THE PAST COUPLE OF WEEKS had been a real whirlwind. I was back to Bridgeport after spending my four days-off rock climbing with an old pal, over on the west slope, up near Lake Tahoe. This, right on the heels of my weeklong pack trip into the wilds of northern Yosemite where I innocently posed as a Park Service backcountry ranger (wrong uniform) whilst gallivanting about on another Federal agency’s turf. This six day joy ride was a seditious response to having my “official duty station”—that is, the cabin at Piute Meadows—overrun by Forest Service muckity-mucks off on what amounted to a taxpayer-funded political junket. No way was I going to stick around for that fiasco so I went on a little trip of my own (also taxpayer funded). Without telling a soul—not even my boss, friend, and partner-in-crime, Lucky Lorenzo. Pulled it off, almost without incident. Now it was time to saddle up and head back into the woods for a long, uninterrupted stint at the cabin…get back into a balanced routine of honest outdoor labor, healthy eating, and post-work repose in the form of, say, sitting in my little folding beach chair out in the meadow, watching the sun go down after a revitalizing river bath (at least, on those days when the sun was still up when work was done).
My plan: leave for Piute early the next morning. To that end, after stocking up on supplies in town and hitting the village Laundromat, I drove five miles north on 395, out to the facility we call “the old ranger station” (several buildings converted to staff and seasonal housing). I had a few things yet to take care of and parked my truck next to the barn. One of the new guys on the fire crew walked by and informed me that there was a potluck dinner in progress over at the women’s barracks. I told him I’d already eaten, thanks, and had stuff to attend to but would maybe walk over later.
It was dark by the time my horses were caught up and locked in the corral. Done. I strolled over to the barracks, only to find that this potluck affair was more dorm-style party than some sedate dinner gathering—no surprise, given that the men’s and women’s barracks are a stone’s-throw apart. I walked into a room full of mostly college-age kids with beers in their hands and was about to turn around and leave when I saw two old friends seated together on a sofa near the door, co-workers who seldom see my smiling face post-Solstice. They called me over and had me squeeze in between them.
And there’s John Howe, the Bridgeport District Assistant Recreation Officer, in the kitchen talking to a young woman I didn’t know. John, whose office desk sits across from Lorenzo’s in the overcrowded Rec room, is a tall, swarthy, career-bureaucrat-in-the-making. I’m still not quite clear on what he does from day to day or what his job actually entails. It’s hard to pin down exactly what it is but something about John is a bit off. He’s one of those people (we all know the type) who make routine conversation uncomfortable and say downright offensive things without meaning to. As for the young woman: judging by the faded denim jeans and lace-up packers’ boots, that had to be Kate—a new seasonal hire on our Resources crew. I recalled Lorenzo bringing up her name a while back; how she’d been working in Yosemite Valley for the Park Service but, for reasons unknown, abruptly left a cushy NPS job. He said she was a competent horsewoman and packer and that he hoped to poach her from Resources next year by convincing her that she’d be much happier working in the backcountry than out monitoring trashed grazing allotments and sitting in front of a computer all day.
Back to the party. From the confusion of loud talk, these words leapt out at me: “I hear you might be coming over to our side next year.” Apparently Lorenzo had shared his designs with John, too. I got up and threaded my way over thinking to throw in my own pitch on behalf of the Wilderness crew. But Kate didn’t seem to want to chat with either of us and soon drifted off. Before I could do the same, John got his hooks in me. He started right in to griping about how his boss, Bill, the guy in charge of anything recreation-oriented on the district, had just dumped a certified boondoggle in his lap. Within days, he told me, a bunch of people from not one, but two Reno TV stations were descending on Bridgeport with plans to ride into the mountains, camera crews and equipment in tow, to film parts for evening news segments on capital-w Wilderness (the 25th anniversary of the 1964 Wilderness Act being later this very week). “And I have to organize the whole freekin’ thing.” John then offhandedly mentioned that they wanted to interview a backcountry ranger for the segment. Gazing off, he wondered aloud who he might be able to get. With stunning naïveté I said, “Well, good luck finding somebody, John! Me: I’m heading back to Piute tomorrow.”
Next morning was your typical, mad, first-day-back-on-the-job rush. In the office, talking with three people at once, I eventually managed to pull Lorenzo aside as he exited the mailroom. “Lorenzo, before I split we need to settle on a day for you to bring in my resupply.” A bit later we had a chance to sit down and talk. I brought up the resupply matter again. He just laughed and said, “Problem solved, Fersell! You’ll be doing it yourself! Wednesday, ride out of Piute. On Thursday you’re going to be interviewed for a piece on Wilderness that’ll be shown on TV. You’ll be the star!”
(Saw it all in a flash: John, trying to be nice for a change, instead of his customary, brusque self, had been offering me a chance to volunteer before having Lorenzo do his dirty work.) “Oh, now I get it. John was chatting me up at this party last night at the women’s barracks and I was too stupid to see what he was getting at.” Switching to third-person and, apropos of nothing whatsoever, adding hick-accent: “But Tim don’ wanna be no TV stahr! What if Tim sez he ain’t gonna do it?”
