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.

Mount Diablo

I went to Mount Diablo State Park in July, 2005, my first assignment out of the Academy. My ranking in the Academy gave me a choice between Mount Diablo and Ventura State Beach. I wanted to go to LA. Susan was working down there and we had an apartment and I was ready to return to LA, particularly the mountains and the wilderness down there. But Ventura was the closest slot available. At Ventura State Beach alcohol is a problem, Hell’s Angels and meth addicts and it was nearly 100 miles from LA. I decided that wasn’t for me, I don’t like the beach, and the enforcement there looked to me like cowboys and Indians. Susan and I wanted either LA or San Francisco.

The disadvantage of Mount Diablo was that the actual assignment included being in charge of the museum and souvenir shop at the top of the mountain. I really didn't like the idea of becoming a shop keeper after going through the Academy. I didn’t become a Ranger to be a shopkeeper. I visited Diablo and they seemed eager to have me, so I took the Diablo assignment. I didn't think it would be that bad but it's not what I wanted to do as my first assignment when I became a Ranger.

Mount Diablo is 20,000 acres, 45 miles east of San Francisco. It sits right where the weather of the Bay Area and the weather of the Central Valley meet and it can go either way depending on which way the winds are blowing and where the pressure systems are for the day. I had been to Mount Diablo in 1995. We drove to the top and looked around. That time I was very unimpressed, a 3,837 foot peak with a parking lot and gift shop at the top.

In the Academy when I made my visit to Mount Diablo, it was a beautiful spring day with light fog on the south side, hanging between the blue oaks which were just beginning to bud. It was magical and a beautiful place. When I began working there, I came to appreciate what a gem Mount Diablo was.

At 3800 hundred feet it wasn’t much of a peak but between the Bay and the Valley it was the highest point, looking across to Mount Hamilton which anchored the South Bay. All the hills around it were much smaller and it sat on the edge of the Valley like a giant viewing platform giving a view from the Sierra Buttes above Sacramento and sometimes even Mount Lassen down to Yosemite in the South. On a clear day we could see out to the Farallon Islands 30 miles west of San Francisco.

Mount Diablo is the center of its world, one side facing east with Western Junipers and Gray Pine and the other side facing west with Blue Oaks and Live Oaks. There are Coulter Pines like the ones in the mountains facing LA and Madrones that always made me think of Oregon. For plants in the Bay Area it is as far east as they go and plants from the Sierras stop their western march at Mount Diablo and the same is true for the North and the South. Mount Diablo really is the center point for California. We had our own Manzanita, Mount Diablo Manzanita and the Mount Diablo Globe Lily along with Mount Diablo Buckwheat and Mount Diablo Sunflowers and many other endemic plants. We had two breeding pair of Golden Eagles.

The Miwok people in the Sierras and in the Bay Area were created on Mount Diablo. After being there a short time I realized Mount Diablo for the first people was the Garden of Eden, the sacred place, the center of the world, where it all began.

Even in modern times Mount Diablo gathered legends about itself. Everyone in the Bay Area called it the tallest mountain the Bay Area. It wasn’t. Mount Hamilton well within sight of the Bay was three hundred feet higher. Everyone said that the view from Mount Diablo was the largest view in the world except for Mount Kilimanjaro. From the rooftop viewing platform on top of the museum you could hear that ten times a day. It wasn’t. That particular piece of information had turned up in the newspaper in the 1930s and was groundless but had been repeated so often that people came to believe it.

But these made up myths about Mount Diablo just acknowledged that there was something about Mount Diablo that people couldn’t quite explain, something very special and sacred, and so people made up stories about Mount Diablo just to make sense of it. There was a whole story about how the mountain was a misunderstanding by the gringos of the original Spanish and that it really wasn’t named for the devil.

My own story which I could never verify but made sense in terms of the history of the mountain is that it was named by the missionaries from San Jose. The area around Mount Diablo was a good distance from Mission San Jose and the local people sought refuge on the mountain. It also was the Miwok Garden of Eden, a very sacred and holy place to the Miwok. In Europe anyplace named for the devil is usually a former sacred place to pre-Christian people. I thought the same thing probably occurred at Mount Diablo. The missionaries told their neophytes it was the Devil’s Mountain and they should avoid it. It made more sense to me than trying to claim that the most prominent geographical feature in the area, called Mount Diablo for over a 150 years, had been named by mistake.

An evangelical Christian from the nearby town of Oakley has been campaigning to change the name of the mountain. So far he has been unsuccessful but he keeps trying. The first attempt to change the name of the mountain was in 1863.

