Cathy

She calls herself Kate now.  When I first met her she was Cathy, Cathy Bruemmer.  I thought it was Brenner, an Irish girl, and quickly learned it was Bruemmer and she was German.  The e is an anglicized addition, an attempt to get Americans to pronounce Brümmer with an umlaut over the u.  Or maybe it was just how an Ellis Island Immigration official, probably Irish, spells an umlaut u when he first hears it. 

Her parents were Midwestern Germans, her father Catholic from Illinois and her mother a convert from Nebraska, solid hard working people, though her father had a subtle and delightful silly streak.  He didn’t work that hard when he was being paid but he liked his own projects.  He built an airplane once and flew it until he crashed it.  He enjoyed life in a German way.  Her mother, the stiffer spine in the family softened with a little Thunderbird wine in the evening, was a ranch raised girl who had come to the big city during World War II.  Wilbert was 4F and stayed home which gave him a great advantage with beautiful women, an advantage I don't think he usually had.  Minnie was not only strong willed and hard working; she was good looking too.   

Cathy Bruemmer was one of a kind.  Her parents lived in a cracker box house facing the quiet streets of El Segundo, but the back wall thinly divided their home from Imperial Highway and the runways of LAX.  Cathy was a free spirit.  When I first met her, she was wearing one of her long dresses that she made for herself, I think it was green with a garish print.  We had just come out of the 50’s, her father drove a Ford Falcon station wagon,but she was well into the 60’s, ahead of the rest of us.  She was attending Mount Saint Mary’s College on a scholarship and worked in the fabric department at Penny’s where her mother also worked. 

She did all the cooking for her family.  Her father didn’t like onions or spicy food of any kind as he defined it.  It was after we were married that she bought her first garlic.  But within the confines of her family, she cooked and baked wonderfully, fried chicken, mashed potatoes, and German chocolate cakes.  After we were married and her imagination was free to concoct anything she wanted including onions, garlic and even occasionally olive oil, she was a great cook, though her food, Italian, Russian, Chinese or French always had a faintly Midwestern German subtext.   

She was excited about movies, literature, and art.  She was a free spirit.  She was in trouble with the administrators at Mount Saint Mary’s; they knew the long dresses were a sign of rebellion.  Essentially she was a good kid.  She had been 5’7” in the third grade and all of 80 pounds and it was only now in her freshman year of college that she was growing into her own height with hips and small sexy breasts.  She was really quite pretty but she didn’t know it.  I don’t think she’d ever really been kissed yet, never had a boyfriend, and didn’t do drugs. 

Many years later she liked to drink white wine with ice cubes and to smoke pot before she had sex though she could do just as well on a couple of margaritas.  She was still outspoken and still a little naïve.  She was working as a teacher at a Catholic high school in Santa Fe Springs.  A co-worker had been disciplined unjustly and in the lunchroom one day Cathy said, loud enough to be heard, “That’s why we should have a union.”  She was fired the next day. 

I fell in love and in lust with her at first sight.  A week later when we got together we made out until our brains nearly fell out and groped each other virginally.  We were Catholic and had grown up that way.  We were well suited to each other.  We were excited about each other but we didn’t know what to do with it and in fact didn’t make love until our wedding night, which we did wonderfully, after two years of Catholic foreplay. 

I think I was the first man, very young man, to appreciate her and she was beautiful, beautiful long legs and a lithesome body.  She was always envious of women who were fuller in the chest, but I thought she was wonderfully shaped.  She looked like a girl to me.  She had an inept grace about her.  She reminded me of a young and clumsy gazelle, who could jump beautifully into the air and stumble a moment later on her long legs. 

We were inseparable from shortly after we met.  Her family welcomed me and we did our college friends together.  I had become part of the literary and artistic circle at Loyola and I think Cathy found my friends very exciting.  We did her large circle of family friends together.  She was exciting intellectually, a voracious reader like myself, and though her family were working class Republicans, she was becoming a liberal Democrat. 

The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution was passed in 1964.  It authorized President Johnson to execute the Vietnam War but it really didn’t become an overriding consideration for college students until 1966 when Cathy and I met.  I received a IA draft status.  IA, one 'A' as we said it, meant you go next.  A grammar school friend of mine was killed in the DMZ in May, 1967, and I decided for Cathy and me that I would join the Air Force and hope I could avoid the fate of a draftee in the jungles of Vietnam. 

In the summer of 1967 I went off to Basic Training and then technical training at Keesler AFB in Mississippi.  In April the following year at the end of training I received orders along with the rest of my class to go to England.  I had been an English major.  Cathy was a history major.  I went home and we got married.  I was home a couple of weeks before the wedding could be put together and finally we enjoyed on our wedding night what we had put off so long and a honeymoon drive to San Francisco. 

At Christmas time in Mississippi I had been invited to bed by a young woman named Charlene and being a virgin I didn’t know how to say no.  For a couple of weeks Charlene and I made the beast with two backs badly and then life went on.  Stupidly in a very drunken moment, I chose to tell Cathy about this liaison the night before I left for England. 

I know it was devastating, but she struggled through it and joined me in England a month later.  We didn’t talk about it and never worked through it.  I think it was always a smoldering resentment that Cathy had against me for the rest of our marriage.  We conceived Sean during our first summer.  We both loved England and we did OK together.  There were resentments and struggles but nothing terrible. 