Lorenzo: “You cannot refuse.” (Serious tone but grinning.)
Tim, back to normal voice: ”What if I say ‘John, unh-uh, nope, count me out. Sorry, not gonna do it.’ What, you think they’ll fire me?”
“You cannot refuse. You will be a TV star.” He looked like a jovial pirate minus the costume. I smiled, conceding defeat.
“Okaaay, okay…I’ll do it. At least now I won’t have to worry about you losing my grocery list again. Besides, I can flub it so bad they won’t be able to use the footage. I’ll j-j-just act r-r-real n-n-nervous. Maybe [gazing off] blank out for a few seconds—‘Hey, uhh, having a little seizure! Not to worry; just gimme a minute and I’ll be okay!’”
If I had to come back to town after only two nights at the cabin, well, so be it. So, there was a new plan: ride out Wednesday, do the gig, ride back in on Friday. Then, hopefully, stay back for a good long while. Anyway, this would be something new and different; an adventure of sorts. It might even be fun—you never know. I’m thinking, Maybe they’ll take us all out to dinner when it’s over. Might even get a free meal out of them!
AS PER THE REVISED PLAN, I rode out on Wednesday, a flawless late-summer day with hints of autumn in the shadows and light. A few miles from the pack station, I ran into a solo backpacker on his way in; a fellow Forest Service employee who works over on the west slope, on some district I’ve never even heard of. Turns out that he’d been a backcountry ranger early in his career so we ended up jawing like two old friends. During our talk, my right hand was resting on my saddlehorn. At some point, what felt like a big fly lit on my thumb. It tickled a bit so I unconsciously took a swipe at the thing with my other hand. Bad luck: this was no fly, it was a “meat bee,” and as my left hand grazed it the varmint zapped me. Instant fire. “Oh, ow! OW! A wasp just stung me!” We kept right on talking but by the end of our palaver my thumb was ablaze. Meat bees are actually wasps, not bees—pesky miniature yellowjackets that buzz around your head while you’re trying to eat your ham sandwich. There’s been a rash of these pests in recent years, clearly drought related, and the locals say they’ve never seen them so abundant. Or so surly. You can shoo them off with impunity so long as you don’t make physical contact like I did. They can spoil a perfectly good picnic. In fact, I’d been hearing reports of vacations cut short because of them…tales of people who aren’t normally allergic to bee stings having unusually severe reactions.
I made it to the pack station without further incident. My thumb burned and started to itch but was tolerable. It stayed about the same for the rest of the day.
BUT THEN…
That night (parked by the barn again, asleep in my camper) I woke up and found myself not just scratching but feverishly clawing at the back of my hand. By the time I’d gone to bed, it had been bothering me for hours. Now, my whole hand—not just the thumb—was ablaze. I’m very disciplined when it comes to not scratching things that itch but self restraint, it seems, doesn’t automatically carry over into sleepworld. And now it was way too late so I just went to town. Ahhhhhh…. Vigorous rubbing provided exquisite relief but the moment I stopped, something unanticipated took over. I’ve never experienced anything quite like this particular form of agony—while not what you’d call painful, it was nothing shy of torture. I tossed and turned for awhile, then switched to turning and tossing. Sleep was out of the question. Finally, I slipped my pants on and walked barefoot to an unoccupied barracks trailer by the light of a dazzling Milky Way. Orion was well up which, in early September, meant it was around two a.m. Blinking in the harsh light of the bathroom’s naked ninety-watt bulb, I ran cold tap water over the tormentor while studying my face in the mirror. When numbness somewhat masked the burning sensation I stumbled back, crawled into my bag, and eventually drifted off.
The wind came up during those last hours of fitful sleep and I woke to a raw, wintery day. Trying to ignore my hot-and-bothered extremity, I drove to town and met Lorenzo for breakfast as planned. He was fresh back from his own days off and had no idea what this day would bring. Over fried breakfast he told me about how the Toiyabe Forest powers-that-be up at the Forest HQ in Reno recently hired a new Public Affairs Officer—a woman who’d been on Senator Harry Reid’s staff but quit to take this new position. She was the one charged with setting the whole thing up but, thanks to her strong anti-Wilderness political bias, had intentionally put little effort into making it happen—no surprise, considering she worked for Harry Reid—a staunch conservative, at least when it comes to Federally owned land. For further context, Lorenzo explained that, on average, Nevadans are opposed to designated Wilderness (Nevada is without any) and that the upcoming vote on a State Wilderness Bill was thus sort of a big deal.
As a result of all this the Bridgeport FS contingent were still more or less in the dark as to the day’s agenda. Walking out of the café I asked, “Well…what now, boss?”
