* * *
The first federal employee to see the Grand Canyon was Lt. Joseph Ives. Sent by the U.S. Army to explore the area in 1857, Ives returned to Washington and submitted his official report to the U.S. Senate. In this report the Army lieutenant compared his first trek into the “Big Cañon of the Colorado” to entering the portals of “the infernal regions.” Ives wrote that when he and his men entered the canyon for the first time, they heard harsh screams and imagined that apparitions of goblinlike figures were perched in the hollows of the impending cliffs.
I’m not sure what it is about the Grand Canyon that unsettles me more, the park’s indifference to humanity or its stark reflection of my own duality. Like Lieutenant Ives did in 1857, I, too, have heard “harsh screams” while hiking in the canyon. But when I looked up, there were hawks soaring overhead. Any gargoyles I imagined peering down on me from the sandstone ledges were probably the contented ghosts of the Anasazi, revisiting their ancient food caches. And where I had begun to see a chaotic abyss filled with death and violence, young rangers like Cale Shaffer saw the beauty of God’s creation and opportunities to save lives. Yet when people ask me to name my favorite national park, I never hesitate; although my relationship with the Grand Canyon will always be a peculiar affair.
* * *
A month after the Havasu mission, I hiked down the South Kaibab Trail after putting in a full day at the office. The late start had me yearning for my backcountry home—the ranger station—where a meal, a bottle of wine, and a bed awaited me. Descending the switchbacks below Cedar Ridge, I saw bright splotches of blood on the sandy boulders alongside the trail. I figured the blood must be from a hiker’s high-elevation-induced nosebleed. As I continued hiking I saw more and more drops of fresh blood, which were getting larger and larger. This was some nosebleed. Right then, a hiker ran up the trail to meet me. Panting with excitement, the man pointed to the switchbacks below us and said, “There’s a severed ear on the trail down there!”
I was more miffed than shocked. A friggin’ severed ear. How do you like that? The paperwork alone was going to take hours. Forget the fettuccini. Forget the Cabernet. Forget the cushy bed. Your night off has officially been fucked.
“Hey, ranger,” the hiker tapped me on the shoulder. “Did you hear what I said? There’s a six-point deer on the trail down there!” He lifted up his camera. “I got an excellent picture of it.”
The poor guy. He had no idea. The only response the grim-faced lady ranger could give him was better left unspoken. Something was seriously wrong with me.
23
PINE PIGS
On the South Kaibab Trail, six tough miles from the nearest road, the night skies were black. Until a rescue helicopter could fly in at dawn, I was on my own. I poured orange Gatorade powder onto a saltine cracker and held it to my patient’s lips.
“But I’m thirsty!” she said.
“Salt is what you need, ma’am, not water.” I was under the impression that my fifty-two-year-old patient and her daughter didn’t like me. If so, I understood why. I despised my stiff, patronizing tone as much as they did. Still, the ill hiker desperately needed my help. She nibbled on the cracker and, to my relief, was able to keep it down. When I tested the woman’s blood sodium, my portable machine had blinked up a shocking number. Maybe this seemingly perverse snack would balance out the woman’s electrolytes and we would get through the night without her seizing on me.
Sometime after midnight my patient said, “I need to pee. Right now!” She didn’t have the strength to walk or stand. Her daughter and I lifted her 180-pound body by the arms so that she could lean backward over a ditch alongside the trail. She let loose her bladder and the fluid splashed off the sandstone, showering my calves and hiking boots with urine. But I was delighted to see all the excess water leaving the woman’s body.
Once my patient fell asleep, I turned off my headlamp to conserve the battery. Northern Arizona’s clear skies had made it easy to pick out the fuzzy tail of Hale-Bopp. This comet had kept me company on many all-nighters during the spring of 1997. (I had worked mostly twelve-plus-hour shifts for the entire month of March without a day off.) I pulled my knees to my chest and leaned back against a sandstone boulder. I was going to rest my eyes. Just for a minute. Around 3:30 a.m. I awoke with a jolt. My patient was snoring. I had dozed off long enough to dream of a crashing helicopter and mauling grizzlies.