We lived offbase in the town of Bedford.  After a couple of years, a gypsy came to the door one day and Cathy invited her in.  Cathy told me about it when I got home.  The Gypsy predicted my promotion to Staff Sergeant and something about us which Cathy wouldn’t reveal.  I always had the feeling that the Gypsy predicted we wouldn’t last as a couple and that Cathy believed her.  It seemed after the Gypsy that as hard as we might try our marriage was always doomed. 

We had a hard time while I went to UCLA and she stayed at home with our two sons.  We struggled in our rented house when I got a job at Bank of America.  I think I have a normal libido and like most men I would love to enjoy most of the attractive women I see.  I am also a bit of puritan and even today I don’t have the energy or flexible conscious enough to cheat, not that it doesn’t seem attractive sometimes, but just that it’s too much trouble.    

Having gotten married at 21 with very little experience prior to that, I did wonder what it was like on the other side of the fence and as Jimmy Carter would say, I wasn’t faithful in my thoughts, but for the most part I acted faithfully. 

Cathy had her faults.  She was a terrible spendthrift, she was always buying something that saved us hundred of dollars that we didn’t have the money to afford.  She could be obnoxious and abrasive.  And together we probably drank too much.  But overall we did as well as most couples do and potentially probably could have stayed married for a lifetime. 

Unfortunately our minds didn’t go that way.  By the 1980s we seemed to hate each other.  Whatever either one of us did seemed to be against the other.  We came from an old view of relationships, husband working, wife at home, and that didn’t work well post-feminism.  I thought Cathy took advantage of me and I was stuck on a treadmill and I’m sure she found me limiting and critical of the new life she was trying to lead, a new life she had always been trying to lead.  And what I thought of as the curse of the gypsy hung over us.  My marriage in tatters, frustrated I looked elsewhere and found one woman who would sleep with me once and others who might.  I was no longer even trying to be faithful. 

Cathy graduated from Cal State LA and I think she felt empowered and limited in the roles we set for each other.  Finally in 1983 we separated and in the following year divorced. 

I’ve never regretted divorcing Cathy, now Kate.  She’s a good person and tries hard but even today 30 years later we only accommodate each other as friends.  I find her naturally abrasive.  I love her and I care about her, she’s the mother of my three sons, and today she is like a sister that I’m not really that close to.  Without our history we might not be friends at all. 

It makes me feel bad.  She was so beautiful and so exciting when she was 18, I wonder what happened to the girl I loved and regret my part in making her at all bitter.  Alcohol played a large part in it.  I’m of the school that accounts the downward spiral of alcoholism almost inevitable until one is given the grace to leave it. 

It is a sad thing.  I wish I had been able to give my boys a stable home life until they were 18.  I wish that I myself had been able to have a stable middle class existence, enjoying the warmth of a home and roots, instead of the searching rootlessness that was my 40’s and even 50’s.  

But life goes on and I’m here and I’m not there, and I prefer it this way.  

After the Divorce

Cathy and I separated in November, 1983.  I went off to live with my parents and she stayed in the house we had bought three years earlier.  Shortly after I left home Loyola High School decided to expel Sean, our eldest son.  Sean had been caught with marijuana at a football game.  Loyola had zero tolerance for drugs supposedly.  It was a hard time for all of us.  As soon as they started the process we did everything we could to fight it.  I moved back into the house and spent all of my free time getting letters of recommendation together for Sean.  It didn’t make any difference.  Sean in his first three weeks of Loyola with a full scholarship was thrown out.  It was devastating for all of us. 

When it was over I returned to living with my parents in Burbank and Cathy got Sean enrolled at Providence High School in Burbank.  Cathy and I were angry at each other.  Sean took everything on himself and struggled at Providence.  He was exceptionally bright and he did his best to shock and dismay his teachers.  An English teacher gave a lecture on writing to get the attention of the reader.  Sean wrote a suicide note.  He said it got her attention.  Ted had started swimming the year before and his days consisted of going to school and then swimming practice for hours.  His weekends he spent at swim meets.  He spent more time with his team and his coach than he did anywhere else. 

Benjamin the athlete spent more time at his baseball coach’s house than he did at home.  The baseball coach had a son about Ben’s age and Ben found a safe haven there.  Cathy and I seemed to be buried in our own pain and I don’t think either one of us was there for the kids at the beginning of our separation and then divorce. 

In December I stopped drinking and began attending AA meetings.  In January I began a writing class at UCLA Extension.  Separating from Cathy after having been married since I was 21, I began my long postponed bachelorhood.  I was desperate for companionship but not very good at it.  In the new year Cathy met someone and I took care of the kids.  Many weekends I just moved into the house and stayed with them.  Ben, Ted and I began to establish our relationship now that I wasn’t living with them.  Sean was out on his own, as wild as he could be with a wild set of friends.  I barely ever saw him.  Sean was obviously very angry at me.  The other boys seem to adjust to the new reality. 

Cathy and I did the lawyer thing.  I had my good friend Hu Sommers take care of me.  Hu made sure Cathy and I both got a fair deal.  He front end loaded my obligations and when I asked him why I had no money, he asked me what was I going to spend it on? 

I continued working at City National Bank and Cathy was teaching at Immaculate Heart High School in Hollywood.