“Not really sure. There’s no hurry; we’re supposed to meet everybody at Virginia Lakes around ten o’clock. We’ll need seven head. Let’s take Pokey, Pal, Nugget, Zeke, JD…Bruno….uh, that’s six. We need one more pack animal. Who’s left? I guess we’ll have to take that worthless Charlie Brown. Worthless! All the saddles and tack. Don’t forget anything. Brian can drive the truck pulling the four-horse trailer.” [Brian being this year’s rookie-ranger.] “You and I’ll take the Gutless Pig. John will show up on his own. Tom Roberts is renting horses to some of the dudes; he’s gonna ride with ‘em and he’ll get interviewed, too. Because he’s an outfitter.” [Tom owns and operates the Virginia Lakes Pack Station.] “Y’know: the commercial angle, ‘Business and Wilderness in harmony,’ blah bla-blah! So let’s get the truck and head for the Okay Corral.” Lorenzo has nicknames for everything.
“Well, this is looking like it’s gonna be a long day,” I said. “We’d better go over to the store and grab something for the trail.”
“Nah—don’t worry about it…they’re providing lunch. They’ll spring for it.”
“Are you sure about that? Monday, I saw a memo from Bill on your desk. I just glanced at it but I think it said something about ‘five dollars for a sack lunch.’”
“No…they’re bringing stuff with ‘em. And they’ll pick up the tab. Trust me. They always do with gigs like this.”
“Lorenzo—haven’t you heard? There’s no such thing as a free lunch!”
THE THREE OF US WASTED a perfectly good hour at the barn, much of it spent running around in circles out in the pasture trying to corner the aforementioned half-wild mule called Charlie Brown, who rarely gets used and only when absolutely necessary. Then, after loading the animals and collecting all the saddles and gear, we moved to the old barn’s lee side to get out of the biting wind and stood in patches of sunlight, hands a-pocket. Technically, there were still a couple of weeks of summer left; this day felt like we’d skipped fall and gone straight to winter. At long last, we climbed into our rigs and took off. Wild lenticular clouds were lined up, north and south as far as the eye could see. It was going to be nasty up at Virginia Lakes.
Lorenzo piloted the Gutless Pig [his name for our absurdly underpowered stock truck] while I sat in the passenger seat, cradling my hand in my lap. Visibly swollen, it looked to be badly sunburned or something worse. Lorenzo glanced over. Then again.
“Uh…by the way, what’s up with that, buckaroo? While we were eating I couldn’t help but notice you’ve got a sore paw there.”
“Yeah,” holding it up for his inspection, “Nice, hunh? I got stung by a meat bee on my ride out yesterday…itches like hell. I’m gonna try and go easy on it today.”
As usual, the stock truck overheated going up Conway Grade but we reached the campground without having to stop and let it cool down. Brian pulled in behind us minutes later. John Howe wasn’t there yet so we just sat in our rigs, getting rocked by the more violent gusts. Virginia Creek Canyon is known for being an exceptionally windy place. The upper lake basin has little in the way of cover much beyond the trailhead (one of the highest in the Sierra, at just under ten-thousand feet). It had to be screaming up on the crest. Tough luck for us: this was a truly odious day to be out and about.
John showed up. After unloading the animals we started grabbing things from a massive pile of tack in the back of Brian’s truck. Lorenzo went off to meet the rest of the group, wherever they might be. I tried to saddle a horse but couldn’t properly do up buckles or thread latigos through cinch-rings so left the rest to John (Brian just starting to learn how) and instead huddled in the stock truck’s cab, nursing my sick baby. When they were ready to go we led “the seven stooges” [Lorenzo again] up a narrow fire lane lined with frantically quaking aspens, golden leaves raining down. This led to another parking area, an overflow lot just past the campground that I didn’t even know existed. The Reno people were there. It was already eleven—not exactly an early start.
I asked “John, “So where exactly are we headed? Do you even know?”
“We’re all supposed to meet up at a place called Lunch Meadow. Do you know where this Lunch Meadow is? I have no idea.”
“Sure—it’s on the other side of the divide, part way down that long set of switch-backs on the other side. The meadow sits on a bench maybe half a mile above where the trail splits off to Summit Lake. Tom’s packers usually stop there to give their dudes a break from the ass-pounding they got coming down that steep grade. It’s a nice spot: great views looking straight across the headwaters of Green Creek at Summit Lake, almost level with it, and down on Hoover Lakes. It’s, oh, probably just shy of three miles from here. Yeah, that’s a good place to aim for. But, I’ll warn you now, John: the wind is gonna be howling going over the top. Howling! It’s like a wind tunnel there on days like this. Your people are not going to like it, I can tell you that much. Not even a little.”
“Well, that’s where we’ll stop for lunch, but they said they wanna continue on to Summit Lake if we have time.”
“Summit?! You’ve gotta be kidding! We won’t get back ‘til dark, John!”
“No, no—they say they’re hoping to be back to their rigs by three.”