When I was working there I saw a Buddhist group at the mountain one day. They were staying at Juniper Campground and then I saw them again at the summit. The group of about 50 people all seemed to surround a monk that they were very protective of. I approached the group. The followers began to move in defense of the monk and then he signaled his followers to let me through and I met the Sogan Rinpoche, the sixth reincarnation of the Sogan Rinpoche from Tibet. The Venerable Sogan Rinpoche was a delightful and very personable gentleman who was delighted to meet and chat with a Ranger from the mountain. We talked about the sacredness of Mount Diablo and agreed that it was a very sacred place. It was where the Sogan Rinpoche came each year to do his earth blessing.

I often heard people say that Mount Diablo had been sacred to the Miwok people. And I tried to correct that and told everyone that would listen to me that yes, Mount Diablo was sacred to the Miwok people but that it was still sacred to the Miwok people and not just to them but that it was simply a sacred place and the Miwoks are aware of it and so are many other people. Yes, it was sacred; and it’s still sacred today.

One summer evening, closing the Park I kept coming across small groups of Muslim Americans, people with young families. They obviously didn’t want to leave the Park and when I went to talk to them, I learned they were from a Muslim Center in San Ramon and they had come to observe the new moon that marks the beginning of the month of Ramadan. For these Muslim Americans with roots from all over the world, just like many other people in the Bay Area, Mount Diablo is a sacred place. Finally they all gathered in a particularly good spot to see the new moon and began praying. They invited me to pray with them.

Suzette

I first met Suzette at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco.  I was in the new class of counselors hired on July 1^st, 2001.  Suzette was in the class before me and had started working there six months earlier.  Early on I had a client who as I talked to him told me what he had told the previous counselor to do.  As I listened to this guy, I realized he was only manipulating the system to cheat his creditors and I was supposed to roll over and help him.  He was what in banking we called a flake.  I reverted to being the bank vice president I had been two years earlier and told the SOB we weren’t there to help him cheat his creditors.   

I went looking for the previous counselor to tell her I had taken care of this guy for her.  I expected to find a young recent college grad who could be easily pushed around.  Instead I found Suzette.  She was wearing a long gray sleeveless slinky dress that was businesslike and sexy.  She was gorgeous and had a smile that lit up the room.  She had not taken the client seriously and the problem had been she didn’t follow his directions either. 

She had a laugh to match her smile.  She was a most attractive young woman.  Of course, I found her attractive, I would have had to be blind and deaf not to have been attracted.  She had a beautiful laugh.  She was young, in her mid or late twenties, though I thought she was younger.  She was a recent graduate of Cal, the University of California in Berkeley.  She was an English major and probably the smartest of all the counselors.  She was a favorite of Susan the supervisor and did special projects for her.  Her name was Suzette Anderson, she appeared to be a dark skinned African American.  She wore her hair pulled back to a French braid, looking very Spanish, that and something she said, I asked her if she was a Latina.  And she was, Panamanian, born in New York, with immigrant parents, she grew up in Inglewood.  Like many Central Americans she is fiercely patriotic about being Panamanian. 

This was the period at the end of my obsession to learn Spanish, an obsession that got me to fluency and I immediately spoke Spanish which she understood but responded in English.  It turned out she could barely get a word of Spanish out.  She reminded me of my cousin’s children who would only respond to their mother’s Tagalog in English.  For years I used her as an example of someone who at five decides to only use English.  My own granddaughters stopped speaking Spanish in kindergarten.  I think it was their reaction to the way the Spanish speaking immigrants were treated in their classroom.  If they didn’t have to speak Spanish they didn’t want to.  Suzette to my surprise could barely get gracias out of her mouth.  She choked on it the way the most anglicized gringa would speak. 

She had been an English major at Cal and immediately began plying me with books.  She particularly liked Toni Morrison and at her urging I read “Song of Solomon.”  In our chats I quickly realized her appreciation of literature and literary criticism was way beyond my understanding.  She had learned something at Cal that had passed me by or honestly I probably didn’t have the aptitude for at UCLA. 

From my point of view it was a wonderful office flirtation.  She was a beautiful young woman and we were friends.  I tried to go to lunch with her whenever we were free together and it wasn’t often enough, but every week once or twice.  She was a bit of tease.  I wasn’t sure how she felt but it was fun for me.  She had a six year old son and lived with his father, but they weren’t married.  She didn’t talk about John and I didn’t talk about Susan.  If I had thought about it I would have realized the flirtation was mutual, but the age difference between us was huge.  Suzette was younger than two of my sons.  I just enjoyed the friendship with a beautiful and exciting young woman.  Anything more would have been too complicated and it never occurred to me. 

When I left CCC to go to Juvenile Hall, Suzette invited me to dinner with her and her friend Jody.  There was an electric charge between us, but if we hugged, it was stiffly.  I went back to have lunch with Suzette a few times after I went to Juvy, and it was always fun.  We didn’t really stay in touch but she was a friend and I wasn’t really surprised when two years later I got an email from her and she suggested lunch. 

