The Last Season (13 page)

“In Alaska, I became excited about the newness of the country. My curiosity became piqued and I yearned to know the plants, geology, glaciology, weather, and the effects of these things on each other. I felt like a stranger. And returning to the High Sierra, I realized the comforting feelings in knowing many of these things. Like being among friends.”

Still, Randy was lonely, and he missed Judi. Ever the thinker, he justified his emotions by reasoning, “An element of loneliness is necessary in wildness.”

 

IT WAS THE DAY
after Thanksgiving 1977, and Randy and Judi had survived what Judi describes as their first “rough bump” on the road of marriage. Randy never let on how worried he had been at the beginning of the summer. Judi was, as she put it many years later, “blissfully content” and, as the snowplow rumbled past on the road below their cabin in Yosemite, “excited.”

They were snowbound—together—for the rest of the winter. Randy had been hired as the full-time Tuolumne Meadow winter ranger. Judi, who, thanks to Randy, had learned Nordic skiing herself, was hired part-time, two days a week. They were a team, and now with the Tioga Pass road officially closed, they were “alone with the storm and the mountains,” wrote Randy. “The way we want it.”

Three feet of snow had fallen when Randy and Judi woke to a “Clear. Sunny. Brilliant” day. “Impossible not to go outside for a ski,” wrote Randy that night inside their cabin—a barely insulated two-room affair that had been drafty before they patched the walls with cardboard cut from the boxes of provisions they'd brought in for the winter. “Snow has drifted around the back door, collapsing into the room as I first open it, but after a little shoveling we put on skis in the doorway and pole off the porch.

“Breaking trail. Forcing a way, with the snow pushing back with an equal and opposite force. Elementary physics, but who cares? The world is ours and as beautiful as it can ever be.”

When the road was still open, Judi had brought in—with full National Park Service blessings—her “Japanese clothes dryer”: a kiln for firing the ceramic pottery she intended to craft that winter, between the shoveling of snow and the ski-patrolling up and down the Tioga Pass road and the other routes threading through the snowbound and deserted park.

More than 30 feet of snow would fall that winter—a constant battle of clearing rooftops and pathways to the outhouse and trying, without success, to maintain a ski track, at least around the meadow and a fair distance in either direction on the road whose blacktop wouldn't see wheeled traffic for more than five months.

For a young couple in love, it was a dream job.

“We push through to the lower end of the meadow, to Pothole Dome, leaving behind a set of tracks which should be a pleasure to ski on our return,” wrote Randy after the second major storm. “There's no wind, and the sun ricocheting off the ambient white is hot. Judi takes off her sweater and shirt, to ski au natural. Sweet nakedness. I suppose
I should take off my pants and likewise flap in the morning sunshine, but I elect an ascent of Pothole Dome instead, leaving her bronzing her body on our ski track.”

Fresno Bee
reporter Gene Rose learned of the husband-and-wife team, together in the high lonely of the Sierra for an entire winter—as romantic a hook as he could imagine. He interviewed them on the telephone, their only link to civilization, about their snowbound winter jobs. Rose's editor buried the article in the back of the paper.

In spite of that, United Press International's wire service picked it up and followed with its own story on the couple the next week. NBC from Texas and NBC from Burbank, California, called, both wanting to fly in via helicopter to interview the rangers for the news. Rose's editor apologized for the lack of foresight; apparently backcountry rangers were worthy of a story in the front of the paper.

Meanwhile, Yosemite's park information officer called the Morgensons to tell them she had been fielding calls from New York, Alabama, Florida, and on and on. Judi was interviewed by a man from KNX, Los Angeles. On February 23, CBS “called us to tape an interview for a ‘woman's related program,'” wrote Randy. “Their most earnest question was about how we get along living so close together for so long. Don't we fight, scream, and tear each other's hair? Of all the things she could have asked about our life here…”