“Rrright! I doubt we’ll make it much past the meadow. Not at this rate, anyway.”
“They said the cameras will only come out once. Hell, I don’t know. We’ll see how it goes. I’m basically along for the ride.”
The Reno crew consisted of half a dozen city-slicker types, all in western garb. Most of them looked reasonably normal but two were dolled up like cowboy parodies, like characters in some silly Hollywood musical. (The ones who’d be in front of the cameras, no doubt). There were vehicles and horses parked all around, people standing in knots, talking. Lorenzo, master schmoozer that he is, was there with them, bla-blah-blaing away. No one seemed to be in any kind of hurry. Brian and I walked up to one circle. I was going to introduce us both, maybe get some idea of what this show was all about but right then Lorenzo walked past and said under his breath, “You…Brian: GO! Hit the road!” I didn’t know what this sudden rush was about but figured he wanted us to get a lead on the riders. So I grabbed my prop (a shovel) and the two of us started off. But we hadn’t gone a hundred yards before Lorenzo, now on horseback, rode up behind us. “Brian—go back and help John with the packing. Make sure he doesn’t load any camera gear on Charlie Brown—that useless mule would figure out a way to destroy it and it’d be better if that didn’t happen.” Then he turned around and rode back.
As soon as we left I’d handed Brian my shovel. Now, grinning and shaking his head, he gave it back. Brian is a nice kid—a twenty-two-year-old blond surfer-dude from Southern California, straight out of college, new to “the life,” and maybe a bit overwhelmed by this day’s vivid demonstration of Federally funded chaos. As he started back I spied Lorenzo through the trees, stopped, waiting for the others and could make out another horse and rider through the trees. Thinking: The riders are leaving and Lorenzo wants me to streak on over so we can meet up at the meadow and schmooze a bit before the pack animals arrive and the real stuff begins. I hope one of them has my lunch. So I took off in earnest, Forest Service cap clamped onto my head. (I’d already adjusted the adjustable headband to its hurricane setting.) A half mile on, just before reaching the old miner’s cabin below Cooney Lake, I jumped off the busy thoroughfare and proceeded cross country via a slightly more direct route leading to the upper basin. This sort-of-a-shortcut bypasses the popular lake and all the fishermen and campers who’d slow me down with their questions. However! It had been several years since I’d last taken this route and I managed to get myself lost for a few minutes. Just slightly.
Once back on track I took a breather in the lee of a dense willow thicket. Even with the chill factor I was sweating so took off my jacket and stuffed it in the pack. Thanks to all this heavy exertion at ten-thousand feet, my almost useless appendage was now throbbing. The itch was terrible. And it was definitely more swollen. When I hit the main trail again at Frog Lakes I paused for a few minutes to dip it in one of the lake’s outlet stream. No riders had appeared yet which wasn’t surprising since I’d been traveling faster than a walking horse. The trail showed fresh horse prints heading upcanyon, already blown in with grit and pine needles but quite recent—definitely not yesterday’s. Still, there was a slight chance that the riders had gotten in front of me while I was wandering around, slightly lost. (And because my so-called shortcut wasn’t actually shorter—it was more a way to save time by avoiding recreators.) On reflection, it seemed unlikely that the group would have made it this far so I kept going, walking fast, feeling a bit more relaxed inside.
Made it to the head of the cirque, where switchbacks lead to the top of what I call Virginia-Green Divide—an otherwise nameless pass crossing the high ridge between the Virginia Creek and Green Creek watersheds. [Hikers wrongly refer to it as Virginia Pass.] The wind kicked into a higher gear as soon as I started up the switchbacks and left the krummholzed whitebark pines’ paltry shelter. One tremendous gust snatched my cap and flung it into a clump of the stunted trees a hundred feet below. Back down I went. I still couldn’t see anyone so the doubt began to slither back in.
It was just as wild up on top as I’d known it would be, having been there on similar days. (Though never this bad.) The divide itself is a couple of hundred yards broad, pancake-flat and completely exposed, with a sweeping 360° bird’s-eye vista: two highcountry lake basins, massive Dunderberg Peak to the northeast, looming, and a sliver of Mono Lake peeking out from behind the bare naked ridge-crest called Black Mountain. As soon as you top out, you’re facing an equally spectacular view due west, down the length of half-mile-long Summit Lake with the real Virginia Pass at its far end and northernmost Yosemite Park beyond, with more snow-clad peaks. Today, the typically blue blue Summit Lake was covered with frothy whitecaps and I was getting rocked by a fifty-mile-per-hour tempest—and that’s no exaggeration. Glad to not have a load on my back, I held onto the shovel with a death grip to keep it from being ripped out of my hand. (It really was that bad.) I paused for just a moment and glanced back, expecting people on horseback to be in view at last. But nary a horse rider in sight. Maybe they’re about to come out of the trees. Or maybe the riders didn’t leave before the packstock after all. This definitely made me uneasy. But I wasn’t about to linger and resolved to just hump it down to Lunch Meadow and wait for the others to arrive. I knew of a sort of hiding place there that would provide a little shelter from the storm.