By this time I was living in Oakland and Susan was living in LA.  Suzette and I had a wonderful lunch.  We ate somewhere in my neighborhood on Lakeshore Avenue in Oakland and then we went for a walk, all the way around Lake Merritt, a good three miles.  We sat in a café and drank coffee and talked and talked and talked.  She was going to graduate school for an MFA and was very excited about that.  I was unabashedly attracted to her and would have loved to have touched her.  We sat close but there seemed to be an invisible curtain just barely keeping us apart. 

At that time Susan and I got together for a week in LA each month, which was OK, but I had long since given up on the marriage between Susan and me and would have welcomed an affair.  Suzette didn’t talk about John and my natural Puritanism and reticence and we were just good friends.  She was as a friend described it later, an inappropriate female friend, but not a relationship that I felt would ever get beyond flirtation.  I didn’t really know how Suzette felt and I didn’t ask.  I was enjoying her company. 

We got together a few more times and then I went to the Ranger Academy in Pacific Grove, a good distance from the Bay Area.  After the Academy, I invited her to my graduation.  She didn’t come but invited me to a celebratory lunch in the City at the Slanted Door, a highly rated San Francisco restaurant. 

We saw each other after that and then I received an email, our only form of distance communication, that invited me to lunch.  Susan was supposed to be in Oakland that week and I emailed Suzette that Susan being in Oakland made scheduling lunch difficult.  I knew the mere mention of Susan violated our unspoken rule of not talking about partners and it acknowledged in a subtle way that our lunches were not the totally innocent meetings of friends that we pretended they were. 

I got no response from Suzette.  As the time passed I realized she had been scared off.   I was surprised to think, maybe there was more to this than I had admitted and I found that very exciting.  Maybe I would hear from her again.  But I didn’t for nearly two years.

Then in March, 2007 I got an email from Suzette wishing me a happy St. Patrick’s Day and maybe we could get together for lunch.  By this time Susan had moved back up to the Bay Area and was living with me in Park housing at Mt. Diablo.  It was not a comfortable situation and I welcomed a chance to see Suzette again. 

Only this time I was going to say something directly about it.  I sent her an email and told her how much I enjoyed hearing from her and I would love to go to lunch, but I was married and this was a little complicated.  We needed to talk about what we were doing. 

In response I got an erotic love poem that took my breath away.  Suzette is a very talented poet and this was a very good poem.  I had no idea Suzette felt toward me as the poem showed.  I really had thought, the flirtation was just her style and we really were just friends. 

I was eager to see her and we arranged to get together shortly after Easter.  This time we touched.  I held her arm and enjoyed the closeness of her next to me.  She was shy, but the air between us was charged and it was wonderful. 

About that time I picked up Helen Fisher’s book, “Why We Love: The Nature and Chemistry of Romantic Love.”  Suzette and I were in love, all the chemistry and emotion that Fisher talks about.  It was a wonderful roller coaster ride.  I was old enough and experienced enough to know what was happening and our infatuation with each other was like a storm we couldn’t resist, a storm that would inevitably pass.  I was going to enjoy it while it was there.        

I tried to see Suzette every time I could.  We emailed each other and I would go to work and sit down at the computer first thing to see what she had sent.  It was a delicious obsession.  I knew if it came out, I was risking my marriage but by this time, I really didn’t much care. 

Susan knew something was going on.  One time at a restaurant I arrived very late, something I never do.  She teased me about a girlfriend and I stumbled through a denial, but it was true I had been with Suzette and lost track of the time. 

After that Susan went on vacation to the Caribbean.  I had already said I did not want to go and work gave me the excuse.  I saw Suzette on the weekends and we spent more time together.  Suzette was still living with John, but that obviously wasn’t a good relationship either.  John and Suzette had a son born in 1995.  Suzette didn’t tell me much, but early on the relationship was on again off again and then John moved up to the Bay Area when Susan went to Cal and she wanted a father for her son. 

With Susan in the Caribbean we had a date and went to the Legion of Honor.  I think it was closed but we spent the day in the City and on the Muni I reached for her hand and for the first time we solidly held hands, not linked arms, not nearly close this time, but tightly held hands.  It seemed naively adolescent but Suzette and I were very reticent with each other and it made the romance all that more exciting. 

In all of this I really knew it was the infatuation that was running us and we wouldn’t know what we really had until the infatuation had run its course.  Being married and trying to indulge an infatuation wasn’t going to work and I realized I needed to end it with Susan.  I was really grateful that this infatuation gave me the energy to end something I had really wanted to end years before. 

