Ranger Confidential Read online

  2

  PLOVER PATROL

  On his first day working for Cape Cod National Seashore, the district ranger issued Chris Fors his gear—a black plastic briefcase, a metal clipboard, a ticket book, a box of bullets, and a revolver. The gun, a hand-me-down from the FBI, was an old .38 Smith and Wesson six-shooter. It was a cool pistol, though. It looked like an antique.

  After showing his new employee around the office, it was time for a lunch break. The boss suggested that Chris try a local diner in the nearby community of Provincetown, Massachusetts. Chris Fors had a deeply masculine voice and his Yankee accent was quite strong, but to an original Cape Codder, even a born-and-bred New Englander like Chris would always be an outsider.

  When the young ranger entered the diner and ordered his food, the locals in the place didn’t pay much attention to him. He wasn’t wearing a uniform, and with his Scandinavian skin, short blond hair, wire-rim glasses, and young face, he looked like a tourist. Just another college kid sitting alone at a table, eating his fried clam strips. A pair of salty Cape Codders slid into the booth in front of him. The men appeared to be on their lunch break from the dock or the cannery. Chris could overhear their conversation. They were bitching about the ranger’s new employer, the National Park Service.

  A sixty-mile peninsula of gravel and sand that reaches out into the Atlantic like a beckoning finger, Cape Cod is one of the longest expanses of uninterrupted sandy shoreline on the East Coast. It is also one of the few remaining nesting habitats for the piping plover, a bird named for its whistling song—a plaintive peep-lo, peep-lo—that, like the Hank Williams whippoorwill, sounds as though the bird is calling for a long lost lover. Weighing less than a cup of coffee and covered with feathers the same smoky beige as dry sand, the piping plover has a black ring around its neck. A black band across its forehead connects two disproportionately large eyes. Thumb through the Peterson Field Guide to Birds of North America and you will see that the piping plover (Charadrius melodus) is not the most beautiful bird in the book, but it is certainly one of the cutest. It is a teddy bear among North American shorebirds, and we almost lost it forever, twice.

  The first time was in the years before 1918, when fashion called for real bird feathers in women’s hats. After the Migratory Bird Treaty Act passed in 1918, plover populations rebounded until the boom years following World War II. The Migratory Bird Treaty protected birds from plumage hunters; it did not, however, protect them from cars and condominiums. Threatened once again, the piping plover became an endangered species in 1986. By 1988 the Cape Cod population had dwindled to thirteen breeding pairs.

  Plovers build their nests out of nothing more than dimples in the sand. Sometimes the birds decorate their nests with sea-polished rocks and shiny fragments of seashells before the female lays four mottled eggs. The sandy color camouflages these eggs from predators, such as foxes and seagulls, but it also contributes to the eggs being crushed by shoes and off-road vehicle (ORV) tires. Chris Fors arrived at Cape Cod in May 1989. The summer nesting season for piping plovers had begun, and the park superintendent had ordered the closure of several beaches to ORVs. These closures turned the piping plover into the spotted owl of the East Coast.

  As he ate his lunch in that Provincetown diner, Chris eavesdropped on the angry locals. The men were working themselves into a fury, complaining about park policies and verbally burning the little piping plover in effigy. “Let’s go on an egg-stomping hunt,” one man said. “No,” said the other, “let’s take a shotgun and blow a bunch of the little bastards to bits.”

  Then one of them suggested something so radical the young ranger nearly choked on a french fry.

  “Why don’t we torch the ranger station?”

  “Yeah,” the other one agreed, “like those guys did in Tennessee!” Recently, in response to another unpopular park policy in another national park, some locals in Tennessee had burned down an entrance station in the Great Smoky Mountains. The men had seen it in the paper. It sounded like something they should do too.

  This conversation put Chris Fors on high alert. The men left the restaurant and climbed into a couple of rusty pickup trucks. When Chris rushed to write down the license plate numbers, he didn’t have a pen on him!

