until many years later.  Our friends were the artists of Loyola and some were smoking pot and using LSD but we were high on each other and high on life. 

Within a month or two I told her I loved her, which was quite true, and she loved me.  We were inseparable, a couple in the circle of friends I had at Loyola and with her family and their friends in the parish at St. Anthony’s in El Segundo. 

We were both working class Catholic.  Cathy’s parents were Midwest Germans and not that different than my Irish father and Ozark mother.  Both our fathers were in the aircraft business, doing almost the same job.

Being Catholic and from the backgrounds we were we didn’t talk about sex or our relationship.  We groped each other and made out until our hormones screamed, but our background and attitudes held us back from “going all the way.”  It was a different time and that was our culture.  It seems strange now, but it was pretty normal in our world.  The only thing to do was to get married. 

In May I asked her to marry me about the same time a classmate of mine from grammar school was killed in Vietnam.   So I went in the Air Force to avoid the draft.  When I got orders for England I came home on leave and married Cathy.  It was a great wedding, a quickly arranged event with family and friends pitching in.  Everyone was there, her parish friends and her parents’ friends, my childhood friends and family and all of our friends from college. 

It was a wonderful celebration and we had a wonderful honeymoon.  We drove to San Francisco and spent a week there exploring the City and mostly staying in our motel room.  We couldn’t have been happier.     

Our marriage was destroyed by our inability to talk about what was important, to be honest with each other and to face the disappointment of reality together.  It was also handicapped by alcoholism. 

We had a respite in the anguish of trying to live together when we joined Marriage Encounter in 1973 or 1974.  We renewed our intimacy and worked hard at being a couple.  Unfortunately Marriage Encounter didn’t address our two issues, alcoholism and true forgiveness.  Ten years later our marriage broke up on those rocks and we separated and then divorced. 

Susan

In July, 1994, I was introduced to Susan by Kathy Kenney, a woman I had met a couple of years earlier through work.  I was trying to recruit members of a work committee to form a Community Development Corporation.  The Federal Reserve Bank people told me I should meet Kathy Kenney in San Francisco.  She worked on the same things up there and they said she could advise me on contacts and people she had met in LA.  Kathy and I became friends.  Kathy was married and I think was a natural matchmaker.  

I had recently broken up with a beautiful but crazy woman in LA and I was getting tired of the roller coaster ride of the women I seemed to pick for myself.  The women I was most attracted to all seemed to be beautiful, intelligent and crazy.  I told my friends like Kathy that I was open to the idea of blind dates.  I had more confidence in my friends to pick good matches than I did in myself.

Kathy and another woman, Jan, took the charge seriously and did just that.  Jan’s friend was a wonderful woman but unfortunately not much attraction there.  And Kathy insisted I come north to meet a friend of hers, a work friend, who was just the right woman for me.   

Before I came up to San Francisco she warned me that Susan was the daughter of Rita, an LA City Councilmember and a former President of the School Board.  I had met Rita a few times and certainly knew about her, but I didn’t know her personally and I don't think before dating Susan I ever showed up on her radar.  

To me it made Susan all that more interesting.  I went up to San Francisco to a dinner party at Kathy's house.  Susan was there along with some other guests.  She is a Cal grad.  She had come up to San Francisco to go to school and stayed in the Bay Area and ended up working for Willie Brown when he was the Speaker of the Assembly.  She was political but outside her mother’s shadow.  I respected that; Susan was making it on her own. 

She had been involved in a number of issues and especially disabilities.  She knew Kathy through Kathy’s husband David who ran a nonprofit that served the deaf community.  Susan was in charge of disability services for Pacific Bell and on David’s board.  The phone company was under legislative mandate to provide services to the disabled and Susan’s job was to meet the mandate. 

My job was also based on a government mandate and while we didn’t work with the same groups, our worlds were overlapping.  We had a lot in common. 

She was an attractive woman, 36 when I met her, short like her mother with a manner and style that was strong and forceful, but she was charming at the dinner party and we agreed to meet again.   

She went on vacation to the Caribbean and our first date was in September.  I planned the perfect date, afternoon tea in the tea room at the Biltmore Hotel downtown and then dinner at La Serenata de Garibaldi, an elegant gourmet restaurant Mexico City style.   La Serenata was closed and we ended up at a very good Thai restaurant in Santa Monica, a favorite of a previous girlfriend.  Afterwards I took her back to her mother’s apartment on Bunker Hill and we stopped at the Water Court of one of the new towers and watched the water show, something new at that time.  We talked and told each other about ourselves.  It was a wonderful date and she was an interesting and solid young woman. 

Our next date was in San Francisco.  Susan’s considered herself a bit of a wanton woman, so when we got to her house we jumped in the sack immediately.  Unfortunately, I didn’t find Susan all that attractive, I’m not sure why, but I was able to get past it.  She was sincere but it all seemed very mechanical and forced.  It got better and Susan was a wonderful companion. 

After a few commuting dates back and forth, we decided I would move up to Mill Valley where Susan had a beautiful home on the side of Mount Tamalpais above Boyle Park.  Susan was interesting.  She was successful, doing very well at the Phone Company and sure of herself.  I could see why Kathy thought we were a good match. 

San Francisco was exciting.  I loved the City and the East Bay.  Marin and Mill Valley were beautiful but my fantasy of being Irish working class kept me from enjoying it.  But in a place where I didn’t fit in I had to admit, it was an incredibly beautiful spot.  Mill Valley is this once small town nestled among the redwoods on the south side of Mount Tam.  It had become a place for successful writers, lawyers and doctors.  For people from the City it was a place to visit on weekends and stroll the shops and galleries.  For me it was too expensive and too self consciously cool.

