SEASONAL FOREST SERVICE EMPLOYEES are required to have a physical exam every two years, paid for out of their own pockets. It doesn’t seem fair. For us worker bees—firefighters, range techs, wilderness rangers, docents—this cuts a full day’s wages from the hundred or so workdays we’re allotted each season. But I finally found a workaround: it just so happens that my girl is a nurse at the little health clinic in Lone Pine, the town closest to where we live. At the end of my first work week I headed home with the requisite forms in tow and got myself a free physical. Katy got her RN license just last year, not long before she moved from Idaho to the Eastern Sierra and we started living together. Lacking experience, she had to take a couple of trainee-type positions with long commutes before scoring a proper job closer to home. Now her workplace is just fifteen-minutes away from our shack at the foot of the mountain.
After breakfast on my first morning back, Katy headed off to work wearing her pastel-green scrubs. I showed up at the clinic an hour later with paperwork in hand and the receptionist ushered me back to a treatment room. Minutes later, Katy strode in. “Why hello, darling!” She peered into my ears, took my blood pressure, and listened to my heart and lungs with her stethoscope. She rapped both knees with the rubber hammer-thingey. I’d peed in a jar at the outset and my urine tested fine. Good to go.
That unpaid doctor visit saved me seventy-five clams. But how’s this for irony? I headed back to Bridgeport with official clearance to begin work, only to find that in my absence a brand new rule had been put in place: Henceforth, all temporary employees will be reimbursed for their annual physicals. (Words to that effect.) Oh, well.
I’m a Wilderness ranger, which means that I live and work in the backcountry. My so-called “duty station” is an old log cabin, eleven miles from the nearest road, at a place called Piute Meadows (“Piute,” for short). This was my ninth summer living there.
I was just starting to get the cabin opened back up and restocked with supplies. At the end of my first ten-day stint, I saddled up the ponies, rode out of the mountains, and drove to Bridgeport (the quaint little town where our Forest Service district office is located). A note from my friend and supervisor, Greta, awaited me. I knew there was a message waiting because three separate office workers informed me of its contents before I even had a chance to read it. In a nutshell: the pulse-rate reading on my physical was ‘too low’ and as a result I still wasn’t cleared to work. It seems that I’d disappeared into the wilderness before anybody caught on. Now I’d have to see a doctor again and get it re-checked before I could head back to the cabin. Just then, I was all set to drive home and spend some time with my sweetie but right before leaving town I asked Roy, a fellow seasonal who works the front desk, to take my pulse. Roy has advanced first-aid training so there was an off chance that this would suffice. Roy came up with sixty; my normal reading. (Katy had gotten forty-eight—the lowest number I can recall.)
After my days off I was back in Bridgeport, ready to put all this pulse-nonsense behind me and get a jump on the long ride to Piute. You see, this was one of those full-on El Niño summers. Over the past two weeks thunderstorms had been an almost daily occurrence. By the time I showed up at the office that morning, wispy clouds were already swirling up on the crest; rain was all but guaranteed. As for my trip back to the cabin: Riding in the rain—no problema. Packing in the rain, however, is a real drag.
Greta arrived at eight sharp and found me standing beside her desk. After we swapped “Good morning!”s my boss got down to this dirty business: “Your pulse was too low on your physical—the minimum is fifty. Roy’s taking it ‘doesn’t count.’ It has to be done by a doctor or an EMT. And it has to be taken three times with at least an hour’s wait in between. Sorry, but it looks like you won’t be riding to Piute today.”
I was appalled and began whining out of principle. But, to be honest, I wasn’t all that surprised. After—what is it? twelve seasons?—I’ve grown accustomed to the way our government functions, or fails to function, and have seen far worse cases of by-the-bookness. (This one ranked maybe a 7.2 on the ten-point absurdity-scale.) Some no doubt overweight, cubicle-bound clerk at the Forest Supervisor’s Office in Reno had finally gotten around to reviewing my physical. When this low-level pen pusher discovered that a seasonal temp on the Bridgeport District had a pulse rate two-beats-per-minute below the minimum-allowable, alarm bells went off. This person—who has never met me; who’s probably never even heard my name before now—didn’t so much as pause for five seconds to consider that a backcountry ranger’s job requires heavy physical exertion, at altitude. Which, duh!, tends to result in tremendous aerobic fitness. Their urgent call to the Bridgeport Ranger Station had effectively grounded me.