Randy mused upon the things he would have asked, and what he and Judi could have told: how taking a bath was an all-day affair—digging out the bathhouse, melting snow, firing the tub, keeping the fire stoked every twenty minutes, more snow, more wood. Meanwhile, clothes would be soaking in the cabin, the “soak cycle.” How the meadow at dusk presented a constant show: “a few thin streamers of rose pink, and purple clouds in a hard, cold blue sky; a thin wash of the lightest orange on the mountains, and the evening mist, thick and cold, rising off the meadow.” How they could spend a morning watching the heavy snowfall while huddled around a warm waffle griddle. About the miles and miles of country crossed to the squeaky tune of waxed skis on fresh powder, “exhilarated by the winter world we
moved through. The pines and firs, some of them giants among their kind, were coated, every branch, twig and needle—the entire world was an even white.” How sometimes they would not make it back to the cabin until well after dark, retracing their tracks in the moonlight or by flashlight “up our hill to our reward—hot buttered brandies.” How the evening's entertainment might be listening to
The Nutcracker Suite
or reading Annie Dillard's
A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.
About the uncountable cups of tea. The cast of woodland creatures. The mouse that washed its face and head “just like you, Randy,” laughed Judi one night. Or the pine martens—a male and female—that became their favorite to watch. “Like flowing water, he flows over his terrain,” wrote Randy. “There are no obstacles. Back slightly arched, alert eyes on the snow in front of him, tail moving with slow undulations behind, and furred feet running rapidly over the snow surface he moves with an almost effortless grace. Whenever I watch such a creature in the wild I think, with amusement, of how awkwardly we move about within our medium.”

Most importantly, Randy would have told the audience why they were there in the first place: as a safety presence for the few wilderness travelers hardy enough to ski into the area, and to monitor the park and the wilderness overall, which meant maintaining the buildings and a near-constant battle of shovel versus snow.

Too boring, Randy reasoned, for television and radio.

One day during this media bombardment, they heard boots on the step and a knock. There in the doorway, like an arctic explorer with red hair and eyebrows frozen beneath a hood, was Randy's good friend and fellow ranger, George Durkee, come to visit Yosemite's “latest and greatest celebrities.”

Durkee had begun his career with a U.S. Forest Service fire crew in 1970, but landed a position with the NPS in Yosemite in 1973 before being recruited to Sequoia and Kings Canyon in 1977. Shortly after his recruitment, he was hanging out in the valley in full hippie attire—including ripped-up denim jeans with matching jacket and bandana headband—long-haired and suspect outside the Curry Village grocery
store. A high-level ranger from Sequoia and Kings Canyon named Paul Foder was walking by with one of the Yosemite Mafia. He pointed toward Durkee and said, “Now, that looks like probable cause if I've ever seen it.”

The Mafia member said, “No, that's the new ranger you just hired.”

Durkee would never live that one down. He'd originally been hired as part of the effort to better relate to the youth population after the riots—which meant getting out and walking the paths and campgrounds of Yosemite at night, “getting the youth to fly right,” says Durkee. One night as he was walking in Stoneman Meadow—without a flashlight because he was “extra cool”—he came upon a dark form just off the path.

“Hey, guy, sorry but you can't camp here,” he said.

No response, so a bit louder, with authority: “Park ranger. You can't sleep here. You've got to move.”

Nothing. Durkee cautiously kicked the guy lightly with his foot.

“Klunk.”

It was one of the cement forms used to separate the trail from the meadow.

He slunk quietly away, only to be reminded of “the incident” by Randy—repeatedly—after Durkee made the mistake of telling him the story. This night, as he stood in the doorway of the Morgensons' cabin in Tuolumne, was no exception.

“Hey, Judi, it's that ranger who tried to arrest a cement pylon,” said Randy before giving Durkee a hearty handshake and pulling him out of the cold.

The two friends were sardonic, cynical, hypercritical, anti-establishment, irreverent lovers of wilderness who bantered back and forth incessantly. Randy would yawn when Durkee quoted his favorite authors—Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad—while Durkee would “tolerate amateurs” like Randy's favorite, Thoreau.

Durkee, Randy, and Judi ate dinner and spent the evening discussing the now-required Law Enforcement Commission for backcountry rangers, theorizing that during the classic police-academy “defensive
driving” segment they would set up deer and backpackers to maneuver around. Since they didn't drive squad cars in the backcountry, they'd just run “really, really fast” through the course while making driving sounds—screeching tires and the like.