 It took me until May to establish a real relationship with someone.  Not to my surprise, but it was ironic, Cindy was much like Cathy.  She was president of the local parish mother’s club, a legal secretary at a small firm; she had an 11 year old son and lived in a home she rented in the neighborhood she had grown up in in West LA. 

I dated Cindy for about eight months and then went on to another girlfriend, which became my pattern for the next 10 years or more.  I wasn’t ready to get married to a woman very similar to my ex-wife within just a year of separating, but of all the women I dated Cindy was probably the one I should have married.      

In August of 1984 I moved out of my parents and into the back house of a friend a few blocks away from where the boys and Cathy lived.  I left City National Bank and began working for Dai-Ichi Kangyo Bank.  

Cathy and I had worked out our bitterness using lawyers for awhile but that played out and we settled into a relationship where I paid child support, alimony and car payments.  I was broke but as Hu said, it didn’t do me any harm.  We never formalized visitation rights over the boys thank god.  I saw them when I wanted to, took them places, attended Ted’s swim meets and stayed with them when she was away.  After the initial accusations of being a poor husband and a poor father, Cathy didn’t stand in the way of my seeing my sons at all and until Benjamin graduated from high school I lived nearby and actively participated in their lives. 

It took me awhile to get started in AA.  At first I attended meetings once a week and I stayed pretty much on my own, but I was lucky to find a good sponsor and after the first three months got more involved in AA and even found a home meeting in South Pasadena.  A home meeting in AA is a meeting that one goes to regularly.  I showed up and I began participating, pouring coffee, cleaning up, getting to know people.  We met in the South Pasadena Women’s Club. 

I participated actively in that group and attended other meetings in the Pasadena area.  I got to know people and to be known.  I celebrated my first year of sobriety at the South Pasadena Women’s Club and many birthdays thereafter.  Eventually I became the secretary of the first meeting, the pre-meeting and then the second meeting.  The secretary isn’t really the person in charge.  They help to find the speakers and they lead the meeting.  The South Pasadena Women’s Club meeting had a small informal steering committee, all men, who met for breakfast on Thursday mornings at the Green Street Café.  I became a member of that group.  The AA group had an official name besides The Women’s Club, but most of us didn’t know what it was.  We just called it The Women’s Club.    

Making things equal the Crown City Meeting on Friday nights had an informal group of women who ran that meeting.  Somewhere along the way I became secretary of that meeting for a while too. 

At work I used to laugh to myself that these Japanese bankers, American businessmen and lawyers that I was often stuck in meetings with had no idea that I was the head drunk for San Marino/South Pasadena for awhile.  Of course, I knew leadership in AA wasn’t like other places, much more amorphous and all about service, not prestige, but it was fun to think about. 

At the bank in 1987 I was promoted to vice president.  In 1984 I started driving Ted to Loyola High School every morning and did until he graduated in 1989 when I started driving Ben to Loyola every morning. 

Sean was asked not to come back to Providence after his first year.  He started Eagle Rock High School.  At Eagle Rock he was more a truant than a student.  He’d bought a car on his own before he was 16 and hid it in the neighborhood which I found out about.  He was a punker and ran with a crowd that was as lost as he was.  At one point he moved in with me, but then he started stealing from me.  Since then Sean has proved himself to be scrupulously honest.  I suspect at the time he thought of it as borrowing from me.  If he did, he owes me $10.  I was probably too scrupulous and intolerant at the time and I dropped him off in Glendale to fend for himself, which he did. 

I began doing well at work.  I figured out how to be single and have a social life.  As Spalding Gray said, being a straight single man in my late 30s with a job, it wasn’t that hard.  I dated women in AA and women I met at work or in classes.

In 1986 I met Lisa Levine.  She was a beautiful woman and very smart.  She had two daughters, a girl 11 and another three years old.  It was a stormy relationship for the next three years.  Sara, the youngest daughter made my life impossible around Lisa.  Lisa herself had some strange traits, but we tried to make it work.  We broke up and then got back together.  In 1988 we bought a house together and I thought if I just settle down this will work.  After a year together I realized I didn’t want to marry someone with whom I was just going to be unhappy in the end and we broke up.  She moved out and I kept the house. 

A couple of years later I found myself deeply involved with Judith Barnes, a strikingly beautiful woman and again extraordinarily bright, but also very neurotic.  She was a victim of childhood sexual abuse and was recovering but life was not easy for her.  I was very attracted to her and loved her, but life with her wasn’t easy and it didn’t look like we would ever have a normal life together.  In 1992 in one of my rare manic episodes I broke up with her, which probably was for the best. 

During this period Benjamin started to Loyola High School.  He started as an athlete but didn’t like his baseball coach and dropped out.  Later he became an adequate swimmer on the water polo team, but his athleticism didn’t go very far in high school.    He was his own character.  I learned later he had been the LSD and marijuana dealer for his classmates in his final year or two.  His mother found marijuana in his drawer one time and I went through a charade of being shocked with her.  I did want him to know that being a pothead wasn’t a good way to go through life.  He was very active in Alateens. 

In this same period, Benjamin began to develop a reputation as being a very original character and someone with a lot of talent.  He won a full scholarship dedicated to a young man, an original, who had died in an auto accident.  In his last year in high school he took a photography class.  He made a short film that was remarkable for its tone and lighting.  These were the first signs of Benjamin’s talent as a first class photographer and an artist, a skill he has developed.   

