by Eric Blehm
“First, we were inspired by this amazing artwork, and then we walked outside only to find ourselves in this amazing natural amphitheater.” The granite cliffs glowed in the moonlight, the pine trees shot up into a sky full of stars, and Judi and Gail had Randy between them, the three happily holding hands as they headed toward Judi’s dorm room at Happy Isles.
“Gail let go,” says Judi, “and I never did.”
It wasn’t long before Judi was a frequent guest at the Morgensons’ residence on the Ahwahnee Meadow, drinking cocktails in the yard and watching evening light on Half Dome before being called in to dinner. The protocol of the Morgenson household was a bit surreal for Judi, whose own family life was more unstructured. She was impressed by Esther’s attention to detail—how she wrapped everything she put in the freezer slowly and artistically in plastic, like Christmas gifts. At the dinner table, Judi appreciated to the point of awe the image of Dana at one end carving the meat and Esther at the other end serving the salad, of plates passed from one person to the next until everyone was served. Then, and only then, did anyone lift a fork.
Judi learned quickly that Esther was the sensitive and quiet artist while Dana was the engaging diplomat with a confident command of language. Randy, she observed, had inherited both his mother’s sensitivity and his father’s way with words; he was also handsome, with thick, dark hair and expressive, gentle eyes that held a hint of something she couldn’t put her finger on. Mystery, perhaps. By the time her job ended and she had to return to the city for school, Randy had captured her heart.
HIS OWN HEART FILLED with romance, Randy strove to get his photography and his stories published. He’d been taking notes in the backcountry and made dozens of prints from both his travels abroad and the Sierra that he sent off to various magazines. He read the letters he’d written home, all of which his mother had typed up, and reviewed his journals. And what more inspiring setting to write one’s memoirs than staring off toward Half Dome as the first winter snows dusted the valley?
As temperatures dropped and tourists fled, an unlikely mentor arrived—perhaps to research a book or to visit Ansel Adams, or likely he just knew that this was the best time to come to Yosemite. Perhaps he came to see Dana Morgenson, who had become a bit of a celebrity himself in botanical circles. Regardless, Wallace Stegner ended up in the Morgensons’ living room that autumn of 1971.
He’d just won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Angle of Repose and was about to begin his final year teaching at Stanford University, where he’d founded the creative writing program in 1946. In the ensuing decades, he had taught hundreds of students, some of whom had been awarded a Stegner Fellowship: Wendell Berry, Ken Kesey, Ernest Gaines, Raymond Carver, and Edward Abbey.
During the course of eco-fired conversation—snowmobile usage in the national parks and other such controversies of the times—Stegner learned of Randy’s aspirations as a writer and offered to read something he had written. Randy had just refined two stories, “Little Town of Golapangri” and “Within Mountains,” both of which left Yosemite Valley in Wallace Stegner’s satchel.
By Christmas, Randy had received a handful of rejection letters for other articles he’d submitted to magazines, but he had heard nothing from Stegner. He’d almost given up when, after the new year, it arrived: two single-spaced typed pages on the letterhead of Stanford University.
“I’ve been interested to read your two pieces,” wrote Stegner on January 26, 1972. “They’re literate, sensitive, and earnest, and they probably made you feel good when you wrote them…. But, I doubt they’ll do for publication…. I’ll try to tell you why, always with the risk of being blunt and seeming unfriendly.”
First Stegner commented on “Within Mountains,” which had been inspired by LeConte Canyon:
It’s all about your feelings and sensations, and those don’t communicate well to a reader. He half feels you indulging a sort of yeasty nature mysticism, and he has no way to join you in it because you give him nothing concrete enough to see or smell or touch or hear. Your pictures are all generalized…. There is no foreground, middle ground, background; there are not even details, but only generalizations of details. ‘As warm sunlight reaches into the canyon, chipmunks and chickarees chase over Sierra slickrock and across dried grassy places.’…It is a generalized sunlight hitting not a place…but a generalized Nature crossed by anonymous and generalized little beasties. I would feel the emotions this…arouses in you if I could put myself in your shoes….