By dawn the woman felt better. She asked me if she could apply lipstick before she met the rescue pilot. “Sure,” I said, “why not?” It had been a long night. We were covered in dust and smelled of urine. Lipstick might be just what the doctor ordered.
After breakfast and a shower at my house on the rim, I put in a full day at the office, catching up with my administrative duties as the Corridor district ranger. Among the many supervisory tasks on my list was a closed-door session with Cale Shaffer. The other PSAR rangers had complained. Cale’s high expectations of them were a pain in the ass. I advised Cale to pull back and let his peers fend for themselves. If they were slacking off, I would see it.
Cale had disappointed himself, believing that he’d let me down, and it showed. This broke my heart. The whole thing was my fault. I had placed more responsibility on his shoulders because I had so much faith in him. Though I did my best to act impartial, it must have been obvious to everyone but Cale. He was my favorite temporary ranger. All my permanent employees, especially Bryan Wisher, treated Cale like a beloved mascot, and my superiors adored the newbie nearly as much as I did.
Surely his peers were jealous. Packed into Cale’s tight little body were enough brains, brawn, and work ethic for five rangers. His sincere smile and compassionate demeanor had even the most stressed-out park visitors eating out of his hand. By luck or fate, I had hired the perfect ranger, one with an idealism that appeared bulletproof. But this backstabbing business from his peers worried me. Could the Grand Canyon turn a guy like Cale into an asshole like it had the rest of us?
Later, Mary Litell Hinson phoned me at the office. It was great to hear her voice. I had missed my hyper, goofball, adrenaline-addicted employee since she had left the canyon last December. Mary transferred to Yosemite as soon as her husband was hired on there. That was four months ago. Today Mary had called to confess.
“I’m pregnant,” she whispered, “but don’t you dare tell a soul.” Mary wanted to keep her pregnancy a secret because she believed her superiors would confiscate her gun and law enforcement credentials. Yosemite managers had done this in the past, once they discovered a female ranger was knocked up.
“It’s going to become obvious to them at some point,” I told her.
“I can still work,” Mary said. “I’ll wear a shoulder holster.”
That night, when I finally settled in for a good night’s sleep, it had been thirty-nine hours since I’d seen a bed. After two delicious hours of unconsciousness, the phone rang. The dispatcher directed me to the booking jail—a small cinderblock building where rangers processed prisoners before taking them to a county facility in Flagstaff. Inside, I reported to the arresting ranger, Chris Fors, who was completing his paperwork. Through the bars of their holding cells, three intoxicated Park Service employees yelled their obscene protests.
“Come on and get me you fucking ranger,” they taunted. “Yeah, I assaulted that security guard, but the fat power freak deserved it. I’m going to sue. I’m going to have your job! You gung-ho motherfucker.”
Chris and another ranger worked silently inside the cramped booking room. The other ranger was Chris’s roommate, and they weren’t speaking, on or off duty. Their spat began when Chris asked out a dispatcher the other ranger had dated weeks earlier. The roommate told him you shouldn’t date your friends’ ex-girlfriends. Problem was, in a western national park, when it came to romance the gender ratio was often in a woman’s favor. Chris argued that und
er the circumstances, if you were going to mount the entire available female population in the park, it didn’t leave your “friends” any options. This didn’t go over as well as Chris had hoped.
The conflict mushroomed when, after a few too many postshift beers, Chris left numerous inebriated 3:00 a.m. “cat-calls” on their answering machine while the other ranger was trying to sleep. The roommate was creative in his retribution. When Chris returned from his booze-fest early that morning, he couldn’t use his toilet because the other ranger had pulled the mattress out from Chris’s bedroom and stuffed it in the bathroom.
The cursing drunks and feuding roommates injected more hostility into the booking room than I could tolerate after only two hours’ sleep. I suggested that Chris leave while the other ranger and I took the prisoners’ mug shots and got their fingerprints. “You rangers are nothing but a bunch of fucking pigs!” one of the drunks screamed at Chris as he stepped outside. In case I believed I was somehow excluded from this insult, the drunk added, “You, too, Andy.”