I jogged (more like lurched) across the plateau, clutching the shovel in my good hand and leaning into the blasts. Once over the divide, the gale-force winds lost some of their energy. Starting from the top, a gentle incline quickly drops away and the trail snakes between bluffs of shaley metamorphic rock for a while then zags and zigs straight down via short, tight switchbacks. One stretch crosses a lower-angled, blocky talus field. Meltwater from big perennial snowfields cascades freely across the soil-free trail in several places and flows straight down it in others. This section gives way to more switchbacks before briefly leveling out at a sweet little pocket meadow perched on the mountainside: our designated rendezvous.
It was already after noon.
Not far below the divide I met three backpackers. One of them, in the lead and a bit ahead of his partners, really stood out against the backdrop of grey and brown shale. Ambient temperature-wise it wasn’t all that cold. But this guy’s outfit—cherry-red short shorts and a festive Hawaiian shirt—just didn’t match the current conditions. To top it off, he had this completely outlandish hat: a broad-brimmed straw affair whose floppy two-foot-wide brim drooped down almost to his shoulders, reminiscent of a Bassett hound’s ears. What an outfit! What’s holding that thing on? He hailed me:
“Hey, mister ranger! Is it, uh, this windy on the other side of the pass?”
Now, that old saw, “There are no stupid questions,” is simply not true; I field legitimately stupid questions on a regular basis. Grinning smugly, I nodded with exaggerated slowness and replied, “Unh-huh”—an unh-huh that fairly oozed snarky sarcasm. The foul weather, combined with my digital affliction and the whole bizarre situation, had taken a toll on my overall mood and I just hadn’t noticed. Until now. His two buddies caught up to us just then and were listening attentively.
“Well, is it like this down lower, say at the trailhead?” In the background, instead of your typical serene mountain stillness punctuated by the odd marmot’s chirp or calling bird or murmur of cascading water off in the distance, was a pervasive dull roar coming from everywhere at once. We had to lean in and talk loud to be heard over it.
“It’s this windy everywhere! See those clouds up north? The weird pancake-stack clouds? When you see those bad boys it means that the jet stream has dropped down where it shouldn’t be. I’m guessing there’s a low low pressure trough over us right now and it’s sucking the thing down, apparently over the entire region. It’s probably like this pretty much everywhere today, up and down the Sierra at least. Especially up high. But this place is almost always windy—the whole canyon is like a funnel for some reason. See how carved up those clumps of whitebark pines are? That’s wind. But it won’t be nearly this bad once you get down into some real trees, into the lodgepole forest; it’ll make a big difference. But you won’t hit lodgepoles until you’re all the way down to Cooney Lake and that place is a zoo. You don’t wanna camp there. Where you coming from?”
“We’ve been over in the Park for almost a week but spent last night down at those Hoover Lakes. Then—jeez!—middle of the night, it just starts ripping!”
Once we got to talking, it was obvious that I was in the company of backcountry pros who were having a fine time despite today’s less-than-ideal conditions. Our little trailside chat ended up being a top notch version of what we in the ranger business refer to in our reports as “visitor encounters.” These three suburbanites from Sacramento were affable and funny and fully game and we had a few good laughs while being buffeted about. One of them kept glancing down at my hand but said nothing.
Guy with red shorts and silly hat: “This is our last full day. We wanna spend one more night out and don’t really want to go much farther. What’s the camping like at that Big Frog Lake?” [He’d seen it on his map—the next named body of water they’d come to, still well above ten-thousand feet.] “Got some big ol’ frogs there, hunh?”
“Wise guy. ‘Big Frog’ Lake is basically the biggest of three very large puddles. It wouldn’t even have a name if it weren’t right next to a trail. Not much in the way of cover there, only a few scrawny little whitebarks. It’ll be…okay. But I’m guessing it’s gonna blow like this all day and there’s no wood left to burn around any of these high lakes. Too windy for a fire, anyway. Where’re you all headed after you get out?”
“We’re travelling, actually. Extended road trip. But our next destination is Reno. Eat pizza. Drink beer. Gamble. In that order. Then take it from there.”
“Hmmm. Tell you what: if I were you…well, there’s loads of good, cheap motels in Reno. Soft beds. Hot showers…those other ‘amenities’ of which you speak. You’ve been out for almost a week? Well, that’s what I’d do. But this is my job—I’m not on vacation. On days like this I just wanna be back in my cabin stuffing wood into the stove.” We shared a last laugh before I checked their Wilderness permit and waved them on. As we parted ways I yelled back, “Watch out up ahead—buncha people on horseback coming this way. A TV crew from Reno, actually. They’re gonna interview me down there in that little meadow you just passed for a thing that’ll be on the Reno news tonight—a piece about Wilderness seeing as how today just happens to be the 25th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. I’m gonna be the star of the show!”