By the 2004 I couldn’t stand living with Susan.  Our living in separate cities postponed the inevitable, but when Susan said she was moving back up to the Bay Area I thought I should tell her we were finished.  But I took the easy way out and decided to give it another try.   She moved up in December and by spring I had had it with Susan. 

I was having a hard time at the Park.  My supervisor was a twit.  I was the lowest man on the totem pole, a probby, on probation.  Living in State housing and in the Park is never a simple thing and Susan was making it very difficult for me with her demands on our “landlord,” and her dissatisfaction with everything in the Park and her own situation.  Her vacation to the Caribbean was a welcome respite but when she got back I had to do something about it.  I was grateful that Suzette had come back and I felt lucky that it gave me the energy to finally end it with Susan.    

When Susan got back on July 1^st, the next day I invited her to go for a walk with me.  “We had to talk.”  I struggled through telling her I wanted to separate.  I didn’t want to be with her.

She interrupted me and asked, “Is there another woman?”

I said, “No.”  I wasn’t separating from Susan because of Suzette.  I just wanted out. 

She said, “You’re lying,” and told me she had been reading my emails.  It didn’t go well after that but the result was right.  We were done. 

Susan and I continued in the house for a short time together.  We tried to avoid each other and didn’t talk again.  In September she moved out and I was free.

 In August I went up to Oregon to see my son and his family there.  When I got back Suzette and I went for a picnic at Paradise Park.  I leaned over to kiss her, for the first time.  I anticipated a light chaste kiss but it was returned passionately and our relationship took another step along.

In October Suzette finally informed John and that started a round of insanity for her.  I think it was shortly after that John turned up when I was meeting Suzette at a BART station.  I was surprised he was a little man and jumping up and down and yelling biblical insults at me, adulterer and all of that.  I thought considering that he had never married Suzette in 12 years or more he didn’t really have that much of a claim on her. 

John began drinking and was pretty distraught.  I learned he was a graduate student at Cal State East Bay, still a graduate student, even though I guess he was in his late 40s or even 50s and he worked as a community aide for the UC police, walking coeds to their cars after night classes.  I didn’t take him very seriously. 

I stayed close to Suzette throughout the craziness.  John had gotten himself totally worked up, he was drinking and one time he grabbed Suzette and ended up biting her on the lip, enough to bring the cops for a domestic violence call and earn a temporary restraining order.  So John was gone in November.  He continued to be as troublesome as he could be, but it was over.  He convinced the court he was the better parent for Arom, now 12, and he got custody of him. 

Suzette and I settled into making out as if we were virgins back in Catholic high school.  Yes, Suzette had put in her time at St. Mary’s Academy before she finished at Rialto High School. 

I went to Angel Island in mid-December which made the break with Susan more complete.  By that time we had started divorce proceedings, Susan was very businesslike and in charge.  We did a mediated divorce and had no problems until Susan decided I had cheated her on taxes.  She decided I owed her $150,000.  I explained how community property laws actually worked and what claims we might both have.  She didn’t pursue it.  I think in the end if I was cheating on her, even financially, it gave her closure and justification.  I certainly had enough blame and she was rightly angry and I was relieved. 

I was glad to be at Angel Island.  The people there had never met Susan and as far as they were concerned Suzette was simply my girlfriend.  Our scandalous beginning was irrelevant. 

Suzette began coming over to the island but she always needed to get off sooner than I would have liked.  She’d come only if she could leave at 9 at night or 3 in the morning or way too early and cutting her visits short.  After awhile it seemed like we were still having an affair, but it wasn’t John we were cheating on, it was Arom.  After the initial protests Arom was living with Suzette most of the time.  She told me she had not told him about us

We dated for a year, but it wasn’t a very satisfying relationship.  Even after John left it didn’t seem Suzette was free.  Sometimes I could reach her.  Sometimes I couldn’t.  Suzette is an extraordinarily private person and it was hard to tell what was going on with her.  Sometimes she was available and sometimes she wasn’t.  Sometimes she would come to the island and we would enjoy each other’s company and sometimes she couldn’t wait to get off the island. 

By January of 2009 I had decided that Suzette and I weren’t going anywhere.  I gave up on trying to establish a relationship with Suzette and waited for her to withdraw, only the next time I wouldn’t try to bring her back.  The infatuation was over.  We went on like that until March.

Then one day Suzette called me and asked me if I was sitting down.  I laughed and sat down and waited to hear what she was going to tell me.  She told me she was pregnant.  We had been using birth control but apparently it wasn’t effective.  When we got together a few days later Suzette had decided that she wanted this baby.  So with great trepidation I celebrated this coming event with her.  We would have the child.  She would move on to the island and we would get married. 