When we were done, I walked over to the adjacent office to retrieve Chris so that he and I could transport the prisoners to a jail in Flagstaff. Chris sat at the desk where he was supposed to be filling in all the tedious blanks on all the tedious federal forms. Instead of completing his paperwork, the ranger had his hands flat on the desktop as he stared at a wall less than three feet in front of him. Although he was inside, away from public view, Chris still wore his Smokey Bear, which was weird. The ranger hat is nothing if not iconic, but it gives you a headache when worn longer than twenty minutes. I had heard the rumors: arguments with supervisors; fights with girlfriends; all-night drinking binges; flashlights hurled across parking lots. People said Chris was losing it, and here I had found him wearing his flat hat indoors and in an apparent catatonic state.
“Hey, Chris,” I said, carefully. “We’re ready.”
Chris kept his eyes on the cinderblock wall in front of him. After a worrisome delay he spoke. “I hate this fucking job.”
During our ninety-mile drive to Flagstaff, Chris turned the commercial radio volume all the way up. The music softened the tequila-powered personal attacks the three men in the backseat were hurling at us. We dumped off our glaring burdens at the county jail. Then we slid into a booth inside the only restaurant open at 3:00 a.m. Before our omelets arrived, Chris brought forth his troubles and wrung them out in front of me.
Chris had ambitions. He got a master’s degree because he wanted to be a superintendent some day. But those dreams were crumbling almost as fast as the sandstone foundation of the ranger station. Recently they had given away a job he desperately wanted—a supervisory position at Yellowstone—to someone Chris felt was less qualified, and he was carrying around this disappointment like a man diagnosed with a mass in his liver. “If I don’t escape the Grand Canyon soon,” he said, “the park is going to kill me.”
As much as Chris bemoaned his stagnant career, his romantic life fared no better. A year ago he had broken up with the blond from grad school, and now the state of Arizona was experiencing a drought of women willing to date shell-shocked park rangers who lived in singlewide trailers occupied by bats and shared with moody roommates. If he was going to turn his life around, he needed a job that paid well. He needed a job that earned him some respect. He needed a job that allowed him to own a house and please a wife. He needed a job that brought him home each night. He needed a job that didn’t give him nightmares. He needed a job that was so safe and secure it bordered on boring. So, Chris confided in me, the park ranger had made a bold career move. He had filled out a job application and mailed it to the FBI.
24
DANGEROUS TYPES
It was a gorgeous Sierra day—a warm October afternoon. Showy milkweeds cast their feathered seeds into fall breezes. Red-winged blackbirds bobbed up and down on yellowing blades of grass. Rainbow trout gorged themselves on insects floating down gurgling streams. A hundred and fifty people, some carrying banners and flags, stood at the edges of a meadow below El Capitan and chanted, “It’s our park too!” and “Let them jump!”
A few Yosemite locals among the increasing crowd heckled the park rangers who were doing their best to keep traffic flowing. Families on the way to campgrounds and hotels saw the people and the media cameras. They pulled their campers and rental cars off to the side of the road to determine the cause of all this excitement. “What’s going on?” they asked. Someone pointed to the top of El Capitan and said, “A woman is about to jump off that mountain.”
Park ranger Mary Litell Hinson was somewhat relaxed. The protest was going so smoothly. Three jumps down, just two more to go. Then the last BASE jumper would be on the ground; all the protestors and looky-loos would head for their hotel rooms, campsites, or bar stools; and the deer and the red-winged blackbirds could have their meadow back. Months ago Mary had become the ranger in charge of the Valley day shift, a shift of park rangers responsible for patrolling one of the busiest national parks in the world. She was the first female in this job, and 1999 had been one of the park’s busiest years on record. Despite the heckling from the protestors, Mary viewed this event, watching the rainbow-colored parachutes float down to the meadow, as a pleasant diversion from her normal duties.
The first two jumpers were cool, but the third one, a dentist from Indiana, let loose with the “Nazi Punk Service” rhetoric when Mary handcuffed him. Give me a break, the ranger thought. What does he think this is—Tiananmen Square? Then someone told her the next jumper was a woman. Mary handed the dentist over to the nearest male ranger before walking into the meadow to wait for the next jump.