Greta patiently listened to my sarcastic tirade but finally cut me off. “That’s very nice, Tim, but you haven’t passed your physical and you can’t work until you do. I called Peter and he’s coming up from Topaz. He can do it.” Peter Padgett is an engine foreman at the USFS fire station outside Topaz [small town near the Nevada border]. A certified EMT, Peter had agreed to drive fifty miles just to take my pulse three times, then drive fifty miles back, shooting his day in the foot. Fire crews don’t start work until nine a.m. and it was an hour’s drive so there’d be a good long wait. I tried another tack: “C’mon, Greta! Can’t we just fudge this thing? Fill in the little boxes? This whole deal is farcical! And it’s a complete waste of taxpayer dollars. Our tax dollars—yours! mine!”
“Y’know, Tim, normally we could. But not after Mike.” She was referring to one of our rangers whose case, admittedly, is a perfect example of the need for seasonals to get annual check-ups. Evidently, Mike suffered health problems during the winter but had no idea what was wrong. His physical turned up blood in his urine. Further tests indicated kidney stones. So Mike is stuck on light duty (worse than it sounds). Now he’s getting weekly treatments with surgery a possibility. So the poor guy, who’s near-broke and uninsured, is having to adjust his entire life to get in pace with Medi-Cal.
There was basically nothing for me to do in the office so for well over an hour I wandered the halls catching up with seldom-seen co-workers (thus wasting everybody’s time). To be sure of passing my test I gulped down three cups of bad office-coffee.
Peter showed up at ten. Local-boy of twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven years; tall, slender, towhead blond; very pale-skinned. He comes across as a good-ol’-boy in the making, going redneck fast. To be fair, I hardly know him. His father happens to be a warden for the Department of Fish & Game and, awhile back, I heard some trash talk about his son. This guy I know was drinking in a bar in town. He told me about overhearing Peter boast to his pals, “If I saw a spotted owl I’d shoot the damn thing.” So it sounds like Peter Padgett is the game warden’s version of “preacher’s kid.”
Peter appeared in the doorway of the crowded room that Greta shares with three other people in the Recreation division. He introduced himself and we shook hands.
“I’m Tim, hi. We’ve met a couple of times, actually. Hey, I’m real sorry about the hassle. Thanks for coming. Why don’t we duck into the mailroom. It’s quieter there.”
We sat down at a little table between the coffee maker and Xerox machine. Peter took my wrist, felt around for my pulse, and began to listen. He stared at his watch face for fifteen seconds, counting. On a scrap of paper he wrote “16” and, beneath it, “4,” then drew a line under the two figures. Squinting, with furrowed brow, Peter gazed at the ceiling. I watched him write “4” beneath the line. He carried the two, ciphered some more, and after what felt like way too long arrived at sixty-four.
People were in and out of the room continually, making copies and checking their mail slots. Peter was explaining why we needed to wait an hour before he could take it again when Billy Bryant zipped past us. Like Peter, Bill Bryant is a native son of Bridgeport Valley. (His great-grandfather was one of its earliest settlers and Billy lives in a modest bungalow on Bryant Street.) He runs our fire division, having spent his entire career working in the town where he was born. In 1970, just out of high school, Billy hired on as a lowly fireman on a pumper crew (an entry-level position). Now he’s one of the most respected men in the business—often away for long periods during the summer months, heading up command teams for the really big “project” fires. Everyone loves Billy. A trim, sharp-featured man with a twinkle in his eye. He’s funny and fun but doesn’t mess around. He greeted me warmly: “Heeeyyy, Tim! Howya doin’? Haven’t seen you since the day you came on! How’s things up at Piute?”