Then in April we learned that Suzette had tested positive for Trisomy 21 markers.  She had an ultrasound.  Fetuses with Down Syndrome often clench their fist.  The fetus didn’t have clenched fists.  We learned we had a girl.  They withdrew amniotic fluid and we waited for the test results which take about three weeks.  It was a very hard three weeks on both of us.  Suzette was mostly withdrawn.  I had concluded if our child did have Down’s Syndrome that I would want the fetus aborted. 

With great relief we learned that Paloma, by that time we knew her name, had no chromosomal problems.  It was like the second acceptance of this event.  Times had been difficult

Both times, learning about the pregnancy in March and then the test in May were like a roller coaster ride where this was this excruciating slow climb up a hill and then the decision to go ahead and the plunge down.  The first time the climb was a few days until we got together and I found out Suzette wanted to keep the baby and the second hill, much longer and higher, was four weeks and then we plunged down into the speed and inevitability of Paloma’s coming. 

That was in May and it was time for Suzette to move to the island.  She put it off, reasonably enough, until Arom graduated from Sierra Prospect 8^th grade.  She also put off telling Arom that they were moving and that she was pregnant.  She told Arom about me and her pregnancy as they were packing to move on the 4th of July.  Arom was 14 years old and furious.  I had never met him and Suzette didn’t tell him anything about me.  He was in a total snit, not talking, not helping, he was angry, rightly so I think.  It couldn’t have been handled much worse.

In return Arom did his best not to graduate from the 8^th grade but Suzette and his teachers pushed him through. 

Suzette got her father and brother to help her move.  The truck arrived at the docks in the late evening and it was a pile of furniture and boxes that had been thrown into the back of U-Haul truck willy nilly.  It took another few days to finish moving and I went over to help Suzette.  The apartment was a wreck.  We trashed what was left, packed a few boxes and I had Suzette hire a couple of casual workers to help her clean the apartment. 

We planned to get married in August.  Suzette got very crazy, as pregnant women sometimes are.  Disorganized she began concentrating on details of a very elaborate wedding.  For a wedding cake she went to a bakery in San Carlos, 40 miles away; the invitations she was hand making.  At this time Suzette had some idea I should be a father figure to Arom.  He was barely talking to me and rightly so I thought. 

In August Suzette and I went to get the marriage license and as was common by then Suzette wasn’t talking to me.  She like Arom radiated hostility and anger.  That was my excuse to pull the plug.  Getting married seemed a crazy idea.  The wedding was being put together with no communication or proper planning.  Suzette was focused on hand making invitations, and she was by this time very pregnant.  So I said, no, we would postpone the wedding.  She was angry that afternoon and then never said anything about it afterwards.  I knew it was a resentment that wouldn’t go away but it didn't make sense to me at that time to go ahead and marry someone who couldn't even talk to me when we were going to get the license.    

Suzette and I occasionally found a way to be friendly and comfortable together, but it wasn’t common.  We went to pregnancy classes at Kaiser Medical Center in San Rafael and most of those we passed ourselves off as the loving couple we should have been.  In social situations Suzette would relax and we did well, so sometimes that goodwill would last past the evening.  Paloma was born in October, more or less on schedule.  

Thankfully the day Paloma was born we were wonderfully together. 

On October 11^th about five or six a.m. Suzette woke me up and told me she was having regular labor contractions.  We were living on Angel Island.  Rich Ables, the maintenance worker on Angel Island, was a good guy with a very good heart who really liked Suzette and me and wanted to do anything he could to help us.  Instead of waiting for the 8:00 run to the mainland, which would have been easy enough, I called Rich knowing he would be very proud of being part of our day of birth for our new daughter.  So at 7 a.m. Rich took us to the mainland on the Ayala, the Park’s crew boat.

Everything was easy, there was no hurry or panic, we just wanted to be on the mainland as the situation developed.  When we got to Tiburon we walked the four blocks to the car and I asked Suzette if she wanted to go to breakfast and she did. 

We went to Denny’s.  Suzette ordered pancake rounds with syrup and butter, pancakes, orange juice, bacon, extra bacon, a vanilla milkshake and I think maybe eggs.  They kept bringing things and by the time she was finishing the table was full of empty plates.  The waitress there still reminds us of that day.  It was very funny and Suzette was having a good time. 

After Denny’s she wanted to go to ACE Hardware in El Cerrito for a board or something she needed; so we went there.  The salesman who helped us had been a medic in the Army.  He asked when the baby was due.  We told him the baby was on her way now.  That made him nervous.  Don’t worry you won’t have to do it, we told him.  From there we went to Target and Suzette shopped.  I don’t remember that we bought anything,

At Target she just wandered around looking at things.  We were moving pretty slowly.  Mid-afternoon we went to a Starbucks in Emeryville.  We sat there and talked and entertained each other through the afternoon.  Finally we decided we should think about going to the hospital.  The pains had never been terrible, but by this time Suzette would regularly stop and hold herself during a contraction.  They continued to be regular and they were getting stronger though not urgent.