“Hey, we’ll watch it tonight on the TV in our cheap motel room. I think you just convinced us to move on. Have fun! This could lead to bigger and better things!”
Shortly thereafter, I passed two slow-moving backpackers carrying big loads; like me, on their way down, but we didn’t stop to talk. Reaching the bench, I strode through a small grove of upright whitebark pines, crossed the little half-acre meadow, and ducked into a natural enclosure hemmed in by low rock walls and shrubby whitebarks. (I’d taken refuge here on other windy days.) After emptying my pack I plopped down on it and leaned back into this perfect little body-sized nook, in full sun, and just like that found myself reclined in near-total comfort—in a virtual calm, no less. There was nothing left to do but hunker down, keep an eye out for the crew, and try to ignore my throbbing, itching hand. The whole thing was grossly swollen now—had reached that state usually characterized as “blown-up dish glove.” The skin was tight and shiny. And it was driving me mad. By my side was a block of the slatey metamorphic rock this whole area is made of, still in shade. Gingerly pressing the feverish foreign body against its smooth, icy-cold surface brought a little relief. A little.
But, just minutes into the wait, I was getting antsy and it was hard to sit still. Part of this was the itch that couldn’t be scratched. But something definitely wasn’t right and time went by at a crawl. Hungry! Why didn’t I think to bring some snacks?
Just a few minutes later I looked up and caught a brief glimpse of something human, mostly obscured by two layers of trees. Maybe hikers on the trail. I leapt to my feet and tried to get a better look but couldn’t see anything through the tangle of krummholzed conifers surrounding the enclosure. I went for a better look but once out into the open saw no one. It must’ve been those last two backpackers passing through. Couldn’t see anyone coming down the switchbacks, either, so I went back to my little sanctuary and tried to remain calm. On any other day, I wouldn’t be waiting around like this— at least, not for very long. But given my condition I opted to hold tight. When the group showed up—or rather, if they showed up—I’d try to talk Lorenzo or maybe John out of their saddlehorse and ride back.
Time crept by. It was now going on two o’clock and I was beginning to spin out: They should’ve shown up by now! SOMEBODY should be here! [And:] Maybe they’re in front of me after all…what if they passed me while I was “lost”? [Then:] No, no…the three guys I talked with would’ve mentioned seeing them. [Followed by:] Wait! Maybe those guys, after leaving camp this morning, hadn’t reached the Summit Lake junction before the horses came through, bound for Summit Lake, and they missed seeing them. Then I’d go back and run through it all again. And there was this: I knew that the pack animals would be well behind the riders. So where were they? The trail, being little more than shattered rock in these parts, didn’t show tracks. Wish I’d thought to ask those last two backpackers if they’d seen anyone.
At least an hour passed. It was time—past time—to trudge back up to the hill and have a look over the other side. Something was definitely amiss. Disgusted, I threw my stuff in the pack, crossed the meadow, and started up the long grade.
Maybe half way to the divide two more backpackers appeared, heading downhill—another couple. When I first saw them, they’d just come around a bend but were still aways off and a switchback or two above. The man spotted me and yelled down, “ARE YOU LOOKING FOR ANOTHER RANGER?!”
“YEAH! SORT OF! DID YOU SEE HIM?! WERE THERE ANY PEOPLE ON HORSEBACK?!” We were both shouting but his words were getting blown away like confetti. Both replies sounded like affirmatives, though, and I yelled back, “DID YOU HEAR ANYBODY SAY WHERE THEY WERE GOING?!”
“EAST LAKE!”
That last I heard clearly. East Lake! What?! Now I was very confused. Beyond confused: bewildered. This made absolutely no sense. East Lake was well below the two Hoover Lakes, a mile farther down Green Creek. Without another word I waved at the pair, turned, and started back down. How in the world did everybody get in front of me? They’ve already eaten lunch and finished whatever it is they were gonna do and everyone’s wondering what happened to that ranger. How could I have missed seeing them?! Where’s Brian?
I ran, actually ran down the switchbacks (switchbacks, please note, that I’d already been down once and had just climbed back up), loped past Lunch Meadow, and started down the next set of switchbacks. Down down down, ignoring my throbbing blown-up-dishglove appendage, trying to make sense of the senseless while keeping an eye on the stony trail lest I break an ankle and have to be rescued.
A half-mile below Lunch Meadow, almost to the Summit/Hoover Lakes junction, I practically ran into Brian as he came around a blind corner, heading up the trail at a slow jog. Red-faced and dripping sweat, he was staggered by my sudden appearance.
“Tim!! Where’ve you been?! I’ve been looking all over for you!”
“What are you doing here, Brian?! Where’s everyone else? Are they still coming?”
“They’re all back at Frog Lakes! Tim! We only went a mile or so and everyone wanted to stop—nobody knew where you’d gone off to so they were gonna interview me! But I don’t know anything! So I said I’d go look for you instead and they told me, ‘Well, you’d better start running.’ I ran all the way to the far end of Summit Lake and still never found you and I was all confused. Tim!! Where’ve you been all this time?!”