“Oh! Hi, Billy! I’m fine, thanks. Great to be back. The cabin’s in good shape—no bear break-ins since that last one, thank god.” Then, seeing my chance, I blurted out, “Hey, Billy! Have you heard about this? Peter came all this way just to take my pulse because it was too low when I had my physical. They won’t let me work because I’m too healthy!” Billy grabbed his mail and was on his way back out but paused at the door. I pressed on, explaining the one hour waits and how both our days were basically shot. Billy made that universal snort-of-derision sound and said, “That’s ridiculous!” Then he turned to Peter: “Just take it twice more and fill in the boxes and let him go.”
Billy (bless his heart) strode off without another word. I suggested to Peter that he not bother taking it again but he insisted. This second round he got seventeen and worked the problem on paper again. On the third go he counted fifteen and began writing down the figures all over again, complete with the underline. I could no longer restrain myself and mumbled, “Umm…that’s one beat per second. I think that’s sixty.”
“Oh… Yeah!” On perceiving the neat correlation, Peter’s face lit up with a smile.
Outside, dark clouds were building over the Sierra crest; piling up even thicker out toward Sonora Pass—where I’d soon be heading. Already two hours behind schedule (and now in a race with worsening weather), I grabbed something to eat in town then drove my little pickup and all my freight to Leavitt Meadows Pack Station—a twenty-five mile drive. The pack station is my “trailhead” and base of operations. We have an agreement with the proprietor, Bart Cranney, to board my stock when I’m not in the woods in exchange for occasional hay deliveries. It was high noon when I pulled into the yard. With rain imminent, I immediately started shifting bags, boxes, and crates from my camper onto the loading platform. “Doc” Grishaw, retired M.D. and part-owner of the pack station, ambled over for a chat, as if I had nothing but time on my hands. It started sprinkling just as I went to catch up my four-legged co-workers: Redtop (saddle-horse; cinnamon red with white blaze and socks—what we call a “sorrel”) and Valiente (packhorse; a big dapple-grey roan). They were out in the middle of the main corral fraternizing with members of Bart’s herd. Lucky for me, in lieu of leading me on their usual merry chase, the pair stood calmly while I slipped their halters on. Back at the hitch-rail, Doc—clearly in one of his better moods—blithely chattered away while I brushed both horses and got them saddled. Working double-speed, I transferred a milk crate full of canned goods into Val’s panniers [large canvas and leather pack bags]. Right about then it started to rain in earnest so I hastily covered everything with a heavy canvas tarp and dove into my camper where I spent close to an hour listening to the harsh drumming of rain on thin metal roof. Not much else to do.
When downpour turned to drizzle I got back to packing. Much more yet to go. Regrettably, in my haste and distracted by the Doc, I’d halfway-filled Val’s panniers with canned goods. Knowing that I had to come back out in just a few days, I’d originally planned on reserving half these cans for the next trip. My old packhorse (born the same year as our rookie ranger) had only been out a few times thus far and was in nowhere near peak condition. So I really shouldn’t have loaded the panniers up with all this heavy stuff. Plus, there was still plenty more cargo that had to go in today.
But more storm was on the way so I didn’t take the time to re-pack the panniers. Not only that, I ended up filling them brimful with still more heavy items. I was barely able to heave them up on Val’s back (he’s a tall horse) and get the bags’ hanging-loops over the packsaddle’s crosstrees. Lastly, I threw a duffle bag of clothes, a double-bit axe, tent, and a sack of dry catfood on top before tarping and lashing down the load with rope. The two horses, water-streaked and a little on the soggy side, stood patiently. But I knew they were eager to be on the trail and get this over with. Me, as well; it was already after two o’clock. But when we finally got through the gate on this June day all my cares and worries and hurries evaporated. Minutes later it was raining again but now of little concern, thanks to my calf-length oiled-cotton slicker, leather chaps, and broad-brimmed Stetson hat. We were headed for Piute Meadows, slow’n’easy.