“Company like George was always a treat,” remembers Judi. “I'd just sit back and listen to them like they were Abbott and Costello. They were the entertainment.”

Durkee and Randy's friendship would be strengthened over the years by a dirty little secret—an addictive, mutually perpetuating hobby of bashing the National Park Service. They also had a propensity for looking out for their fellow backcountry rangers.

One of their first victories against the NPS was getting rid of the rent rangers were charged for their backcountry stations for most of the 1970s. These rudimentary shelters, loosely termed “cabins,” generally had sparse furnishings, no running water, no electricity or plumbing, and were infested with mice, rats, and the occasional porcupine. Durkee and Randy felt that their canvas tents and drafty, leaky cabins weren't in the same league as the “public housing” in the frontcountry, which was guarded by “private residence” signs.

There was nothing private about a backcountry ranger's station. In addition, they were used by the public as emergency shelters during storms and as trailside motels for administrators passing through. And there had to be some underlying reason for the free utilities. Perhaps it was a way around shelling out hazardous-duty pay for having to light combustible cooking stoves. The amount of rent charged was reasonable enough—$14 a month for the Little Five Lakes tent, $21 for the Rock Creek cabin, and $15.17 for the stone Tyndall Creek cabin. But Durkee and Randy felt it was their duty as Americans to point out the injustice. It was the 17 cents that pushed them over the edge.

Visits from friends like Durkee to the Morgensons' Yosemite duty station were the exception, not the norm. Their company was each other and the woodland creatures that weathered the winter. And then the winter that had been before them was melting in their wake. The rivers grew louder, the bears staggered groggily out of hiberna
tion, and the wilderness yawned and slowly awakened. Throughout it all, the Morgensons had confirmed their compatibility: how their interests could sustain them and how life, in its simplest form, was entertainment enough. Every day they'd discovered something new, another example of nature at work. Skiing across the meadow after a fresh snow, they often came across a rodent's tracks. If they followed these tracks, they would sometimes end at a burrow in the snow, with icicles formed over the opening from a mammal sleeping inside. But one day the tracks suddenly became erratic and disappeared.

Stumped, with no clue as to what had become of the rodent, they stopped. Then they noticed a perfect “snow angel” at the terminus of the tracks—indentations made by an owl's wings as it pounced on the animal from above, pushing its small body into the snow. A few specks of blood were the only sign of the kill. The discovery made Judi sad, but Randy explained it as nature in its rawest form—a celebration, if not for the mouse, for the owl. This was a world Randy understood and the kind of life in which he felt most comfortable.

“Back in civilization I begin the questioning,” wrote Randy. “What to do with life? What kind of life? In wilderness this ceases; the questions aren't answered, they dissolve.”

 

BEFORE LEAVING
for the required ranger law enforcement academy in Santa Rosa, Randy went to Yosemite's wilderness office to see his supervisor, a subdistrict ranger who had checked in on the Morgensons a few times that winter and brought some VIPs on one visit. Randy's intent was to review his performance rating, then sign to confirm that he agreed with his supervisor's comments. He was informed, however, that his supervisor hadn't had time to complete the review, or even to start it, for that matter. Confident in his performance, Randy signed a blank document.

While Randy was learning how to be a “wilderness cop,” things weren't going so well back in Yosemite. Dana Morgenson had his annual physical, during which a suspicious lump on his prostate was diagnosed as cancer. On May 29, as Judi shuttled gear to Dana and Es
ther's house in the valley, she developed a headache and nausea, which she at first attributed to “reverse altitude sickness.” On her second trip, the headache became so painful that “it was hard to see straight.”

Judi ended up hospitalized for four days with aseptic meningitis, described to her as a less deadly form of viral meningitis. Doctors theorized that she had contracted it from the deer mice they'd lived with all winter, one of which had bitten her. The park refused to pay her hospital bills, stating that “illnesses” contracted while on duty weren't covered. She was told that if she'd broken a leg, it would have been a different story altogether.