It was ironic that Benjamin also became an alcoholic and addict.  Ted stopped drinking at 15.  Sean stopped at 28 or so and Benjamin kept going until he was 35. 

Ted finished high school and went on to UC Santa Cruz.  It seemed an odd choice for Ted who by the time he finished high school was an outstanding athlete in water polo, buttoned down, very conservative appearance, though gratefully not in his politics, and very sober.  He struggled for three years at Santa Cruz, loved it, dropped out after his third year and returned to school to graduate in 1994.  He taught high school and then went through a personal crisis and left for Japan to teach English.  After two years in Nagoya, he went to Saudi Arabia for a year and then returned home.  He paid off his student loans.    

He met a girl in Santa Cruz, married her and started graduate school.  Seven years later he earned his PhD in political science from the University of Oregon.  Somewhere between struggling with everything in his undergrad days at Santa Cruz and graduating from Oregon he became an academic.  He was always a scholar but it took him a long time to focus it and to learn to work it, but he is an outstanding scholar.

Ted and I never really got along very well.  That’s even been true sometimes until recently.  Ted and I, I think are too much alike.  We had terrible arguments when he was in high school and seemed to hurt each other’s feelings easily, something I was more responsible for than him but something it didn’t seem I could prevent.  He was an incredible youngster, very intense, very interesting.  We weren’t really very good friends when he went to college, but over the years, as with my other sons, we have built a very warm and enjoyable relationship. 

Sean was the wild child.  He was on his own from 15 on.  He lived on the street, then with a group of friends.  He was a character.  There was an article about him in my UCLA alumni magazine, a child of the 90s written by a sociology professor.  At that time Sean at 19 was the night manager of Del Monico’s pizza parlor in Hollywood, drove a 1959 Ford Fairlane and the night he spent with the young professor, the car only ran in reverse, and with that he gave the professor a tour of Hollywood after midnight.  Sean was involved in the punk scene and by extension in fashion, music, art, and clothes.  Sean has incredible charisma and he was always a remarkable participant in whatever he did. 

Shortly after he was 18 I went to see him.  We planned to have lunch.  I think he invited me.  We had not been able to talk at all through his teen years but something happened in that visit and we became friends, a friendship that has continued and developed for over twenty years now.  He started modeling in LA and then got on a plane and went to Paris.  He stayed there three years and did very well.  His drinking and whatever else he did didn’t help but he was a wild child within bounds. 

He came home and started working in the movie business, a gopher, then a grunt and eventually learning most of the trades.  Sean is a good carpenter, a good mechanic and can figure almost anything out.  My three sons have extraordinary minds.  Ben is an artist of the first rank coming very much into his own now.  Ted is an extraordinary scholar and thinker.

I am fortunate that all my sons are admirable in their own particular ways.

I went to visit Sean when he was in Paris.  Sean walked down the streets and people knew him, French, British and Americans.  He cut a unique figure even in Paris.  He did well as a model but burned out toward the end.  When I visited him he had been in France for a couple of years and spoke French easily.      

I had this great stay with Sean and his girlfriend Lindsay in a fifth floor walkup apartment in Le Marais, the third arrondisement in Paris, right in the heart of Paris.  I brought a bicycle from home and Sean let me ride his Yamaha 175.  I got around Paris and began my day with café au lait and croissant in La Pierre du Marais.  I read my International Herald Tribune and enjoyed the best coffee in the world. 

I met Sean’s friends, he had many, and we went to lunch and dinner in incredible places.  I learned about Paris.  I became very jealous of Sean’s ability to speak French which he did with ease.  Sean who was 24 at the time and full of advice and worldly wisdom, told me if I wanted to speak Spanish, I should go home and speak Spanish to everyone who could. 

After my two weeks, I went home and took Sean’s advice.  I bought tapes for my car and began speaking Spanish to everyone I thought might respond.  It was great.  I began learning to speak Spanish.  I started going to Tijuana once a month to practice and rented a hotel room west of downtown.  I quickly learned that Tijuana is a wonderful town with museums and coffee shops where the people are very friendly and it was at that time a very relaxed and comfortable atmosphere.  I got my tongue working.  I would sweat but I could communicate with people.  I learned how the jitneys worked.  I visited el museo de California.  I had a favorite coffee shop. 

In September I went to Cuernavaca Mexico for a two week immersion course.  The school I had signed up for was nearly out of business; Eduardo had broken his partnership with another school and had no facilities.  So I lived with Eduardo, his wife Lourdes, Maria Lourdes or Mary Lou and their small child.  They were wonderful people and during the day we studied Spanish at Eduardo’s mother’s house, a beautiful Mexican home that opened on to a garden.  I really began to learn Spanish.  A couple of weeks after I got home I got a call from an attorney who needed advice on my expertise, CRA, for his client a bank with a large CRA problem.  He didn’t say it, but I knew it was California Commerce Bank, a subsidiary of Banamex in Los Angeles.  I was tired of Dai-Ichi Kangyo and recommended myself as the CRA officer to help the other bank solve its problem. 

I went to work for California Commerce and they had a wonderful bilingual staff with loan officers from Mexico.  As soon as I let people know I wanted to learn Spanish I had plenty of people helping me.  It was a good bank and a wonderful environment to learn Spanish. 