I said I probably needed a burrito before we settled into the hospital and we went across the street to La Cucina Puebla, a place we liked.  Suzette decided to eat and we had a full meal, taking our time again. 

By this time, the pains were coming more regularly and at shorter intervals and we headed for Kaiser Oakland.  There is no maternity ward at Kaiser Marin so we had made all the arrangements to go to Kaiser Oakland.  Oakland Kaiser is a big medical complex at Piedmont Avenue and Broadway.  By the time we were walking from the parking lot to the hospital the pains had become intense and we would have to stop and wait until they passed.    

We went to the pre-birth triage and the nurse was very nice and the intern was a wonderful young man.  They agreed that it was going to be sometime that day but not soon.  They said if we lived on the mainland they would have sent us home but since we lived on an island we were admitted then.  We moved slowly, stopping when Suzette was having pains and were relocated to the obstetrics area and made comfortable in a delivery room. 

Even remembering it over three years later our experience at Kaiser was incredibly warm and human.  Everyone was wonderful.  They took care of us like we were family and very very special people.  They made us comfortable, they watched, they did what they needed.  From beginning to end, the triage nurse to the girl who helped us to our car two days later, people were just wonderful.  Thanks to whatever hormones, dopamine and whatever other things go on at a birth we were in a heightened state and we stayed that way, feeling close and deeply in love for the whole time we were there and loved by everyone around us. 

After 11:00 p.m. the labor contractions strengthened and started to become unbearable.  Suzette was in great pain and not her stoic self at all.  At one point, she started saying “No mas!  No mas!  No mas!”  The nurses all looked at me, they had no idea that Suzette was latina and pushed to her limit she reverted to her childhood language.  Coincidentally as she switched to Spanish the baby crowned and a few minutes after midnight Paloma was born.  Unfortunately the baby had picked up the drugs used to dampen Suzette’s pain and the first half hour a neo-natal intensive care unit, six very intense and efficient people concentrated on her to get her breathing and keep her breathing.  After a half hour they succeeded, cleared up and left the room, leaving the baby with us and the regular obstetrics staff. 

After the delivery we had a wonderful room to our selves on the 12th floor.  It was just us and the baby and we spent our time admiring her.  Outside it was storming, pounding rain and beautiful thick gray clouds.  The first storm of the season it was greeted by everyone in the Park and throughout California wild lands as the end of the fire season.  Paloma’s arrival brought a sigh of relief from all of us, the bad dry days of summer were over.  The rains had arrived.  We had a long relaxing day in the hospital.  The next morning I rushed around to do the paperwork, pay $800, the portion not covered by insurance and we left that afternoon and took a boat back to Angel Island through the storm with our new baby. 

Paloma was transforming.  She was and is such a beautiful child, remarkably so from the very beginning.  Suzette and my genes from disparate places in the world produced an incredibly beautiful girl child. 

We both took time off and adjusted to the baby as she took over our lives.  Suzette went to work in March and during the winter I had a schedule where I only worked weekends.    

I had a lot of fear around being a father at 62 but over time the more I get to know Paloma as a person, the more fortunate I feel.  However she came into the world, whatever the timing, I am just a very fortunate person to have her.  The heart attack I had less than a year later made me feel very vulnerable but after six stints and three years later, I am alive and well and doing well today. 

As much as possible I don’t dwell on the future, I stay in the present and enjoy my beautiful daughter. 

Suzette and my relationship was difficult in the first year.  Arom didn’t help the situation.  The following September he left to join his father in Florida.  We got a new superintendent in the Park at that time who began to put the Rangers in their place and it became harder and harder to live on the island.  The superintendent changed the rules for using the boats to leave the island and Suzette could no longer get to work from the island.  In April, 2011, we moved to Oakland and living on the mainland was one less stress on us and our relationship. 

I retired in November of 2011 and I began enjoying that.  One day I went to Kaiser and they asked me if my spouse had insurance and I started giving the clerk all the information on Suzette and her job.  As I got to a part I didn’t know I said, I would have to call her, and then as I was dialing the phone I realized, she wasn’t my spouse; we weren’t married. 

I went home with the intention of telling the story to Suzette and asking her to marry me.  In our nearly three years together we had become a couple.  For some petty reason when Suzette came home that night, she was all upset and directed some of it at me and as she had been doing since we began living together, she withdrew and wasn’t talking to me.  I was struck by the irony of that, one more opportunity to get married missed because Suzette decided to be angry.  This time I waited a month and told her the story and asked her to marry me. 