Gentle rain, distant thunder, moody lights…crisp mountain air perfumed by wet sagebrush—one of the finest aromas, some say. Pure western-style romance. June is a bit early for backpacking, what with rivers and creeks all running high from spring run-off. So it was not unlikely that, aside from maybe a few of Cranney’s packers, no one else was abroad. We rolled on upcanyon at a steady clip—the whole place to ourselves. I stopped only a few times; mainly to prune low-hanging limbs with my loppers. (I do this from the saddle, for extra reach). Red, who’s gotten used to my sometimes-bizarre behavior, stood stoically as I dropped sodden pine boughs on both our heads.
Splish-splosh. Time flew by. It was still raining, lightly. We were three miles from the cabin at the foot of a rocky hill…an hour to go. Before us was what we packers call a “bad spot.” Here, four-leggers have to negotiate three “slickrock” granite steps quarried out by the last glacier to pass this way. The layer of soil that once covered this sketchy piece of trail is now mostly gone—churned to powder by countless steel-shod hooves and subsequently washed away, leaving a “trail” of solid rock polished smooth by ice laden with pulverized mountain. It’s gotten worse over the years and is currently the most hazardous stretch of the West Walker trail—for livestock. For hikers, the next hundred yards is just one more wearisome hill to climb. For horses and mules, though, it’s a different matter entire. Steel shoes have very little traction on slickrock. If flat, not too bad. Inclined slabs? Not so good. Worst of all is if the slab is at an angle—just a tiny bit of the horseshoe’s edge is in contact with rock. And if the rock is wet…watch out!
I slowed Red as we were about to enter the first hazardous section—a lopsided-V-shaped trough. Without warning, Val stopped in his tracks. Turning in my saddle I saw that the old packhorse’s head was drooping and his sides were heaving—he was exhausted! Knowing that Val was both overloaded and out-of-shape, I should have been watching him vigilantly. I should have spotted this sooner—much sooner. But…I hadn’t been paying attention. Red, like all equines “headin’ for the barn,” had little by little upped his pace, forcing his nearly maxed-out partner to work extra hard just to keep up. If not for my woolgathering I’d have noticed, long before now, that the old gelding needed to go slower. And then make Red match his pace.
I’m relatively new to this packing game, having only been at it on a regular basis since taking the Piute job ten summers ago. I do all right with the packing part but, to be perfectly candid, don’t have a natural bent for horsemanship. Thus far I’ve had a laudable safety record. This is partly due, no joke, to my having been born lucky. The main reason, though, is that I’ve had the luxury of working only with gentle, well-broke, dependable animals. (This may be why Doc Grishaw and Bart Cranny and all Bart’s old hands think of me as a dilettante; to them, I’m sort of like a spoiled rich kid.)
Now, a veteran packer would’ve been checking on Val frequently. But me—I hadn’t been watching him for one simple reason: every time I turned my head a little rainwater would run down my neck. My thoughts were focused on getting home; of making a fire and brewing tea; of petting kitties; of being done with this day. But this is no excuse.Now, seeing how bone-tired Val was, I chided myself for being negligent and let him take a quick break. He was rain-soaked and disgruntled. While Val tried to catch his breath I sat there on Red’s back watching raindrops splash into the little pools of water held by folds in Val’s tarp. Just ahead were the worst five yards of our eleven-mile commute: a three-foot-wide trough formed by rock angled twenty degrees side to side, bordered on its left edge by a two-foot-high vertical face. I’ve ridden through this bad spot hundreds of times, with a bit of dread each and every time. But Red was clearly telegraphing his desire to go home so I gave poor Val maybe thirty seconds of rest before tugging on his lead and turning my antsy saddlehorse loose.