  Chris returned to the ranger station and showed his new boss a napkin with license plate numbers written by a finger dipped in ketchup ink. The district ranger was astonished. The new kid had turned up quite a doozy. On his first day! Before he even had a uniform! What a shit magnet!

  The incensed locals ended up being more talk than action, or perhaps they noticed that the federal government had them under surveillance. In any case, they didn’t torch any government buildings. They didn’t blow any “little bastards” to bits. However, these men were far from the last confrontational locals threatening violence that Chris would encounter.

  * * *

  As a boy, Chris Fors did not want to be a park ranger; he wanted to be a fireman. Whenever the sirens came through his neighborhood, he ran out of the house, jumped on his bike, and pedaled like mad to the end of the street. Watching the fire trucks go by, Chris felt a little jolt of adrenaline. It felt good. It was a comforting distraction from the arguing and drinking going on at home. One summer, when Chris was ten, his dad loaded him and his two sisters into the car and they headed west for the Great American National Park Vacation. When he recalled the trip many years later, what remained foremost in his mind, other than the fact that Mom had stayed home, was the tragic event at Yellowstone. He had left his Matchbox cars, his entire collection, under a lodgepole pine at their last campsite. But by the time Chris remembered his forgotten toys, Dad was well on his way to the next park on the list. It was too late to turn back.

  The vacation felt odd and sad. Dad kept an open can of beer between his legs as he drove, and whenever a cop came up in the rearview mirror, he asked Chris to hide the beer for him. On their way to see the Grand Canyon, they stopped in Las Vegas for the night and got a hotel room. Chris and his sisters watched television while Dad went out. The next morning their father announced that the vacation would be cut short. They had spent all their vacation money. On their way back to Massachusetts, they took a short side trip to see the Grand Canyon.

  Chris’s first view of the seventh natural wonder of the world made little impact on his young mind. He was ten years old. Old enough to know that something was wrong with a dad who drinks all the time. Old enough to be depressed about his parents’ impending divorce. Young enough to be even more depressed about the toys he’d left behind in Yellowstone National Park. In light of all this, the Grand Canyon was just another big empty hole in the ground.

  When Chris was sixteen he volunteered as an “on-call” probationary firefighter. At nineteen he became an emergency medical technician (EMT). He paid his way through college by working as an emergency dispatcher and an ambulance driver. An exceptional artistic talent earned him a spot in a landscape architecture program at a prestigious school in Rhode Island. While his classmates designed entryways to shopping malls and lawyers’ offices, Chris drew up plans for fire stations and fire engines. It took less than a year to see that a career in landscape architecture would be long on salary but short on adrenaline. He dropped out of the design school and enrolled in the Natural Resources program at the University of Massachusetts.

  It wasn’t easy to decide what to be. A fireman? An EMT? A cop? How about a game warden? The times his father had taken him hunting and fishing were islands of good family memories in a stormy sea. Chris was already leaning toward the profession of game warden when a friend told him about a park ranger course they were offering at UMass. If you took the ranger class, you could apply for a summer job at Cape Cod National Seashore. Park rangers were cops, firemen, EMTs, and game wardens! You could be a park ranger and do it all! All of the fun stuff in one job. For one paycheck. Neat!

 
* * *

  Public nudity at Cape Cod was a cocklebur in the briefs of the superintendent. And he passed this minor, yet ever-present, irritation onto his rangers. “This particular freedom—there’s nothing like it,” one nudist told a reporter for the Provincetown Banner. “It’s not a sexual thing; it’s a spiritual nature-loving thing.” The Park Service, however, remained unsympathetic to the close-to-nature attributes of nude sunbathing. Unofficial clothing-optional beaches resulted in public spectacles. Looky-loos bottlenecked traffic on the highways. Some people were trampling fragile plants by running up to the tops of sand dunes for a better view. Rangers were told to use “the lowest level action necessary to ensure compliance.” This was code for enforce the law, but don’t write any tickets—and for God’s sake, be sure to “remove your sunglasses and smile when you talk to these people.”