We got married on April 3rd before a county commissioner and then a wedding with all of our friends at the Unitarian Church on Saturday April 8th.  Again the wedding was a difficult event but for me I did what needed to be done, a hall, a minister, a caterer and emails to my friends to come to the wedding and Suzette concentrated on the things that were important to her.  It worked.  We had a nice wedding.  Lots of people were there.  Suzette went to work Monday and we began living our life as a married couple instead of just a couple. 

In July, 2012, Arom returned from Florida to live with us.  Initially he was more cooperative but that wore thin.  Arom still makes life as difficult for himself as he can, but I’m less a part of it. 

Suzette and I live together better than we have before.  Two days after Arom moved in we moved, as previously planned, to a house in El Cerrito.  It suits my working class self image.  It’s a nice house, not luxurious, on a nice block in an acceptable neighborhood.  It’s very comfortable without being showy at all. 

My days are filled with writing.  Suzette still goes to work incredibly early and comes home late.  Lately she hasn’t had so many things going on that keep her away from the house.  For awhile it seemed she didn’t want to spend any time with me, but now we’re quite close.  That too will change.  Arom will join the Army this summer or be shipped back to Florida. 

And I enjoy Paloma.  We do ballet, that is Suzette and I take Paloma and watch her begin to dance in her pink tutu and tights and sometimes leg warmers.  We go bicycling, her in a green seat on front of my bike or lately on her own bike, a 12 inch pink princess bicycle with training wheels.  We go to the Farm, a small show farm in Tilden Park and to the snow.    

This winter we went up Highway 108 to the Sierras.  We had seen snow for the first time last winter in Arizona.  This time as soon as Paloma saw snow by the side of the road, patches under the trees and on the shady spots, from the back seat she shouted, “Stop the car!  Stop the car!  I want to play!”  We drove on a short distance and stopped in a parking lot with more snow where she could play and then went on to our hotel and the next morning had a wonderful time just being in the snow. 

We sing, we read stories, we dance and I am delighted to have a daughter.  I am also delighted to have a beautiful wife who lately most of the time is very warm and affectionate.  She is an incredibly interesting person who is sincere and seems to try very hard.  We are I think getting better together.  And while it’s not quite the normal middle class life that I’ve aspired to, it’s close enough and it has Paloma and Suzette in it and that’s an incredible good fortune.   

Moving to the Bay Area

I  enjoyed my time of being single.  I enjoyed dating.  I enjoyed relationships when they were good and I struggled through them when they weren’t.  A couple of times I thought I might get married, but it didn't work out.  By the time I was in my late 40’s I was really tired of being single and ready to settle down.  Judith and I had nearly married.  After Judith I was still looking to get married.     

A friend of mine in San Francisco set me up on a blind date, dinner at her home with a few other people, and I met Susan Robinson.  Susan was fascinating, African American, a Cal grad, she was very successful in her career, and doing well at Pacific Bell.  Her mother was Roberta Robinson, a very well known city councilmember in Los Angeles, and Susan was well connected politically.  She had worked for Willie Brown, knew Jerry Brown, Nancy Pelosi and just about everyone in California politics, north and south. 

A couple of months later we had our first date in Los Angeles and then a reciprocal date in the Bay Area.  Susan considered herself a libertine.  She certainly tried to be, at least at first, but for whatever reasons Susan and I couldn’t seem to find a rhythm between us.   We had a lot of other things in common and we both sincerely appreciated each other. 

I had reservations.  I don’t think my love for Susan was ever overwhelming or profound, but the situation was good.  She introduced me to a new world that was interesting and exciting and we had a stable middle class existence.  Our physical relationship was like the overall relationship, good sometimes and tolerable most of the time.  Susan proved to be unsatisfied with her own accomplishments and driven to work harder and harder.  She is a good person but sometimes she could be very difficult.  After seven years of marriage we were pretty estranged from each.  We found ways to keep it working.  We made it another four years.  After eleven years together Suzette came into the picture and the excitement and desire of pursuing Suzette pushed me into ending what had become a very uncomfortable relationship with Susan.    

But in 1995 I moved up to Mill Valley to live with Susan.  I had lived my whole life in LA except for the four years in the Air Force.  I used to tell people I had lived all over, North Hollywood, Atwater, Glassell Park, Highland Park and La Crescenta.  I told them, one time, I had even lived 11 miles away from where I was born.  Now I moved 400 miles north.     I loved LA but I wanted to see what life was like elsewhere. 