Red walked right up the slot, no problem. Val came on grudgingly, still breathing hard and taking tiny steps, tossing his head with each effort. I could feel the strain of each step and finally understood that he was done in—saw those mincing steps; saw him put the tip of a front hoof on that wet slab, knowing full well he wouldn’t be able to stand on it—felt this in my gut. Red had stopped without command at the top of the slot. We were both watching intently when the tip of that shoe skidded off. Val pitched forward onto both knees. He struggled to get his fronts back under him but couldn’t get any purchase on the slickrock. Down he went. Then, in a desperate effort to get turned around, he started to panic. With limbs flailing, it looked like he was doing a little dance for a second there. Down he went again. I heard awful, stomach-turning sounds: harsh grate of steel on granite…the dull thud of horseflesh and horsebone slamming into rock. In his struggle, skin got peeled from shins and knees. In the end, Val keeled over on his side with head pointed straight downhill. Red tensed under me and whinnied. If I made some sort of analogous sound I didn’t hear it. I was outside myself—livin’ in Real Time, where everything is intensely vivid and crystal-clear in a fleet-footed present.
Val was motionless but gasping for breath, laying there all twisted—half the mangled load pulling down on his ribcage, the rest of it partially pinned beneath him. You never, ever want to see a four-legger in such a pickle. Without thought, on full adrenal uproar, I was on the ground. I had the load off in two minutes, then undid all the packsaddle’s buckles and straps but it was pinned under him and wouldn’t come free. Val’s breathing had eased off somewhat but he was still gasping piteously. Yelling, I yanked on his lead. When Val sensed that his load was gone he began to thrash (losing more hide). As he wriggled and writhed, gravity pulled him down the slippery incline and he finally came to rest at the bottom of the slot, belly up with head downhill. His left legs were pointed at the sodden sky. The other two were folded and pinned against the little sidewall. There was nowhere for him to go. At this point, all the fight went out of him. Val’s head slumped down in the muddy trail with his eyes screwed shut.
From the hideous gasping sounds he was making, it wasn’t at all clear to me how long Val could hold out. Being in such an awkward position, it seemed not unlikely that he was suffocating under his own weight. I just didn’t know. Still, I remained calm; the calm that comes over people in crisis. Already sweating from all the exertion, I dumped my chaps and slicker. The cool rain was a blessed relief. I grabbed Val’s lead and scampered around, pulling his head in all different directions. I yanked and pleaded and yanked some more; shouted, cajoled, baby-talked…tried polite but firm commands. The big gray roan lay still, his breathing a shallow wheeze. Red had walked on a few yards (no doubt wistfully yearning for all that green grass awaiting him at Piute) but he’d stopped and was watching us over his shoulder, clearly distressed but also torn.
Try this: I ran up, grabbed the sorrel’s lead-rope, and led him down through a little slabby slot to get around his partner. I saddled up and rode down the trail—the idea being that if Val thought we were leaving him he might rally. (The two of them hate to be separated.) But Val only looked up and nickered. Then, with a heartrending sigh, his head fell back in the mud. Val’s eyes closed again and he went perfectly still. He’s gone. His heart just gave out. Near panic, I leapt off Red and led him back. No: Val was still breathing. He’s still alive! Blood ran down his legs and from a cut below one eye that he’d gotten by slamming his jumbo-sized head against unyielding stone.
I grabbed Val’s lead again and got back on Red. With a few wraps of Val’s rope around my saddlehorn, we tried to winch him down the trail. Nope…not an inch; all it did was stretch out the old guy’s neck a little. I dismounted again and tried pulling on the rope some more, switching in turn from desperate pleading to stern reproach. I tried to unwedge the two legs pinned against the wall (no luck) then grabbed one of the unpinned ones and used it as a lever to try and roll Val onto his side. Again, nary a budge. And that was foolish: if he’d started flailing just then I could’ve been creamed. I was losing both self-control and common sense. I hauled on the rope from various angles with more profanity and earnest beseeching—running out of options.
Finally I gave up and took a moment to survey the scene: panniers, ropes, sacks, and sundry gear strewn about…giant horse wedged belly-up in a slot. Blood and scattered hunks of fur. Rain coming down. Me: panting; soaked from sweat and rain both but mouth bone-dry and throat raw from yelling…adrenaline shakes…a horrid sense of impending disaster. Whatcha gonna do now, cowboy? Radio for helicopter? Crush his skull with that axe and be done? Maybe just sit down and cry? Val’s face in the mud, smeared with sand and blood…eyes squeezed shut..lips twitching as if he were whispering Hail Marys. You really screwed the pooch this time, ranger. I was ready for some sort of finality.