Spanish became my obsession and within two or three years, my Spanish was very passable for a gringo who had never lived in a Spanish speaking country, not counting Los Angeles. 

It is one of the great accomplishments of my life.  Until then I had never met a person who learned a foreign language on their own, without living in the country, with the exception of my father.  When I began speaking Spanish, my father wouldn’t speak it with me, though he understood easily.  I began to realize my father never spoke Spanish or even French when there were people around who spoke the language.  For awhile Ted had a girlfriend who spoke French and Pop would never converse with her, he’d always put her off. 

I began to think about it.  My father barely spoke English to anyone or any other language.  He always claimed he spoke French and Spanish and while he studied French and Spanish all the time, he never spoke them to anyone.  It was all in his head.  He could get by in a foreign country but to be a tourist only requires rudimentary speaking skills.  He certainly wasn’t conversational in Spanish and I doubt that he retained enough French after World War II to be conversational in that language.  But he and Sean were my inspiration to learn Spanish. 

These were good times for me.  I was living a sober life and doing what I wanted to do.  I began working in a very foreign and interesting environment with the Japanese which wasn’t always very satisfying but it was challenging.  I was promoted to Vice President at the bank.  I was a leader in my AA community and I was becoming a leader in economic development in banking. 

Dating became easier, though falling in love, getting bored or tied down and ready to move on and then single and looking for another girlfriend wasn’t always comfortable, I dated interesting and beautiful women.  I dated a librarian, a professor, an agoraphobic Beverly Hills princess, a Jewish Chinese woman from England and many other people.  It was an adventure, not always comfortable but always interesting. 

I learned to speak Spanish, I travelled.  I went to Paris, to Toronto, to Mexico.  I bought a house in La Crescenta with a woman I thought I wanted to settle down with.  That didn’t work but I kept the house and lived there from 1988 to 1995. 

Then in 1994 I met a woman in San Francisco.  In 1995 I moved to the Bay Area to be with her.  A year later we were married.  

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

Police Academy

B.V.S.T. 28 was known as the special needs class.  Basic Visitor Services Training, as they called the police academy classes in Parks were held at the William Penn Mott Training Center at Asilomar State Beach.  The facilities were part of the conference center run by a concessionaire.  We lived in hotel rooms with maid service and a fireplace in a downstairs day room. 

It was hard to say how we became the special needs class.  We were the last class for the testing done in February, 2003.  That meant, as someone in the class before us indelicately put it, we were the bottom of the barrel.  The classes were put together based on overall scores.  I had originally been scheduled for BVST 27 but the delay from my psych test knocked me back to 28.  We were all in the situation of either being at the bottom of the scoring or having something that delayed our starting.  One cadet had diabetes and had fought the bureaucracy to have his application accepted. 

There were 29 of us.  We were bright, almost all college graduates, a few had AA degrees which they had worked hard to get.  We were teachers, park aides, State clerks, and people who had held one job or another but still hadn’t found the job they wanted.  Our class also had four Fish and Game Warden cadets.  We ranged in age from 21 to three of us in our 50s.  The majority of the cadets were around 30 years old.   One of the older guys was a former banker like myself and the other had worked for an airline. 

The thorough background check done on all of us assured that we were honest and people of outstanding integrity.  The Academy is the only place I’ve ever been where I could leave a pen on my desk in the afternoon and come back the next morning and get it.  Even cash lost was recovered and an attempt made to return it to the owner.  There were no thieves and no liars amongst us.  If we were the bottom of the barrel, it was an outstanding barrel.    

State Parks runs a very good Academy.  It is the same P.O.S.T., Peace Officers Standard Training, that all police officers in California, LAPD, Highway Patrol, sheriffs, municipalities, counties, state and special agencies go through.  It was a 21 week course and had an academic component along with physical training, arms training and police procedures.  The material wasn’t that hard by itself but the sheer volume of it packed into a short period and the intentional stress put on the cadets by the system and the trainers, made it a very grueling five months.  The academic part was geared to a high school graduate and the physical training to someone in reasonably good shape.  The physical training was the easiest part of all.  I think most of us welcomed it as an enjoyable challenge and a stress relief from the rest of the program.      

In spite of all the potential it had, BVST 28 turned out to be one of the worst group experiences I’ve ever had.  My expectations were that it would be like basic training or mountaineering where a disparate group of people came together and accomplished a difficult task by helping each other and developing a team spirit.  It turned out to be an ordeal where each of us survived in our own way.  We never came together as a group and in fact, the 20 of us who graduated six months later, all of us seemed to be relieved to be done with it and fled the scene as soon as it was over.  Parks added an extra month to the academy for interpretive training, At the end there seemed to be a general feeling of embarrassment of what we had become, like the survivors in William Goldings novel, the Lord of the Flies, we didn’t want to be reminded of it.  It was something to be put behind us.  As a group we’ve never made any attempt to get together or even connect on the internet.  We were fragmented into various cliques and while everyone tried to belong one way or another most of us were on the outs.  Instead of being a bonding experience, it was more like a junior high experience, something we were all relieved to be done with.    

It was hard to say what went wrong.  It was basically a very good group of people  We were honest, we had character, we were a specially selected group of people with really superior talents and motivation.  In my opinion, there was one bad apple among us, not bad for a group of 30, and a few weak links also not a bad number for any group.  It was certainly a group that given the right circumstances should have been a good experience for everyone who could survive the challenge. 