A year after we met, I proposed to her and in April of 1996 we were married.  I should have had some second thoughts along the way but I didn’t.  All of our friends thought it was a good idea.  Susan’s family liked it.  I liked them.  It seemed to make sense.  Susan’s lack of punctuality, she could leave me waiting for hours, her long work hours, and her inflexibility were all there, but she was a good person and she sincerely tried.  It seemed like we could do OK together. 

So what went wrong?  I think we set each other as a low priority.  We were busy leading our own lives and the other person either wasn’t cooperating or didn’t meet our expectations.  I became more and more irritated by Susan’s disregard for me and expectations that I would cook, clean and fold her laundry. 

In 2004 we found it easier to live apart, Susan in LA and me in the Bay Area.  Our excuse was our jobs, but it really was better for our relationship.  A long distance relationship where we only got together one week a month was better than living together. 

That changed in 2007 when Susan moved back in with me in my house in Mount Diablo State Park.   After a few months back together it was apparent we didn't like each other very much.  When my long smoldering friendship with Suzette turned into an affair, it seemed like it was time to face the music with Susan.  We separated in September, 2007 and divorced in June, 2008. 

Suzette

Suzette and I got married April 7, 2012.  We had been living together since July, 2009, nearly three years, we had been in a relationship since 2007, five years, and we had known each other since 2001, eleven years. 

Suzette and I first met 11 years ago when we both worked at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  Suzette was 28 years old.  It was two years after she graduated from Cal.  She had a son, Arom, born in 1995 and was in a relationship with John his father.  They lived in Albany.  

We became lunch buddies.  She is and was a beautiful young woman, bright and full of life.  I enjoyed her youth, her humor, and her warmth.  After I left CCC we remained friends and every so often we would get together for lunch.  The first few times I told my wife but after that it didn’t seem quite appropriate to still be meeting a beautiful young woman for lunch long after we had worked together. 

When Susan and my marriage evolved into living in separate cities, Suzette and I got together more regularly for lunch.  Suzette emailed me to get together one time when Susan was going to be in the Bay Area.  I said in my reply that with Susan in the picture it was difficult to schedule lunch sometimes.  At the mere mention of Susan, I didn’t hear from Suzette for a year and a half.  I had broken the unspoken rule, neither one of us ever talked about our partners.  

Susan moved back up to the Bay Area and that wasn’t going very well when I received an email from Suzette.  When I hadn't heard from her for so long, I had guessed that maybe there was more to our friendship than what we admitted to ourselves.  In my reply to Suzette’s invitation to get together I said something about it.  In return I received a very surprising love poem.  And our affair caught fire.  We both had grown up Catholic so even a torrid affair took a couple of meetings before we held hands.  After all we had been friends for six years with feelings we never acknowledged and in all that time we never touched. 

By this time in my marriage Susan and I were mostly angry at each other.  I didn’t feel I was risking anything I would miss if I was discovered.  In July I told Susan I wanted to end our relationship.  She asked me if there was another woman.

As strong as my feelings were for Suzette at the time, in my own mind I wasn’t leaving Susan for Suzette.  My excitement about Suzette just told me it was time.  I wanted to end my relationship with Susan and Suzette gave me the energy and the immediate reason to do it.  So I said, “No.” 

Susan had been reading my emails and called me on it.  We separated in September when she could move back to her house in Mill Valley and we divorced in June of 2008.  Suzette and I kissed for the first time a month after Susan moved out; it was a memorable kiss.  I knew Suzette was a tease and it seemed that our friendship had an element of the dance of the seven veils to it.  

In October Suzette finally told her partner John there was someone else and he moved out in December. She told me it was something she had wanted to do for a long time.  Suzette did not tell her son about our relationship.  After that it seemed like we were still having an affair, only now we were keeping it a secret from Arom.   We never got into a normal dating relationship.  It was much more tenuous than that for over a year and as time passed she got more and more distant. 

And then in March of 2009 she told me she was pregnant and she wanted to keep the baby.  Shortly after that we went through a difficult four weeks while we waited to learn if our baby had Down’s syndrome.  She didn’t.  Suzette agreed to move to Angel Island to live with me.  Just before the move in July she told her son Arom they were moving to Angel Island and that she was pregnant.  At 14 Arom was not happy at all and in the coming year he did his best to make me pay for it.  I understood that. 

Suzette and I had planned to get married in August before the baby came.  But when the time got close things were too crazy and Suzette was overly stressed.  We postponed the wedding and concentrated on getting ready for the baby.    

Paloma was born October 12, 2009, I had a heart attack, May, 2010, and Arom moved to Florida to be with his dad in September, 2010. 

In April, 2011 we moved off the island to Oakland and in November I retired.  Living without Arom acting out around us made our relationship easier. And moving off the island made it even more so.  Wherever we went I introduced Suzette as my wife, including at the church we began attending, the Unitarian Church of Berkeley. 

I went to Kaiser one day for an appointment and they asked me if my spouse had health insurance.  I began filling out a form with the clerk with information about Suzette.  I said I needed to call her to get her employer’s address and her social security number.  As I was calling I remembered Suzette and I weren’t married.  I laughed at myself and thought I should fix that.  I went home to tell Suzette.  For some reason that afternoon she wasn’t talking to me. 

A month later I asked her to marry me.   We were married April, 2012.