My early logs were mostly records of work and travel—intended almost entirely for the eyes of my supervisor, friend, and mentor, “Lucky” Lorenzo Stowell. Unfortunately, at that time I wasn’t writing much about “the life”—the daily experiences, the encounters with animals and interesting people—and there were no entries describing my colorful supervisor, who, until about a year and a half ago, was a living legend. Lorenzo died in October, 2017 at the age of eighty-three after what would be called a “full” life. The following spring I attended a memorial service for him in Bishop along with a couple of hundred friends, acquaintances, and family members. He was a mentor, brother in arms, and one of my dearest friends (in some ways though not others) and I think about him pretty much every day, hear him in my head. The following extract is a matter-of-fact sounding comment at the end of an average workday’s entry. But this little snippet from my 1990 journal describes an event that proved to be far-reaching, eventually leading to Lorenzo’s resigning from the Forest Service. It doesn’t begin to capture the drama behind what was a pretty scary accident.
5 Jun (Tue) ◦◦◦◦◦ Back at the station [the Forest Service Ranger Station in Bridgeport], heard that Lorenzo had been injured. He’d taken the new horse, Buck, for a ride up Eagle Creek, got dumped and dragged but—miraculously—wasn’t seriously damaged. Some hikers found him. Went over to the hospital and waited. Took him back to his trailer at the ORS [ “Old Ranger Station,” converted to a residential compound].
And that was it. In retrospect, I can’t believe how terse and detached this way-too-brief account sounds. (It’s the last part of a longer entry.) What follows is a more detailed re-creation, as far as my almost thirty-year-old memories go, written more or less in a style similar to what I would have used in later years, when these journals were far more in depth, written with an eye for entertainment value.
◦◦◦◦◦ Back at the station: I walked in and immediately sensed something was up. Shirley [the district clerk] sez, looking pretty concerned, “Lorenzo was in an accident…he’s okay. I guess he fell off his horse, or got bucked off…don’t really know. I’m going over to the hospital right now to pick him up.” ◦◦◦◦◦ We both went over, me in the FS rig. After waiting not too long, they brought him out. He was barefoot, carrying his boots. When he saw us, his face lit into that big toothy grin of his—“I’m okay! Lucky Lorenzo, lucky to be alive! Hunh-hunh!” Of course, he had to bluff it out Lorenzo-style—never cop to there being any sort of problem. Holding the door, he limped past me and I was shocked to see that this huge rip in the seat of his pants, no underwear, and his snow-white ass was “hanging out.” (Never seen Lorenzo naked….) Shirley must’ve been scandalized. ◦◦◦◦◦ The hikers had driven him to the hospital but were already gone so didn’t get a chance to hear their part in it. (Somebody had already taken Buck back over to the barn.) Got my boss into the truck and drove him to the ORS, helped him into his little trailer. He was medicated and feelin’ not too much pain…was downright jolly, in fact. I know, from having “been there” myself, that this was at least partly a sort of giddiness that comes in the wake of near-death experiences. ◦◦◦◦◦ He tossed a little bag of white pills on the table and slumped down on the cushions. Right off, he asks, “Hey, you got any booze?”――― “Uhh, well, I’ve got a bottle of Myer’s.”――― “Well? Go get it!” Went over to my truck with a little trepidation. When I got back to the trailer with the rum, he was loading his pipe. Gradually got some of the story out of him. Seems he’d taken Buck for a ride up Eagle Creek. The horse is pretty green, apparently. (I’ve never ridden him.) They weren’t very far from the trailhead, actually—it happened back in Buckeye Canyon, on the old road, when they were crossing one of those branches of the creek down low. From the sounds of it, Buck spooked at something while they were crossing. Lorenzo doesn’t know exactly what happened, can’t remember, or wasn’t saying. He didn’t seem to know but, with Lorenzo, you won’t get anything out of him that he doesn’t want to share. All he could tell me was that he came to and found himself laying in the road, “with a mouth fulla dirt.” (I’m guessing he meant that figuratively since his face wasn’t torn up.) When he came off, his foot must’ve hung up in the stirrup and he got dragged some ways. Didn’t know how long he was out or anything about what had happened when he came to but a couple of hikers showed up. Buck was standing near by. They were able to catch the horse and then helped Lorenzo get back to the truck and load-up Buck. Never heard, but I’m guessing one of the hikers drove the stock truck while his partner followed in their rig. It was awful lucky this happened so close to the trailhead, and NOT way up in Eagle Creek. No one ever goes up there and, if he’d been hurt badly….ulp! (I doubt he’d even told anybody where he was going.) But, hey!—this is Lucky Lorenzo Stowell we’re talkin’ about! ◦◦◦◦◦ So, I’m trying to get the straight story out of him. We’re smoking his pipe and drinking my rum. There were a few cold beers in the cooler. He was getting jollier’n’jollier, talking louder, laughing too much. “Ah, Doctor Myers and nurse Mary Jane! Fix a feller right up, yrk, yrk!” A half hour into this he was starting to go down so I helped get him into his sleeping bag, torn filthy clothes still on. “Doctor Myers! Nurse Mary Jane!” That really cracked him up.