I recently had lunch with a superintendent and we talked about my class and his experience in the academy.  He attributed the lack of cohesion to a failure in leadership and I think there’s something to that.  There were two Cadet Training Officers, one of whom was very well liked and supportive, but the other was distant and hard on us and himself.  Our first crisis as a class was an alcohol incident.  Alcohol was banned in the Park for cadets.  We could walk a 150 yards to a local pub outside the Park.  Behind the pub was a picnic area that they didn’t mind if cadets brought their own and consumed it there.  Six weeks into the program it was discovered that some of the cadets were openly consuming alcohol in the dorms.  The Training Officer called each of us in and reminded us we were bound by an honor code to reveal what we knew. 

The so called honor code we were held to was based on a few minutes of paperwork that had been part of the blizzard of paperwork in the first week.  It had never been explained and there had never been a real commitment to it by the group, so no one was protected by any group agreement of transparency, a minimum requirement for any honor code to work. 

In my uncomfortable interview I admitted I had seen a particular cadet take a six pack of beer to his room, but I had never seen him consume it. At the end of the so called investigation we seemed to fall into two groups, conspirators and snitches, but no one could be sure who was which, just suspicions.  Somehow a squabble between two roommates got mixed into it and one of the roommates, one of the alleged snitches, was a lesbian and some of the offended cadets grumbled she shouldn’t even be in the class.  One of the Training Officers, a female, was very apparently a lesbian.  In law enforcement in general and in Parks as well more than the usual number of women among the Rangers were openly lesbian.  On the other hand in law enforcement gay men are almost never out.  Our class probably had one or two gay men in the closet and that added to the tension and one of the leading homophobes against the woman as to be expected had his own issues. 

So we divided into the drinking crowd and the non-drinkers, the cool people and the uncool people, snitches and conspirators.  Some of the younger cadets had problems with those of us who were older, especially me, it seemed.  Maybe I had a problem being older.  I don’t know. 

In my experience even all of this shouldn’t have derailed us.  Differences and problems to be overcome are not unusual in group dynamics and often are part of the challenge the group overcomes.  I guess in our case there were just too many differences, character, age, geography, education, orientation, basic attitudes, even departments, and in my opinion it was exacerbated by bad leadership.  We fractured and then we fractured again and again.  We never came together as a group. 

I started the classes excited about the subject material and threw myself into it.  Our first real classes we had two deputy district attorneys teaching it.  I was excited to have them in the classroom to learn from and grill.  While everyone in the academy did well academically, it quickly became apparent that a number of cadets thought any enthusiasm for the classes was an attempt to show them up and the tone of the classes became competitive with penalties for being enthusiastic about it.  A clique of young people studied together but they seemed to exclude everyone else in a paranoid attempt to look better themselves.   

We studied 40 domains as they were called.  There were sections on traffic enforcement, sex crimes, constitutional guarantees, search methods, everything a rookie police officer needed to know before going in the field.  The classes in law were taught by the deputy district attorneys for Monterey County.  Other classes were taught by Rangers who had become experts in the field and police officers from other agencies like the Highway Patrol, Carmel Police Department and Gilroy.  The material and the classes were not too easy but also not very hard.  What made it hard was the relentlessness of it, week after week, we sat in the classroom for eight hours with short breaks and a lunch break and learned one unit after another. 

When we completed a unit there was a test.  POST requires that the test be passed with a 70% score.  Parks required 80%.  The additional stress of physical training, and the minutia of barracks life, and the academic part which wasn’t in itself hard became stressful.  We had done the same thing for Juvenile POST class, but that extra 10% and the other stresses hadn’t been there.  If you failed a test, you had to retest and if you failed that, you were out of the class.  Our diabetes cadet, a teacher, failed out on a test four of us had to retake. 

It was a week where everything seemed to go wrong.  The section was on Sex Crimes against Minors and it was all about relationships and ages.  The test was loaded with detail and four of us got less than the 80% required.  As a group we decided to retake the test that Friday instead of waiting over the weekend and taking it Monday.  Everything happened that week and there wasn’t enough time to study enough.  At the retesting I still didn’t know the material.  We had a very difficult hour waiting for the results.  No one was confident of passing and Lars, our teacher and diabetic, didn’t.  He was a big loss.  Everyone liked him, he had been one of the cadets who pulled us together. 

In those first few weeks, we lost a Warden cadet who had been too far away from school for too long.  We lost Lars and another cadet who was trying to split his attention between a new wife and the academy.  Alvin chose the wife.  At the end of a couple of months one of the older cadets was let go.  Red was strong but his joints were stiff and he didn’t have flexibility in his hands and wrists.  The defensive tactics training, police judo, was hard for him.  His attitude was they had to pass him and they didn’t. 

I did finish the course, I got a lot of support from Al Pepito and other people in the program but Bill Delasin was my training officer and his write-ups and manner were always very negative. 

Later in the course we had anonymous evaluations by our peers, another ill conceived and executed move that fractured us further.  Many of the evaluations were poison pen notes.   One critique of me particularly criticized my anti-abortion stance, I happen to be pro-choice, based on a question I had once asked.  Another classmate had her weight criticized and denigrated

We never worked together as a class and a cool people clique formed and they helped each other but seemed to think the rest of us should not be there.  It all had a junior high school feel to it.  There was a junior high cynicism and bias against taking the classes seriously.   One classmate who was probably the slowest in the group was made a hero for being a fool.  He bloomed under the attention and showed a good sense of humor.  He was voted the class valedictorian even though he wasn’t close to being at the top of the class.  One of my guests wondered what was he doing speaking for the class, but he was the cool group’s mascot.