  Sure, okay, Chris thought; getting out of his patrol car to talk to topless women was fine by him. But there were times he wondered if things had gotten out of hand. Especially when he had to approach families carrying lawn chairs, beach towels, and seahorse float rings, pull the male adult aside, and say something like, “I’m sorry sir, but I don’t recommend this beach.”

  “What do you mean?” The tourist wanted to know. “This beach looks fine to me.”

  “There are all kinds of beaches here at Cape Cod National Seashore. There’s the topless beach and there’s the full frontal beach, the straight beach, the lesbian beach, and the gay beach. Did you see all the cars parked on the side of the highway? Well, those are the people who came to see the scenery. No, not the natural scenery—the au naturel scenery, if you know what I mean. And I’m afraid some of those people aren’t the type you want within two miles of your wife and kids. I suggest you drive over to . . . ”

  “But we’ve walked all this way, with all this stuff.”

  “Uh, but this beach is where, uh, the homosexuals, they, uh.”

  “Look, ranger, I don’t have anything against homosexuals.”

  “But sir, these guys call themselves ‘The Dune Bunnies.’ See those sand dunes there? They climb to the top of the highest dune, strip down, and get it on right there in the open, in broad daylight. It’s quite the free sex show, let me tell ya.”

  “Here? In the park?” The tourist couldn’t fathom what the twenty-two-year-old park ranger was telling him.

  Lewdness was not a rare thing at Cape Cod. Chris participated in a few undercover sting operations where young male rangers posed as homosexuals in an attempt to put a stop to the exhibitionist sexual trysts taking place along a park nature trail through a charming grove of trees rangers called the “Enchanted Forest.” The rangers took a lot of heat for their “overzealous law enforcement.” Even sexual adventurers don’t like being busted. Nor do nudists, topless women, or losers who drive all the way from Canada to hide in the bushes and spy on sunbathers.

  Some days Cape Cod rangers used all-terrain vehicles (ATVs) to patrol the sand roads that remained open even when the beaches were closed to motorized traffic. During such ATV patrols, Chris Fors stayed busy with keeping Jeeps out of the plover nesting areas, dogs on leashes, and bathing suits on bodies.

  One hot July day, Chris stopped his ATV at a point where he could see between two dunes to the beach. On the sand was a woman he had warned earlier for topless sunbathing. The woman had put her top on as he had asked, but as most people did, she had removed it again as soon as the ranger left. Now she was topless again, lying on her stomach, and a man was standing above her. It looked strange. Something was wrong about it, but Chris couldn’t tell what. Until he saw the jerking motions.

  He must have appreciated the poetic justice and the craziness of it all. Because on that day in July, when Chris saw the pervert masturbating above the oblivious topless sunbather, the ranger knew he was going to make his first arrest. A righteous arrest. An arrest the superintendent had to agree with, and one the chief ranger couldn’t second-guess. A man was committing a flagrant act of open and gross lewdness in front of a defenseless woman. Here? In the park? Not on his watch! Chris cranked down on the accelerator of his ATV. He couldn’t wait to bust that perverted freak.

  As soon as the perverted freak saw the ranger, he zipped it up and sprinted for the bushes. Chris caught and cuffed the guy, and when the sunbather figured out what had nearly happened, she ran up to her hero and said, “Thank you, trooper!”

  Standing next to the bikini-clad lady, Chris felt great, like a good guy. Still, did she have to call him a trooper? Couldn’t she see the patches on his ball cap and on his sleeve, the brown arrowhead-shaped fabric with the bison and the sequoia tree and the snowcapped mountains under the words “National Park Service”? Was it really that difficult to figure out? Wasn’t it obvious? He didn’t work for the state. He wasn’t a trooper. He wasn’t a police officer, and he wasn’t a forest ranger, either. There are national forests, and there are national parks. Cape Cod National Seashore was a national park. He was a park ranger. If she was going to call him a hero, was it too much to ask that she give credit where credit was due?

  “I’m a park ranger, ma’am.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. Ranger, trooper, whatever,” she said. “Thank God you showed up when you did!”