On top of El Capitan, Jan Davis counted three-two-one and then ran off the New Dawn “diving board”—an overhanging rock that served as the perfect launch point for jumping off a cliff. Someone caught the moment in a photograph. Davis wore a black-and-white-striped body suit. Her parody of a prisoner’s uniform was a joke on the rangers waiting to arrest her at the bottom. Arms outstretched, blond hair blown by the wind, Davis flew out over a spectacular view of Yosemite Valley. It was a flawless jump. She was smiling.
Three thousand feet below the top, journalists, a Park Service employee, and Davis’s boyfriend, Tom Sanders, were filming the event. In the film, the BASE jumper’s body is an anonymous black figure in contrast to the light-gray granite of El Capitan. Two seconds went by. Davis twisted in the air, wiggling in an apparent attempt to reach her parachute cord. Another second went by. Then another. Everyone was excited. A woman had jumped. “Yeah!” The crowd whistled and cheered. “Whoo-hoo! Go baby!”
Five seconds had now gone by since Davis stepped off El Capitan, and the ranger wasn’t cheering. Over the crowd noise, Mary heard Davis gaining velocity as she plunged toward the earth at a speed of more than one hundred miles per hour. The wind whipping at Davis’s clothes sounded like someone thumbing through a deck of cards, only louder. Much louder. It was a sound Mary would never forget—the terrible flut-flut-fluttering sound made by a human body in free fall.
* * *
Immediately after Mary jumped off her first bridge, she thought she had killed herself. Within two seconds the rope caught her, and the relief was euphoric. She swung back and forth in the darkness until the pendulum motion stopped. Then she climbed back up the rope to her boyfriend, who grinned at her and said, “I saw the fear in your eyes!” Mary’s fear seemed to excite the man, but he must have also been relieved. Because Mary had developed a reputation for being fearless, and there is something unsettling about a woman who has no fear.
People said that Jan Davis was a woman who had no fear. People said that after her first husband died of an accidental overdose of blood pressure medications, Davis had developed a death wish. Others said that Jan Davis was a risk taker. She knew how to celebrate life. And some said that Jan Davis was an idiot. There is one thing about which most agreed. Even at fifty-
eight, Jan Davis was a pretty hot babe.
“I believe life is about action and passion, and you can’t truly begin to live life until you overcome your fear of dying,” Davis said. She lived to jump off things; and her boyfriend, extreme photographer Tom Sanders, loved to film her doing it. She jumped off the world’s tallest waterfall, earning her the title “the first lady of Angel Falls.” She jumped from an airplane wearing lacy red lingerie, high heels, and a parachute. She chronicled many of her BASE jumping adventures in a children’s book.
* * *
The differences between bridge jumping, rope jumping, bungee jumping, skydiving, and BASE jumping may seem subtle to those who would never consider stepping off anything higher than a sidewalk curb, but the risks associated with each of these sports are not the same. Rock climbers and rescue rangers like Mary place a lot of faith in their ropes and anchors. “In Gear I Trust,” was Mary’s motto, and if it were not for her faith in a climbing rope’s ability to stop her fall, she would have never have walked on that bridge, climbed over the metal railing, checked her harness, tugged the rope, looked at the rocky river bottom below, counted one-two-three, and let go.
“BASE” is an acronym for buildings, antennas, spans (bridges), and earth (cliffs). These are the four things other than an airplane that you can leap from with a parachute strapped to your back and survive. Considered by many to be the most extreme of all extreme sports, BASE jumping is more dangerous than skydiving because there is less room for error. Sky divers typically have thousands of feet to fall and almost an entire minute of time before they must find and pull the cord that lets loose their lifesaving parachute. If the main chute malfunctions, sky divers often carry a reserve chute that gives them a second chance to avoid becoming a pancake. In contrast, depending on the height of the jump, a BASE jumper only has three to ten seconds of free fall before she must pull her chute. Pull too soon, and she slams into the cliff wall. Pull too late, and she’s made her last jump. Two seconds to clear the wall and two to eight seconds to pull her chute does not leave a BASE jumper much room for error. The sport is illegal in many places. This adds to the excitement—especially in Yosemite, where the rangers aggressively enforce the rules.
Ranger Confidential Page 17
