The Last Season (31 page)

Scofield admits that before he opened one of those dresser drawers, he had not been prone to metaphysical thinking. That changed when he pulled out a cardboard box about the size of a hiking boot shoe box that was filled with random items such as a flash, battery pack, camera batteries, and lens cleaner. It looked like a neatly arranged care package intended for a photographer. Sitting atop the assortment, centered in the box, was a small pamphlet “like you'd get in Sunday school,” says Scofield, “and on the cover of this little pamphlet was Sermon on the Mount, from the Bible. It totally threw me backwards—back in time to Randy's Sermon at Mineral King.”

It was the late 1980s, when Scofield and Randy had taught a photography workshop called Wilderness Landscapes. They'd camped at the Potwisha campground inside the parks' Ash Mountain entrance, and woke with the students early one morning to make it to the nearby Mineral King Valley while the light was still right for photography.

The night before had been a sky show of “fantastic thunderstorms,” and there was still a lot of moisture in the air. Randy had planned to inspire the students by telling them how Walt Disney almost turned the Mineral King Valley into a huge resort. This was the type of thing Randy
and Scofield did in their workshops, which weren't just about how to take photographs. They were, according to Scofield, “about how you decide who you are out in the world as a photographer, and if you're going to photograph the landscape, how you develop a rapport with the wilds.”

That misty morning, Scofield, Randy, and a dozen students gathered at the trailhead and focused their attention on the stunning Mineral King Valley. Randy discreetly climbed up onto a rocky knoll and began reading what Scofield described as “amazingly powerful passages” that Randy had prepared about this, the site of one of the environmental movement's greatest battles:
Sierra Club v. Morton
—the 1972 Supreme Court case widely referred to as
Mineral King versus Disney
.

Fog rolled in and around Randy as he spoke from atop the granite podium, sometimes shrouding him almost entirely from the students. But his voice, reading the powerful words of Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas, was strong and steady:

“Who,” asked Randy with a dramatic pause before quoting the rest of Douglas's most famous line, “will speak for the trees?”

“When he finished, the students cheered,” says Scofield. “The whole
scene had taken on these epic proportions—the jagged Sierra crest farther up the valley coming in and out of focus through the mist. It was incredibly moving.” And a mini history lesson: most of the students didn't know that Mineral King had been the case that raised the question of rights for inanimate objects. Scofield, who has taught workshops for more than twenty years, says he has never seen an instructor move an audience the way Randy did that day. “It was like Jesus on the mountain,” explains Scofield. “Powerful weather, amazing beauty, the fog, the crest. It just all came together.”

And it all came back to him now, vividly, as he sat among Randy's belongings. Ever since that day at Mineral King, Scofield had referred to Randy's speech as “Randy's Sermon on the Mount.” He was suddenly overcome by the unshakable conviction that this care package was not just for any photographer—it was tailor-made for him. “There was no question in my mind,” says Scofield. “It was a message from Randy.”

Later, Judi showed Scofield some of the endless files that Randy had kept on virtually every aspect of his life—files that held documents from grammar school, high school, college, the Peace Corps, his correspondence with Wallace Stegner and Ansel Adams, his ranger training, his mother and father, and an extensive documentation of his photography, including the workshops he'd taught.

When Scofield saw those files, he was further convinced that the box was indeed a message from Randy. “If he had wanted to file that Sermon on the Mount pamphlet away as part of his history, Randy kept files of things like that,” he says. “That is where he would have put it. If you assume for a minute that he did want me to find it, he would have known that Judi would have had me go through his camera equipment, but may not have gone through his files. And sure enough, Judi invited me out to do just that. Randy knew. He was thinking about either disappearing or taking his life when he packed that box. He wanted me to have something, a piece of him.

“It worked, all right—that little pamphlet hit me like a ton of bricks.”

Scofield shared with Judi the story of Randy's Sermon on the Mount,
but he wasn't entirely forthcoming about his belief that the pamphlet had underlying meanings. Judi was grieving, and he didn't want to add to her burden—certainly not that Randy may have been planning his disappearance or his death.

Scofield did, however, have one other theory, though it was “out there.” He considered it possible that Randy might have put this box together simply because “he sensed something might happen to him.” Perhaps if Scofield had brought up that theory, Judi might have told him the “message” she herself had gotten from Randy, a message delivered, appropriately, within the pages of a book—the novel he'd given her before he left for the mountains.

I Heard the Owl Call My Name
had sat on her nightstand until the third or fourth day of the search. She had by that time spent her anger and accepted, or more accurately “knew,” that something had happened. She describes the novel, but only after explaining that Randy always read slowly. “Because he loved the language, he'd savor the language,” says Judi. “He didn't do anything quickly. He felt you'd miss things if you went too fast. We were open to things, not the mystical New Age stuff here in Sedona, but being in the mountains and spending that much time by yourself…you can tell by his writings he was really in tune with the cycles of nature. You get into those cycles and you become very aware of them, especially when your mind is quiet. It's very Zen. Everything slows down and you can hear things. You can hear yourself.”

The novel was, in Judi's words, about “a young minister who was sent by a bishop to British Columbia to live with some native Indians whose tribe was slowly disappearing, losing its old ways and its people. He went there to help them, and in the process learned a lot about life and death and how to accept death. Toward the end, he heard the owl call his name, which was a myth that they had in their tribe. What it meant was that he was going to die. The minister didn't know it but he had terminal cancer.”