And so through the whole essay. You come at us emotion first. You try to evoke the emotions without ever giving us the particular place, picture, actions, sense impressions, that might let us feel as you do. Does this mean anything to you? It may be that you’re feeling the influences of Muir, who did get away with a lot of generalizing of that kind. But he got away with it partly because he had a sort of exclamatory genius, he was a whirling dervish of Nature, and not all of us can be anything like that…. If I were you, I’d follow Thoreau or somebody like that rather than Muir…. You may take it as my version of an almost-infallible rule of thumb that nature description by itself is very hard to get away with—it’s necessarily pretty inert and undramatic…. You know a lot about the mountains that doesn’t show here. If you tried to tell us what you know, your feelings about the mountains would probably come across more strongly than they do when you work on the feelings exclusively.
Stegner then gave an equally honest, scathing critique of “Little Town of Golapangri.” He ended the letter by reiterating:
I do think that you have to steer away from the general, quit looking at the heavens and thinking large vague thoughts and feeling large vague feelings, and start watching the pebbles and ants and sunshine and shadow right under your feet. If you can learn that, and discipline yourself to keep remembering it, you can do with words what you obviously want to do with them.
Good luck. My best to your family, who were one of the pleasantest things about Yosemite. And just a word: A French friend who yesterday blew in from Paris tells me that France has totally banned snowmobiles, anywhere. Who are we that we should trail behind the French? What’s the status on snowmobiles in the park, now? Any decisions?
Best,
Wallace Stegner
Randy replied promptly.
Dear Mr. Stegner—
I owe you a large thank-you for…the honest worth of your criticism. Both barrels is what I’ve been asking for from many quarters for some time, without getting it. I’ve no illusions about literary genius, though I remain confident enough in a rapport with words to hope I could reach some success in writing with a little helpful guidance. Thank you.
I would like to send you something again when I get it to a point that seems right, which may be awhile, if I may…
In closing, Randy continued the snowmobile banter:
Apparently there is no change in status of snowmobiles here. They are permitted on the Tioga and Glacier Point roads only; the latter is patrolled by a skiing ranger, the former is not…perhaps in this age of motors we should be happy they are as restricted as they are, if the restriction works. I’ve not talked to anyone who knows that snowmobiles are roaring through forbidden territory in the park, but even so I can’t let go of the dozen things wrong with any use of them here.
Within a month, Stegner replied:
Dear Randy,
I’m glad you weren’t permanently disabled by my criticisms, and that you’re going on to try other things and other ways. The literary business is a contact sport—you have to like bruises and knocks to stay in it.
These letters were the beginning of a string of correspondence that would span years. Stegner continued to encourage Randy to send him his writings, while Randy kept Wallace abreast of issues within the National Park Service, fishing around for information and becoming a sort of stringer for Stegner’s kindred bent toward environmentalism.
On March 2, 1972, Stegner wrote:
Dear Randy:
Ma
ny thanks for the latest dope on snowmobiles. The NPS may mutter about my misunderstanding, hearing “park” when they said, “Valley,” but it ain’t so. There was an effort, I’m sure, to shut the machines out of the whole park, and that’s what the director mentioned to me. But I guess the lobby was too strong, or fear of it was. In any case, Morton’s recent announcement about limiting visitation in the wilderness areas of Great Smokes, Sequoia Kings Canyon, and Rocky Mountain is a hopeful sign for the future. So is the really drastic shutting-down on the poisoning of wildlife on federal lands. Stan Cain, who used to be Assistant Secretary under Udall, and was unable to stop the Fish and Wildlife boys from their poison baiting, was here the other night for dinner, and is very optimistic that the battle is nearly won. So cheers. It’ll only take four more lifetimes. Meantime the desert will be all plowed under by off-trail bikes, long before the high country is gone. Retreat upward.
Best,
Wallace Stegner
BY THE SUMMER OF 1973 the only thing Randy had “published” was this handwritten note he stuck to the door of his ranger station at McClure Meadow:
Welcome to John Muir’s Range of Light, to Kings Canyon National Park.