I felt isolated and alone.  In my sixth grade John McAdam was the misfit in our class.  John wasn’t particularly bright and he was overweight.  He was desperate for friendship and didn’t have any friends.  He didn’t fit in.  He was the brunt of jokes and teasing.  Everything he did seemed to reinforce his not belonging.  I felt like the John McAdam of our class. 

I didn’t have any real friends among my classmates.  The one friend I had made was too wrapped up in her own world and her problems to be much help.  As scenarios approached it really became an issue.  Scenarios, going through realistic situations with actors, where we had demonstrate a knowledge of procedure and law, couldn’t be practiced alone and the cliques practiced together and excluded the rest of us.    

I was desperate and I sought out Denis Poole, the other cadet my age.  He agreed to practice with me and we began working together.  Thank god.  My friendship with Denis was the only way I made it through the Academy.  For some reason, Denis and I hadn’t connected before.  He lived not too far away and didn’t stay at Asilomar except when he needed to study.  At the end of April we began practicing for scenarios together.  Denis and I have been good friends ever since.  In a recent conversation, Denis said he didn’t trust anyone in that class.  Now that I think about it, I need to confirm with Denis that I was the exception.  Certainly since that experience Denis is one of my most trusted friends today. 

The training itself was challenging and enjoyable.  Our daily routine was physical training before breakfast three days a week, long runs, sprints, and  various exercises to get us ready for the physical test that was part of the academy experience including leaping a six foot wall on the run.  That was a challenge for almost all us but could be accomplished by having the right attitude and using the flow of your body as you hit the wall.  Even for the short people, using their own momentum could get them over the wall easily.  It was typical of these tests that at the end, when we had practiced on a smooth wall, the actual test was done on a wall with a small chink in it that could be used as a step. 

The other universal element that everyone dreaded was the pepper spray in the eyes.  It added to the feeling that some of the training was just plain hazing that all California police officers shared to become part of the fraternity.  The academy started in January and in April we received our training for pepper spray and tear gas.  We walked through buildings full of gas that made it hard to breathe and brought tears to our eyes.  At the end of the day, we waited in the classroom for our turn to go outside and be sprayed.  When my turn came I stood for a moment outside the classroom with my back to the wall.  When I stood at the wall, the Ranger asked me my name and when I looked up to give it to her, she sprayed me square in the eyes.  She was good at it and it hurt. 

Pepper spray  on your skin burns like hell and particularly burns in your eyes.  I had seen it done at the San Jose Police Academy we shared at Evergreen College.  There the cadets were pepper sprayed and then ran to a tub of water and washed their eyes out as soon as they could.  Typical of our academy, since we had a reputation for being warm and fuzzy, they made it harder.  Before we could wash our eyes out we had to handcuff a trainer using proper defensive tactics methods.  So for as long as it took for the pepper spray to wear off enough to think and act clearly we just stood there and suffered through it.  . 

Some of the cadets were in huge pain.  One of my friends began shaking uncontrollably as he wept his eyes out.  The people with lighter skin and lighter eyes suffered the most.  My mother used to make chili sauce when I was young and it seemed frequently the essence of it got in the air and burned our eyes and if we touched anything it seemed to get on our skin and then in our eyes as well.  I make chili sauce myself and sometimes forget to wash the oil off before I touch my eyes.  I’ve felt the burn and I knew the best thing to do is to keep my eyes open, not to touch them and to let the active ingredient oxidize.  I had a very bad 10 minutes and then was able to handcuff the trainer and go and take a shower.  The shower was painful but eventually I was able to wash my eyes out. 

Some of my classmates took a half hour or more to be able to handcuff the trainer.  They closed their eyes because it felt like it helped but in fact made the whole process take longer.    

The rationale for the pepper spray is that if we use it we need to know how it feels.  Someone asked, “Does that mean you’re going to shoot us next?”  In fact, it seems to me it is just a rite of passage that all cops share and afterwards we get to laugh about it together.  It’s sanctioned hazing and it works.     

I was surprised the whole physical part of the program was easy.  I was in good shape.  I’ve tried to stay in good shape most of my adult life.  I was a jogger and a runner, a mountaineer and a cyclist.  We ran about 12 miles a week and did strengthening exercises.  It was fun.  I managed to stay right in the middle of our class, coming in about 10^th overall.  The three mile runs became competitions.   The Tigers ran out front but there were plenty of us in the middle to compete against each other. 

I heard Jim Nelson comment one time that he felt OK as long as he stayed ahead of me.  The next run, I stayed right with him, and half way through he realized we were racing.  He kept trying to get me to lead and I kept dogging him, if I went ahead I went slower than he wanted to run.  At the last half mile I took off and left Jim in my dust beating him by a good 200 yards or more.  I loved it.  We did a rematch and I stayed with him but at the end of the rematch I didn’t try as hard.  I don’t know if Jim found his win as satisfying.  I loved mine.  I repeated this experience later with a Ranger at Mount Diablo and it was just as satisfying then. 