“Who? Me? Hah! I’ve been waiting for you guys in this little protected hideaway spot, a place I knew about that’s on the other side of Lunch Meadow right across from the trail. I waited there for a good hour, just trying to get out of this little, uh, ‘breeze.’”
“I must’ve just missed you. I was talking with two backpackers stopped right there, taking a break, who told me they’d passed you on the trail. And three other guys before them said they’d seen you, too. So I kept going.”
“Yeah—I saw those two but didn’t so much as say hello. They wouldn’t have known I was stopped there, hiding in the rocks. So I just missed you, too. Damn. By the time I made it over to the trail everybody was gone.”
“But what are you doing down here?! Oh, man, I’ve been running for miles. My legs are fried!” Poor kid: he was all worked up, probably thinking we were both going to get the sack.
“Relax, Brian. Relax. There’s no hurry now. It’s all over.” His face fell. “And we’re not gonna get fired over this. It’s nobody’s fault. Lorenzo told me to blast over here. I knew what he was thinking: he wanted me to get in front of the horses, get to the meadow ahead of everybody and have time to schmooze it up with the news-guys before the interview. The reason he sent the two of us off first was because he knows that with deals like this, someone has to actually leave to get the ball rolling. Nobody was taking charge back there and they would’ve stood around jabbering all day if somebody didn’t make a move. I waited at the meadow for, jeez, a good hour. Finally, it was obvious that something was wrong and I started back. Saw those backpackers up ahead, the ones you talked to. The one yelled down asking if I was looking for you. They were still a couple of switchbacks above me and I couldn’t hear over the roar but when I yelled back, asking if they’d seen people on horses, it sounded like a yes. And he definitely said they were headed for East Lake! That had me totally mystified! Couldn’t figure out how or why, but it looked like you all were ahead of me and had gone on to Summit Lake. John told me this morning that, originally, they wanted to go all the way to Summit. So then why would that guy have said East Lake? It made no sense.”
“Well, a string of unloaded mules from the pack station passed through earlier. They were booking! That backpacker must’ve thought you meant them.” At that moment, he spotted the bloated red thing poking out of my sleeve. “What happened to your hand?!” I held it up and Brian’s jaw dropped. “Oh my gawd!”
“I got stung by one of those meat bees. What a comedy of errors! Somehow I missed seeing ‘em pass by when I was hiding in the rocks—couldn’t hear squat over this hurricane. Really, it’s almost funny! No, it is funny! Haw haw haw! The gods must’ve been a little bored today and decided they needed some light entertainment. Oh well, it’s all over now! Let’s head back—hey, can you carry my shovel?...thanks—and try to get to the trailhead before they take off without us. Good lord. But hey! We just did what we were told.”
So we marched back over the hill, into the wind, slogging up those rocky switchbacks one more time. At the divide I left Brian behind and trotted the rest of the way. Not that there was any rush—just to burn off some of my angst, hand be damned. It was beyond mattering at this point.
A QUARTER MILE FROM the trailhead I came up on the last riders, fell in behind, and walked in a thick cloud of dust. John Howe, riding drag and leading two mules, finally saw me as he rounded a bend. He grinned sheepishly and said, “Sorry, Tim.” That was all. I dropped back to get out of the brown cloud and came in just behind the last pack-animal, that wicked Charlie Brown, who turned and shot me his patented contemptuous sneer—a look he saves for the rare occasions when he has to be around humans.
I stumbled into the circle of vehicles. People were in the process of exchanging handshakes and congratulations, as in “Well done! Mission accomplished!” I went over and plopped down on the Gutless Pig’s loading ramp, ignoring the powdered manure and dried mud. I must’ve looked pretty hangdog. One of the camera crew guys saw me and, without saying a word, handed me a bottle of water—which I drained on the spot—and someone else pulled a can of Pepsi out of their saddlebags and gave it to me. I sat there sipping my warm Pepsi, watching everybody pile into their cars and vans. No one spoke to me but several complete strangers grinned apologetically. Something in the almost shy, slightly awkward looks on their faces told me that one and all were aware that, whoever I was, I’d gotten a raw deal.
Right about then, Lorenzo came over. Smiling sympathetically, he said, “Hey there, buckaroo! How’s it goin’?”
“Oh, fine.” (This, in a neutral tone, without overt irony.) “Hand’s not so good.”
“I can see that.” He gazed off. After an appropriate number of seconds passed he said, “Oh, well,” which is sort of an expression Lorenzo uses at times like this. Somehow, his soulful ‘Oh, well’ summed up perfectly the sloppy mess this day had been; no further apology was needed. The Reno contingent drove off in one last cloud of swirling dust, leaving us Forest Service folk to deal with our stock and all the tack. Tom Roberts had already led off his rented saddle horses. [Tom is an old friend; I’d seen him when we first arrived but never even had a chance to say hello.]