Early the next morning Lorenzo came over to the bunkhouse where I was staying. He seemed okay—was limping and moving slow, but appeared unaffected by the previous evening’s…activities. He had on a fresh pair of pants and a clean shirt. Yesterday’s had been glued to his back, he said, but he’d managed to soak it off in the shower. I drove us over to the office, where Lorenzo asked me to go to the men’s room with him and bandage the wound on his back properly. I helped him out of his shirt and was stunned to see the worst case of “road rash” I’d ever witnessed: a patch of raw, weeping skin on his left side, about six inches wide and fifteen inches long. On his other side, another patch almost as large but “only” abraded to raspberry-state. I recall being really shocked—couldn’t believe they’d let him out of the hospital without cleaning and dressing these wounds. (In retrospect, he must’ve refused the care.) But they’d given him some ointment, gauze bandages, and a roll of tape so I was able to patch him up. Over the following days he never once complained about pain or discomfort and, in typical Lorenzo fashion, downplayed the whole ordeal. It was actually pretty amazing that he didn’t break anything or have a serious head wound—he’d been drug, apparently while unconscious, behind a freaked-out horse.
Thing was: right around this time, Lorenzo was going through a break-up with his partner of almost ten years. They met in 1980, I believe, at some sort of Wilderness conference. Laurel was a backcountry ranger in Yosemite—a tall, strapping, stunningly gorgeous strawberry blond Amazon—a fine specimen of womanhood in every sense. They lived together in a sweet little cabin near Yosemite Valley. He was mad about Laurel who was in her late thirties by then and desirous of having a child before her biological clock ran out. My boss, who valued his independence above all else, was not game for fatherhood and I gather that it came down to an either-or decision. Lorenzo never shared any of this when it was happening (only later did I get details) but it must have been coming to a head around the time of his accident because there was an undeniable shift in his personality and demeanor from that time forward. For all his charm and charisma, Lorenzo was pretty closed off emotionally and would never ever share any personal matters with his friends. Whatever he was going through: it cracked his armor and some powerful emotional stuff was leaking out. There was barely concealed rage. There was crazy.
Three days later, I was back up at Piute, and wrote in my log on June 9th, “Lorenzo showed up unexpectedly with BBQ spareribs and insanity.” I don’t really recall that evening aside from a vague memory of him acting very unlike his normal self; he was overly loud, cross, extra-cynical and abrasive. He ranted and raved. From this time on, Lorenzo pretty much stopped working and was habitually bitter, his sorrows all bottled up in classic John Wayne fashion. He’d grab a horse and go on long rides, would show up at the cabin unannounced and stay for a few days. Sadly, I came to dread visits that I’d previously relished. We’d head off on long patrols together—usually to remote areas that didn’t really need our attentions—literal and figurative joy rides. Over the course of that summer, Lorenzo got into at least a couple of shouting matches with co-workers, at least once right in the office. (Apparently he made one of the female employees weep—she was that upset.) I never heard any details but the woman he’d made cry filed an official complaint. Finally, Lorenzo showed up at Piute during the first week of August and told me that at the end of this visit he’d go to the office and quit. For all I know, he’d been offered resignation as an out. Maybe he’d just had enough. Clearly, he just didn’t care—about much of anything.
The morning he left: of course, Lorenzo acted as if nothing were amiss. One last greasy breakfast and clean-up. He went out alone, caught and saddled Pal (one of his dearest old horse-friends) while I stayed in the cabin with my thoughts. I have no memory of our goodbye words but watched intently as he rode across the meadow toward the river crossing. Just before disappearing into the trees he pulled Pal up short and turned in the saddle to gaze one last time at the peaks on the crest. After a long look, he tipped his hat—saying farewell! to the mountains. It was a dramatic gesture that brought tears—a rarity for me.
This was far from being the end of my time with Lucky Lorenzo. We ended up being next-door neighbors near Lone Pine for many years—both of us living in palatial shacks on a property at the foot of the Sierra crest just a couple of peaks away from Mt. Whitney, living off-the-grid at the end of a bumpy dirt road. Lorenzo subsequently went back to Sequoia-Kings National Park (where he’d started his ranger career) and spent a number of summers there, stationed at backcountry cabins in Hockett Meadows and down in the Kern River canyon. He began visiting me at Piute after his own season was over and came up several times on foot. Of course, I’d loan him a horse while he was there. (At Lorenzo’s memorial gathering I heard one of his old Park Service peers say, “Once you’ve been a ranger for five years or more, you’re no good for anything else.” True words.)
I have mixed emotions about writing all this—it’s a poor introduction to an amazing character, a renowned Wilderness addict, and a man who knew the true value of living simply. But I feel this episode is a bit of Stowellian history that deserves to be on record. If I compile enough of these journal entries to help flesh out the “Ranger book,” my old boss and co-conspirator will play a major role. One problem, though, with trying to write about the man is that his utterly unique personality will prove almost impossible to capture with words alone. A masterful storyteller, Lorenzo’s talking style involved playing out any of an entire cast of different invented archetypal characters, each with their own voices, interspersed with his own. There was a lot of this acting-out along with gesticulating, hilarious expressions and vivid turns of phrase. The way to best capture a typical Lorenzo performance (I’ve thought about this quite a bit) will require the use of different fonts of up to about 30 points (some in bold, some italics) and serious abuse of the exclamation point. Writing about Lorenzo could never begin to capture his persona. If you ever saw him in person, you’d understand that this is no exaggeration.
©2018 Tim Forsell
15 Dec 2018