Besides the other academic training, hours and hours in the classroom with frequent testing where each test had to be passed or be terminated, we had basic medical training.  I particularly enjoyed the EMR, Emergency Medical Responder, training.  I found the physiology challenging and interesting.  It was a large section and took more than a week.  It was very involved and included practical tests, splinting, taking vital signs, bandaging and all the elements of advanced first aid.  The first few times in the field I was very unsure of myself with accident victims, there was always another Ranger that would arrive on the scene as a backup, but after awhile I developed a real competence in emergency medical treatment and a year after the Academy I even went through additional training to become an EMT, an Emergency Medical Technician. 

It was a grueling five months and the last step were the scenarios that we had to do.  We went out to Fort Ord, a decommissioned military base in Monterey.  We waited in a classroom and then were called out to various calls.  We drove in a police car to each station; domestic violence, robbery, burglary, felony arrests, sexual assault,  mentally deranged and one with live fire with paper wad loads.  A  sniper opened up on me with an AR-15 in what started as a medical call.  I fired back with my Smith and Wesson pistol, paper charges.  I wasn’t hit myself.  I thought maybe the trainer wasn’t that good a shot, but one of my classmates had a pattern of hits on his chest.  The sniper, a Ranger, was very accurate.  I think in immediately firing back I put the sniper off balance long enough for me to get to cover.    

The other scenarios used actors and Rangers who really got into it and we were passed or failed on following procedures and handling the situations.  It involved all of our classroom learning and using our defensive tactics.  It was extraordinarily stressful but I managed to pass all the scenarios with only one that I had to repeat or remediate as they called it.  I was able to do it the same day and pass the remediation. 

My friend Denis had to remediate three the next day.  We had two remediations for each scenario before we were out and Denis was on his last, but he also managed to pass all the remediations.  In fact, our whole class, those who were still with us, managed to pass.  It was the last test on the Friday before Memorial Day and we finished the POST part of the academy.  The last month was Park training for Interpretation and there was no stress to that.  It was a good class but not especially hard.   

Michael Greene was the instructor.  I think he was frustrated with some of us, because we didn’t take the class as seriously as he thought we should.  I was exhausted and didn’t put much effort into the last month.  The training was excellent and I learned it and incorporated it into the interpretation I did in the years afterwards, but Michael wanted us to be extroverts and flamboyant about it and that wasn’t my style.  I can do that and sometimes do, but I didn’t rise to the occasion at Asilomar.  And the weekend I should have put into my presentation I went to my eldest son’s wedding in New Mexico.  My final presentation was adequate.

On July 1^st, 2005 we were sworn in as State Park Rangers.  It was an incredibly satisfying accomplishment.  The last weekend before graduation one of our classmates had been arrested for driving under the influence.  He didn’t report it to the training officers and on Tuesday before graduation Mike was terminated for not having reported a negative police contact as required by the department.  It was a sad event, Mike had been one of the bridge cadets who got along with everyone, but it was the way our class had gone.  Also Bill Delasin showed up at the graduation dressed in civilian clothes without a badge or a weapon.  Bill had always worn his uniform and weapon.  He wouldn’t say why, but he said he was no longer a police officer.  We never learned why but whatever it was, it had been going on for some time, either a medical issue or a violation of the conduct required of peace officers.  It partially explained to me why Bill had been so negative to me.  I think it seemed unfair to him that I was becoming a Ranger at 58 and he was being forcibly retired in his 40s.

We left and as a group seemed to be glad to be done with each other.  There was no group feeling even at graduation.  We all seemed a little embarrassed being together.  We went our separate ways and I’ve only stayed in contact with a couple of people.  Twice when I’ve visited Parks where classmates were Rangers, our exchanges have been very warm, even though both times they were members of the inner clique.  Maybe the whole thing was in my head but I don’t think so. 

I am very proud of having completed a full police academy and I learned in the experience but it didn’t include much personal satisfaction with the group.  I survived, I got a badge and earned the right to train as a police officer in the field and I’m very proud of that.  I’m just sorry that we’ve never been able to share that accomplishment as a class. 

All of the training at the academy was just preparation for training in the field.  I went to Mount Diablo State Park east of San Francisco and my Field Training Officer was Cameron Morrison, an experienced Ranger and one of the most knowledgeable people I’ve every worked with.  For 90 days Cameron and I worked together as a team and in fact the rules which we followed rigidly required that whenever I was in the field armed and badged, that Cameron and I be together. 

The things I learned in the academy we did for real in the field.  We did traffic stops, wrote tickets, chased a drunk at high speed and even made an arrest.  At first Cameron led but then I began to take the lead and Cameron watched and critiqued.  It was not easy, but Cameron’s attitude was so positive that there was little doubt I would pass.  Two of our classmates did fail the Field Training. 

Field Training lasted 90 days and then another 9 months of probation during which I had regular training and support. 

The first day showing up to work actually wearing a loaded pistol and a badge was an amazing experience and after 90 days being in the field by myself most of the time wearing the pistol and badge was again a very unsettling and ominous feeling.  It took a year to get used to wearing a gun.  I don’t think any of us ever take it for granted and I was always aware of it but it did become routine and I became used to people’s reaction to an armed and badged police officer. 

I loved being a cop.  It was a great experience.  I got to work with incredible people and I enjoyed the respect and admiration of citizens when I did my job well.    

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.