“Subconsciously,” says Judi, “maybe Randy knew. When you're tapped into the kind of emotional pain he was going through, you are
really in tune with other things in nature. The things around you, you just know things—maybe even premonitions. Shortly after reading that book, I had the dream about him being in that lake, under water. So, you get tuned in.

“I think Randy might have had that feeling. Maybe he felt that. Maybe the mountains called his name?”

Some would consider this metaphysical hogwash. In fact, after some time had passed, Judi herself began to discount the possibility that Randy had tuned in to something, remembering that Randy knew she liked owls and had perhaps seen the book and thought of her. Nothing more.

Judi might have thought differently if she had known about Randy's patrol the season before he disappeared. On September 17, 1995, Randy had hiked from LeConte Canyon down the White Fork to Woods Creek Crossing and then camped in Paradise Valley. Forest fires were raging in the parks. It was raining ash and smelled of acrid smoke. The sun barely cut through the darkness, and then, come nightfall, Randy's headlamp beam created the same effect as car headlights during a snowstorm. Because of the ash, Randy slept inside his tent, which was unusual.

In the morning, Randy was awakened by an owl calling. It was a surreal day, with silver-and-white ash so thick on the ground it looked like snowfall. He wrote in his logbook, “A great horned owl calling in the wee hours before dawn; eerie smoky dimness, and the owl calling—Paradise.”

Coincidence? Randy might have said, “Only the owl knows for certain.”

But what is known is that great horned owls are common in the parks. It stands to reason, then, that Randy would have mentioned great horned owls calling dozens of times over the years. According to his station logbooks, however, during the entire course of his ranger career, he'd never mentioned hearing the great horned owl—or any owl, for that matter—“calling,” and he'd documented literally thousands of other species, describing in detail their songs, voices, music. Never
an owl. Never its call.

Was it a coincidence, then, that nine months later, he gave his wife
I Heard the Owl Call My Name
as a parting gift on the last day she ever saw him? Did it strike as anything less than odd that of the hundreds of books lined up on his bookshelves, of the thousands in the bookstores he frequented, he would pick a book whose main message is that of a man's ability to sense his own coming death—if he listens.

Randy had heard an owl calling and described it as “Paradise.” Did he hear anything else? Was there a message? In the wilderness, nobody listened more attentively than Randy.

 

ON JANUARY
14, 1998, the director of personnel policy and the solicitor of the National Park Service informed Judi that they had completed their review and “found that circumstances surrounding the disappearance of Ranger Morgenson support the presumption that he is no longer alive.”

A year and a half after she'd submitted the request, Judi had legal proof of Randy's passing. George Durkee put together what he described as a “bombproof” report “proving” that Randy had been killed while on patrol in the backcountry. It included an inch-thick investigation report supplied by Al DeLaCruz, the declaration of death, and the delayed death certificate. In the beginning of March, Park Superintendent Michael Tollefson sent the claim on Judi's behalf to the U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance.

Seven months later, her request was denied in a letter that read, in part: “The evidence submitted on your behalf is insufficient to conclude that your husband's death was the result of a line of duty…this office recommends that you provide additional evidence that demonstrates…a line of duty death. We regret the loss of your husband, Ranger Morgenson. If you have any questions, please call at…”

Judi resubmitted a beefed-up version. Five months later, she received an official denial that stated “while the PSOB Act requires this determination, such action does not diminish Park Ranger James Ran
dall Morgenson's distinguished record of public service.” Attached was a two-page, play-by-play reasoning for the decision, including “Ranger Morgenson's wallet and duty weapon were recovered from his duty station.”

Further, the denial letter stated that the evidence submitted by Judi “is insufficient to conclude that Ranger Morgenson was engaged in duties which he was authorized or required to perform as a park ranger at the time of his death. Ranger Morgenson's body was not found resulting in the issuance of a Delayed Registration of Death…. The record, as it currently stands, provides very little for this office to make a favorable determination.”

The letter then referenced a case from 1985,
Tafoya v. United States,
whose ruling “prohibits the use of conjecture and speculation as evidence or fact when it concerns the cause of an officer's death.”

In conclusion, “Accordingly, Ranger Morgenson's survivor is ineligible to receive the benefit authorized by the Act.”

When Durkee read the letter, he began fuming. He could picture a bunch of guys sitting in an office in D.C., utterly clueless about the Sierra terrain. “The fact that Randy hadn't been found would make no sense to them and was probably reason enough to deny the claim,” Durkee told Judi. “The only way they'll pay is if we find him dead, in his uniform, radio in hand.”

In essence, the Bureau of Justice Assistance left Judi no other choice but to sue, which would be a battlefield strewn with coils of red tape, endless paperwork, and mountainous legal expenses that would likely eat up a good portion of any benefit she'd eventually get. But she couldn't look behind the injustice. How could a backcountry ranger, whose job it was to patrol—alone—the most rugged terrain in the country's most treasured wilderness lands, be denied the benefits he thought existed before committing himself to the wilds?

Of course, there still remained the theory that Randy had staged his own disappearance. What if she fought the battle and Randy happened to show up from Mexico with a sombrero and a “Sorry.”

“Impossible,” would be Judi's response to such a line of questioning
in a court of law.

“Why is it impossible, Mrs. Morgenson?” the opposing counsel would probe.

“Because I just know” would be a difficult response to prove in court, especially with $100,000 on the line.

Then there was the veiled suggestion that because Randy's duty weapon hadn't been with him, he wasn't really on duty.