Brian rolled in right then and wasted no time voicing what was foremost in his thoughts and mine: “Um…is there any lunch left? Would it be possible to, uh….”
John said, “There’s a couple of leftover sandwiches in my saddlebags. They were for you guys. I’m afraid they got kinda smashed—that *!#@*$!# Charlie Brown spun around and slammed into my horse for no reason. Twice.”
And so, at three-thirty o’clock, I finally got to eat my free lunch: a beat-up, soggy turkey sandwich on a compressed French roll. While this generic deli-style sandwich had (so to speak) seen better days, it tasted mighty fine right about then. I hunkered in the stock truck, at long last out of the infernal wind, peeled the cellophane wrapper off with my teeth and devoured the thing in about two minutes. Lorenzo climbed in and drove us straight to the Bridgeport hospital’s ER where I saw the doctor on duty. He more or less advised me to take two aspirin (two Benadryls) and call in the morning.
LATER, LORENZO AND I were back at the barn. All the tack was stashed away. He unloaded the stock by himself and turned them loose while I watched. Brian was already gone. “Let’s go to town, Fersell, and get us a couple o’ gruntburgers!” [Lorenzo-speak for your basic hamburger-and-fries meal.] This would give us a chance to review our day and the errors in judgment we’d made along the way. A debriefing, as it were.
Lorenzo kicked things off: “I wanted to get you out of there so that we could untangle everything and get the dog’n’pony show on the road. You hadn’t been gone two minutes—I swear, not two minutes—when John told me the news-guys said they had to be back at the vehicles by three so they could zoom back to Reno in time to get their footage to editors. We obviously weren’t gonna make it as far as Lunch Meadow, let alone—Hah!—Summit Lake. I knew you were gone and I told John, ‘He’s gone. Fersell’s gone. We’ll never see him again.’ We only made it as far as Frog Lakes before everybody wanted to stop. You shoulda seen ‘em! They were all clutching their little cowboy hats and ab-so-lutely FREAKING! OUT!—like we were in the Himalayas. Greenhorns!!”
“So what happened? Did you get interviewed?”
“Yeah, they interviewed me—blah bla-blah! And Tom Roberts, too. He was real nervous. Said to me, ‘Lorenzo, I’m real nervous! I’ve never done anything like this before,’ and I told him, ‘Tom, you’ll do fine. Just be yourself.’ And he did great.”
“Well, he sure looked great. Tom’s got that classic packer look down: the wool vest…the yoke shirt with mother-of-pearl buttons—gotta have those mother-of-pearl buttons! Silk neckerchief wrapped twice, knot in back. And, hey, that’s gen-u-ine dirt on his Wranglers and real horseshit stuck to his boots! Those Paul Newman-blue eyes and John Muir beard complete the picture: authentic western. Not that fake-western.”
“Yeah, he looked pretty darn western all right! Not like those drugstore cowboys from Reno. They had no idea how absurd they looked in their shiny, brand-new costumes. So they were gonna interview Brian instead of you but he managed to escape. Then these three backpackers show up. One had on this gigantic, completely ridiculous hat…brim flapping in the wind. They got to be in the show, too. And these guys were priceless…said all the right things. Like I was saying, Nevadans hate Wilderness and the news-guys were asking all these leading questions—‘Why do we need Wilderness? Why should Nevada have Wilderness?’—and those guys were candid, funny…weren’t self-conscious or at all nervous. And they answered the questions perfectly: ‘Of course you need Wilderness, you imbeciles!’” [Those weren’t their words—this was Lorenzo acting out their part.] “They were the real stars. It couldn’t have been scripted any better.”
“I talked to those guys…had a real nice conversation. Yeah, they’d be perfect. Definitely. Uhhh…did they mention running into me, by any chance?”
“They did, actually. One said, ‘Please be sure to tell that ranger we’re gonna go watch ourselves on TV tonight while we’re lounging in our motel rooms!’ They all laughed when he said it. For some reason they seemed to think it was pretty hilarious.”
That’s okay.
I didn’t want to be a TV star, anyway.
I didn’t…I really didn’t.
Afterword…
NEXT MORNING IN THE OFFICE: Bill, the Rec Officer, John Howe’s boss, walked in and straightaway asked for money.
“Tim, lunch was five bucks.”
Me, all whiney and indignant: “I was told lunch was taken care of!” Well, my lunch had been “taken care of,” all right—very poorly as it turned out. I didn’t even get the little bag of chips or the pickle, not to mention a can of carbonated sugar water to wash it all down with. But Bill had paid for them out of pocket so I handed him a fiver.
And so it is that, in my experience at least, the Free Lunch continues to retain its mythic status—symbolic of things exceedingly elusive or maybe even unattainable.
©2023 Tim Forsell 14 Sep 1989, 22 Apr 2013, 5 Dec 2023