  After a week of saving topless damsels from drooling perverts and protecting cuddly critters from ignorant brutes, the time came when Chris and a few other Cape Cod rangers felt as though they deserved a night on the town. They got off work and went home and showered for the second time that day. Then they put on their best shirts and their cleanest jeans and headed out to a local bar. Hey, maybe some girls would be there. Pretty girls who would like to meet some park rangers. But once the rangers entered the club, it was obvious they were not welcome by some of the locals.

  “Here come the pine pigs,” murmured someone at the end of the bar. Then the lead singer of the Provincetown Jug Band, a town favorite, grabbed the microphone and announced the arrival of the “Tits and Ass Plover Patrol.” Laughter filled the dark room. Chris smiled and tipped his beer bottle to the band. It was funny. Still, he wished they would hurry up and start singing the next song. But the crowd loved the joke, so the band milked it until it was dry.

  Four months on the Tits and Ass Plover Patrol and Chris began to feel a peculiar pull. Yellowstone. Yosemite. The Grand Canyon. The big parks. The “Crown Jewel” parks. The parks symbolized by the arrowhead patch he wore on his sleeve. The parks with bigger animals to protect, bigger scenery to guard, and bigger bad guys to bust. Sure, Cape Cod was cool. But a ranger born in the east longed to be out west where the national park idea began—in the wildest, rockiest, most majestic landscapes of western North America.

  Back then if you told Chris Fors that, after living and working in a big park in western North America, a park ranger would suffer from paranoia, anxiety attacks, and nightmares—gruesome dreams that would wake him up screaming and grasping at his sheets—the twenty-two-year-old New Englander would have called you a loon.

  3

  FAINT AT HEART

  I became a park ranger because I had nothing better to do. Just as my parents had predicted, a Forestry degree from the University of Tennessee did not make my résumé a valuable commodity. And my career goals were vague. I knew only that I wanted to work outdoors. I applied for a job as a forester for a logging company but later learned that a woman had less than a spotted owl’s chance of working for that outfit. I worked a summer as a naturalist for the Tennessee State Parks. I volunteered for the USDA Forest Service. I had experience as a zookeeper and contemplated becoming a veterinarian.

  The one profession I never considered was that of a federal cop. Yet when a boyfriend invited me to join him on a six-week course for people wanting to be law enforcement rangers for the National Park Service, I said, why not? At the time I was an honors graduate who bagged groceries for a living. Learning
how to drive fast, shoot guns, and handcuff people sounded like fun. I was flattered when a district ranger from Cape Hatteras National Seashore called and offered me a summer job before I had even finished the academy.

  In April 1987, at the age of twenty-three, I packed everything I owned into a sputtering car and drove across the state of North Carolina. I lived on Bodie Island in a mobile home I shared with my boyfriend, who was also a ranger. Our singlewide trailer sat on an exposed cinder-block foundation. The view outside our dining room window was the lee side of a sand dune growing lush with beach grass and sea oats. Most days, the dune provided a measure of protection from the elements. But when the nor’easters blew in, our weather-beaten trailer shrieked and moaned like a scorned banshee.

  * * *

  In the coastal waters off Cape Hatteras, near the shoals we call the Graveyard of the Atlantic, swims a mighty and fearsome fish. The largest ever reeled in weighed thirty-one pounds. Twelve-pounders are not uncommon. They have strong jaws, sharp teeth, and fighting spirits. Landing one is a rush. The locals call them “blues,” and when a pack of Atlantic bluefish attacks a school of smaller fish, they call it a “bluefish blitz.”

  During my patrols along the coasts of North Carolina’s Outer Banks, I saw days when the fishing was good and days when the fishing was damn good. I saw days when all a man had to do was toss a hook into a splashing mass of violence and he was sure to pull something out. I saw days when a bluefish blitz instilled a terror so profound that smaller fish jumped out of the water and onto the shore by the hundreds because a gill-flapping death in the sand was preferable to the teeth of the blues. I saw days when women and children walked the beach to scoop up scores of live sea trout, dropping fish into buckets as if they were berries from a bush.