But wait: there was one more thing to try. It came to me out of nowhere—the proverbial last-resort. I took up five feet of Val’s lead-rope and, screaming ferociously, fell to lashing his flanks and rump in imitation of a demon from equine hell. And this is what finally woke Val from his despondency. He twisted and crashed, slamming his head into stone; legs got raked and fur flew. But—glory be!—he finally got all four hooves under his belly and with a mighty heave…was up! I quick led him to safer ground and we both just stood there in the rain looking each other in the eye. No words were needed. There was a foul, metallic-ey taste in my mouth; a taste that calls to mind four-year-old me sucking on pennies—something I’ve experienced only once before, in the wake of a life-or-death struggle while rockclimbing. When Red whinnied I became aware of a near-total silence—a thing unto itself—and focused with astonishing clarity on the blood that first dripped, then ran in a thin stream from a fresh cut on Val’s ankle. I watched it grow into a small, vibrantly red pool in the wet sand and something about that little puddle of blood summed up this whole day. It had not gone well.
Incredibly, old Valiente was okay. I could hardly believe it: No limbs broken; his abrasions and contusions, though numerous, were minor violations. The cut on his ankle soon clotted. He would have nothing to do with going back up that treacherous slot and it took ten minutes to coax him through an alternate route that was actually worse. I got both horses to an opening just beyond the hilltop and looked Val over before ferrying gear and tack up from the battlefield (quite an effort) then re-saddled and re-loaded the mud-stained, blood-smeared, calm—seemingly imperturbable!—old horse. It was getting late. To lighten his burden I cached all the top-loaded stuff and more under the thoroughly soaked, muddy tarp to pick up at a later date. We were ready to go again.
The whole debacle had taken maybe, oh…thirty minutes. Or maybe an hour. It was hard to tell in the dull light and, without a watch, I really had no idea. No idea. Clock-minutes don’t have the same meaning when you’re on Pacific Real Time.
And with impeccable timing, here came my first visitor contact of the day: two backpackers who appeared out of nowhere just when I was ready to mount up. In no mood to explain what’d just happened, I pulled the sorrel in front of Val hoping the duo wouldn’t notice all his bloody scrapes and cuts. They greeted me in high spirits, commented on the weather, and after a pause one guy asked, “So what are you up to?”
“Oh…just getting things organized,” replied the ranger with sham cheeriness. I tried to look busy. There was no small talk in me and, for once, I skipped asking to see a Wilderness permit. After they’d pressed on I wondered what these two guys would think when they saw the battle zone down below, with all the churned-up sand and blood and scattered hunks of fur. But I wasn’t gonna wait around to find out.
We made it to the cabin an hour later without further mishap. I took it real slow, watching Val like a hawk the rest of the way for sign of a limp. He seemed okay! (Me: I’d managed to strain a muscle in my mid-back during the mêlée and chunks of my own hide were missing.) I unloaded Val, got saddles off, and grained both horses at the hitch-rail. I again looked my old comrade over, feeling his legs for telltale swelling; sprayed his various wounds with scarlet oil [equine Bactine] while petting and baby-talking him. The old fella nonchalantly munched his oats, with not even a hint of reproach. It’s possible that he appreciated my tender ministrations but…I doubt it.
This day didn’t deserve a happy ending. The wreck was entirely my own fault due to lack of attention to detail—so critical when working with livestock. It’d stopped raining by this time. And right when I turned the two out to pasture, clouds parted for a setting sun and the mountain skyline suddenly lit up, all pink and purple and fine.
Washed by grace. Man, you lucked out…again!
It’s better to be lucky than rich or good lookin’. ♠♠♠ Lorenzo Stowell (1935–2017)
©2013 Tim Forsell 3 Nov 1996, 22 May 2013, 3 May 2026