Only one tiny request—please respect and care for these mountains. Especially refrain from discarding litter. Foil, cans, and glass will not self-destruct. They remain for years. Please don’t try to burn foil in your campfire. No one likes to see garbage in the mountains, least of all you. And we have no garbage collection service here. Only we can preserve these mountains in a natural and beautiful condition for us to continue enjoying. It will be a very long time before an Ice Age cleans them of our tracks, or new mountains are created in their place.
Please, please consider enough the life of a pretty meadow to refrain from camping in any, particularly from building a fire on one. Would you build a fire on your own lawn? At these high elevations a burned spot will probably never recover. There will always be the ugly mark of your campfire. I ask you to leave beauty as you walk through the mountains. HAVE A GOOD DAY!
Randy Morgenson, Evolution Ranger
It wasn’t Pulitzer material, but word got around. His journal entries from Rae Lakes in 1965, Charlotte Lake in 1966, LeConte Canyon in 1971, and McClure Meadow in 1972 were good reading, not just the standard logbook fodder recorded by most of the rangers that included miles hiked, weather reports, number of people contacted, citations issued, medevacs performed, lost Boy Scouts found—oftentimes written with that much detail, and no emotion.
“Then Randy came along and started something. He put to words what we felt in the backcountry,” says one of his fellow rangers. “Nobody had really done that, but he took care to convey his emotions. You couldn’t put down a logbook written by Randy without knowing, full well, his love for these mountains—and all the crap he’d put up with as a ranger.” It was, in fact, Randy’s suggestion not only that these logbooks be archived at park headquarters but also that they be photocopied and kept in files at the individual duty stations where they’d been written, so that future rangers could reference them for a “ranger’s point of view” of the country they’d be taking care of and the problems to anticipate.
Whereas Randy’s writing career had yet to bud, his relationship with Judi had flowered. The season after they’d met, he’d asked her to “walk in” and see him at McClure Meadow. The walk in had been a rude awakening for Judi, who toughed it out through 18 miles of wilderness and was still 9 miles short come nightfall. The bats were out and the birds had gone quiet when she was “taken in” (according to Randy; “rescued,” according to Judi) by another ranger whom Randy had asked to keep an eye out while she hiked through his territory.
The following day Judi could barely walk she was so sore, but she hit the trail early in order to impress Randy. He met her en route, making the remaining miles to McClure Meadow dissolve by telling animated stories of every plant, creature, and rock they passed. That night, the hike in was forgotten. He made her dinner while she soaked her feet in a pail of water. She slept in his arms, feeling as safe and content as she’d ever felt in her life.
IN OCTOBER 1973, Randy and Judi took their first vacation together, a three-month road trip focused in southern Utah, where their lovers’ bond was strengthened in anything but comfort. There was no semblance of civilized courting or chivalrous romance of the box-of-chocolates sort. They camped in dry desert washes off the sides of rutted roads. Baths were often a bucket of cold water because Randy strove to avoid burning even dead wood, knowing he was taking away from the life-sustaining nourishment the desert soil desperately needed. They stayed off paved surfaces completely for almost a month, until Randy decided to share with Judi a special place he associated with his youth: the Four Corners Monument, where Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona come together.
As they drove, Randy recounted the trip to Judi. He had been 11 years old, sitting with his brother in the backseat of his parents’ 1940 Buick LaSalle. He had swallowed dust on that washboard of a road all day, bouncing and lurching until the road deteriorated into two sandy tracks—parallel lines through the prairie grasses that became so deeply rutted the LaSalle could go no farther. At that point, they walked through the desert until they reached a large cairn of stones, with four lines of rocks leading away a short distance, representing the state lines. Randy explained how he felt there was magic in that spot, and his father, like a child himself, ran in circles around the pile of rocks, calling out the states as he stepped in each one, “Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona…” It was infectious; the rest of the family joined in and they all ended up out of breath, laughing, just the four of them in the desert.