I moved in with Susan in Marin County just across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco.  I continued to work for California Commerce Bank in Los Angeles.  The President of the bank kept me around as an insurance policy against the problems the bank had had before I came.  I supposedly worked in San Jose but that office closed.  After that I worked at home and went to LA when I needed to.  Two years after the first satisfactory examination, I got us a second satisfactory CRA exam.  I put real effort into the job.  It wasn't easy but it didn't require a lot of time.  Salvador, the President of the bank, was satisfied with that.  I worked half time and got paid full time.

I enjoyed kayaking, cycling, hiking and just leading a life of leisure.  Susan went from the Phone Company to Odwalla, the juice company. After 6 months she was fired.  They didn’t really want to run a decent company, they just wanted window dressing.  A few months after she left Odwalla had an outbreak of E. coli from their juice.  One child died, many were sickened and they were found guilty of criminal negligence.  After Odwalla Susan worked as a consultant and finally went to work for Citibank as their CRA manager for California.  After I left California Commerce, a subsidiary of Banamex, Citibank bought Banamex and my successor at California Commerce Bank worked for Susan. 

At first I felt very unrooted living in the Bay Area.  Professionally no one knew who I was and San Francisco is very different from LA.  It seemed in non-profits and economic development that people of color still naturally had the advantage but in San Francisco the gay community added an extra twist and being a straight white male was no advantage in non-profits.  In Los Angeles I had been well known and respected.  In San Francisco I felt discounted as a white middle aged male from the suburbs.    

I never became an ex-Angeleno, one of those people who denounces LA.  I described myself as an unrepentant Angeleno or an Angeleno in exile.  I did come to appreciate the Bay Area where it’s OK and even common to be literate and where their universities are better known for academics than for their football teams.  In LA, unfortunately it's true, people seem much more ready to discuss the movie than the book.  The neighborhoods in San Francisco and the East Bay are fabulous, unlike anything in LA.  And I’ve even become a foodie.  For the first few years I had a foot in both worlds, but when I quit banking and started working for the City of San Francisco I had to admit I had become a Bay Area person. 

We lived in Mill Valley for awhile, in a beautiful home Susan owned on the hillside above Boyle Park.  Then we moved to Half Moon Bay where she worked for Odwalla.  Half Moon Bay was interesting for being so close to San Francisco but so far away at the same time, isolated by roads that closed in winter storms and otherwise frequently jammed with traffic. We got married in April of 1996 when we lived in Half Moon Bay.  After Odwalla let Susan go we moved back to Mill Valley

In 1999 I quit California Commerce and stopped commuting.  Staying in the Bay Area helped me to begin to put down roots. 

Once when I was counseling at Consumer Credit Counselors I asked my usual question, “Are you a native San Franciscan.” 

The woman answered, “No, but I’ve lived here so long, I think of myself as a native.”

“How long have you lived here?” I asked. 

“Seven years,” she said.   

By then I had been in the Bay Area for almost seven years myself and I didn’t feel almost native at all, but it did make me think I should start accepting the Bay Area as home.  Seven years is a long time.   

In 2001 I went to work for the City of San Francisco in their Juvenile Hall.  Juvenile Hall and Parks would never have happened for me if I hadn’t moved up to the Bay Area.  For that alone I always counted myself lucky to have moved. 

Between Susan and me, the crisis in our marriage came when Susan lost her cleaning lady and I did laundry for both of us.  I drew the line at folding her clothes.  It was a small thing but it reminded me of the Paul Simon song, “she liked to sleep with the window open.  I liked to sleep with it closed.”  Susan wasn’t having it and we had to go to counseling.  Susan was a dominant personality and I am an independent person.  Our marriage survived when she got a job in LA and I stayed in Oakland.  We were good at a part time marriage.  Our marriage became untenable when she moved back to the Bay Area and we began living together again.

After ten years or so it was hard to deny that I wasn’t at home in the Bay Area.  Now with 18 years in the Bay Area, I don't even try.  I am a Bay Area person. 

I love the beauty of it, I love the culture, I love the diversity, and I love the Bay Area.  I also love LA but I have to admit every time I go down there I notice the traffic, the rushing everywhere, the prominence of the Hollywood culture, and the incredible distances in Los Angeles.  LA is like a city in a centrifuge; flying away from its own center.  And the air is bad. When I visit LA I try to keep my complaints to myself, but sometimes they slip out.

I miss the mountains, the wilderness, the desert, LA’s Mexican heart, the vitality of it all, LA’s lack of self consciousness and smugness and the way LA is always changing.  I miss the vibrant arts and the museums in LA.  I miss a town that has a nickname for itself.  I miss mild winter days in LA.        

Paloma and Suzette think the Bay Area is home.  I have friends here and a working of knowledge of the local history and geography.  I am a Bay Area person with strong LA ties.