More than twenty years later, Randy and Judi retraced his childhood trip on a wide blacktop road “so smooth and straight it’s a fight to stay awake on a hot day,” he wrote in his diary.
They camped well off the paved road on the remnants of what Randy surmised was the original road he’d driven with his parents. As the sky darkened and the ground turned white with frost, they noticed a dim yellow glow ahead. From the warmth of their sleeping bags in the back of the pickup truck, the two mused: Was this glow the Four Corners Monument become an “all-night interpretive display”? Or was it a heated “comfort station with flush toilets and camper-trailer hookups”?
In the morning, they headed out on Randy’s second pilgrimage to the Four Corners, “to take a measurement of the progress the nation makes toward providing access to all its corners for all its people.” What Randy found in the place of that once-magical cairn of rocks he described as “a crime against land and against people, a mockery of human intelligence and a true measure of our worth as a culture upon the hapless surface of our gentle planet.
“There is no Four Corners anymore. They’ve Paved it!
“As Glen Canyon has been supplanted by a lake, the Four Corners, the plot of ground where 4 surveyed states come together has been supplanted by asphalt and cement. The Four Corners has been paved and ringed by canopied picnic tables, trash barrels and pit privies, paper sacks, Kleenex, and cans. A wide cement platform covers the actual spot. Consider it a moment. In celebration of the only spot where 4 states’ corners meet, we have poured upon it concrete and asphalt. That says more than I could ever write about America. Destroy it to celebrate it.
“But we missed a bet. As usual we bungled it. The spot should have been asphalted, or cemented at ground level. Then we would have provided the traveling, tax paying public the only spot in the U.S. where we could be in 4 states at once without even getting out of our car. Bumper stickers could have been sold, and proudly worn by those who accomplished it. It’s sad the engineers have so little taste. Thrills for the common motorist are becoming increasingly difficult to collect.”
Combine this soured memory with the “smurky” horizon they encountered while approaching the power plants of Farmington, and Randy was spewing equal parts piss and vinegar in his diary. “I’m sick. I want to vomit, an
d swear at the top of my lungs with all my vocal strength, or better, destroy something, like a dam, or a coal-burning power plant.”
In his eco-vehemence, Randy was ahead of his time. It would be another two years before environmental activism (or eco-terrorism, depending on your perspective) would be brought into the mainstream literary limelight via the monkey-wrenching mayhem of Edward Abbey’s loosely fictional heroes right there in southern Utah.
Judi knew early on in their relationship that she had fallen in love with a man whose heart would always belong to the wilds. He’d dropped plenty of hints. “If I can manage it, I’ll be in the mountains every summer for the rest of my life,” he’d told her, “and you’ll come with me, won’t you? You’ll visit, won’t you?” But there had been times when his comments were more like warnings: “You know the mountains are in my blood? They’ll always call to me.”
But Judi was fine with Randy’s bond with the wilderness, because as much as she loved being together, she had an independent streak of her own that made their union complete. Solitude, she’d found, nurtured her artistic creativity. Just as he wandered the hills, she found galleries to be her temples and cathedrals. And now, thanks to Randy, she’d been introduced to the wilds. Her journeys with him in the High Sierra and the deserts of the Southwest would forever be a source of inspiration, resulting in ideas that she was confident would ultimately be on display in art galleries. She knew it just as surely as she knew she’d follow this man, this ranger with a confident disposition, anywhere.
RICK SMITH WAS one of the charter members of the Yosemite Mafia. Smith began his career as a seasonal ranger for eleven years in Yellowstone. Then, after two years as a Peace Corps volunteer in Paraguay, he was hired in Yosemite as a seasonal; a few years later, shortly after the riots, he became permanent. An expert skier, he was promoted to the position of Badger Pass ranger and Tuolumne district ranger beginning in the winter of 1974–1975, the same winter Randy applied for the position of Nordic ranger—one of the more physically grueling, adventurous, and coveted jobs in Yosemite. Two positions were available.
