Excerpts from the book

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Below are two excerpts from stories written for the book RANGERS - Personal Stories of National Park Rangers and the Landscapes They Protect and Preserve by Daniel Howe and Simon Griffiths

Please note that these are unedited drafts.  I hope you can excuse the occasional grammatical lapses, weird sentences and clunky transitions.  If you'd like to be on the list to receive future excerpts,

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Es Como Familia
Maria Beotegui

There is rarely a sentence that passes Maria Beotegui’s lips that does not have the word “family” in it.  She is a National Park Ranger, and today, she’s sitting at a picnic table at Biscayne National Park in South Florida, a very warm, very moist breeze blowing across the terrace from the direction of Biscayne Bay.  Very warm, very moist breezes are common in the summer in this water-dominated landscape.  We are adjacent to the 35-mile long, 8-mile wide, 8-foot deep Bay and if we were able to wring out the air I suspect at least that much water would come out of it.  There is a brilliantly-colored bougainvillea overhanging the table and as Maria consumes what looks to be a very healthful lunch, I am feeling the kind of calm that I imagine started the cultural trend in Mediterranean societies, particularly Spain, to embrace an afternoon siesta.  South Florida is a strongly Latin / Caribbean culture.  If it weren’t for the interstate highways, the shopping centers, the fast food chains and the occasional Confederate battle flag it would be easy to convince a visitor landing in South Florida that they’d gotten on the plane at the wrong gate. 

The lengths to which recent immigrants go to get to South Florida, and the challenges they face when they get here are often underestimated by those of us who have two or three generations behind us in this country.  When Maria’s family came to the US from Argentina, her mother did not speak any English.  Maria’s father worked off and on, and his relationship with Maria’s mother was tumultuous.  Maria describes her youth here in the United States as “difficult” and “unstable.”  Her parents got together and broke apart and got together and broke apart, 5 or 6 times before her mother left her father for good.  Maria’s family moved around from apartment to apartment.  As a child she went to a many different schools.  After her divorce Maria’s mother worked different odd jobs and found different places for the family to live with every job change. 
 
Maria, as a child, was acutely aware of being different as an immigrant.  She says, “I had a friend two houses down.  When it was back-to-school time she got a whole new wardrobe.  As a kid the differences were obvious…the different cars people had, the different clothes.  I never told anybody but I remember that her mother was what I was aspiring to be.  She was Hispanic but she seemed American, and her house was put together nicely and with intention and her daughters had their rooms and their furniture.  They had new furniture.  Their Halloween costumes were out of this world.  It’s funny that as an adult I value all the opposite things.  My mother made me a play kitchen out of a cardboard box and I thought she was a genius.  She had a big marker and made 4 perfect circles to make burners.  I thought, my goodness I have a play kitchen now!”

Maria remembers, “A lot of the things I understand now I did not as a child.  I did not understand the value of those camping trips as I was living them.”  Maria describes the rituals, the cooking, setting up the tent, the fires.  Camping represented just the basic needs that the family had, and something in the camping itself balanced out the other differences they felt with other families.  Everyone was in old clothes and dirty.  Camping pares things down to just what’s necessary.  This made it an escape from the constant reminder of the differences between them and the people around them.  “I remember fishing with my brother, getting sunburned, the rainstorms, the mosquitos,” Maria recalls.  “It was just so simple.” 

“Biscayne,” she says, “It’s like my family.  I have been here for so long.  I know the names of all the trees and I’ve known them my whole life.”  She also knows the names of other people’s children, hundreds of them, who come to the park to explore in the shallows beneath the mangroves, turn over rocks looking for crabs, pick through the remains of a reef fish, or watch for manatees in the harbor.  Maria has been at Biscayne National Park for 14 years.  She works with school children in the Miami / Dade County area as an environmental educator, trying to grasp some strand somewhere in their wildly diverse lives that connects them to the ecology of Biscayne Bay. 

On the day when we visit Maria, she is hosting a group of home-schoolers at the Dante Fascell Visitor Center in the park.  She has carted out a bucketful of dead lionfish, a couple of tables, some plastic trays and a few hand tools.  The warm breeze blows wet from across the Bay in the wake of a dramatic thunderstorm as the small group of children warily eye the strange looking creatures arrayed before them.  The red lionfish (Pterois volitans) is a solitary and efficient predator with an extraordinary array of feathery fins, a spiny and extravagant but also venomous dorsal fin, and a red-and-black zebra-stripe coloring that makes it unmistakable on the reef.  The lionfish is native to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, but has established itself throughout the Caribbean and as far north along the Gulf Stream as North Carolina, the result of an unfortunate release in the 1990’s of what was likely an aquarium resident into the warm, inviting waters off the Florida coast.  As voracious as it is, the venomous spines on its dorsal fin make it unappealing as a meal itself, creating a management problem in the delicate ecosystem of the Florida Keys and associated coral reefs.  The lionfish outcompete other predators like the grouper (grouper are overfished in the area by sport fishermen) and decimate populations of smaller reef fish.  Park resource managers encourage spearfishing for lionfish (luckily they are not only striking in appearance but tasty as well), and park naturalists remove them whenever they are encountered in the park’s waters – this explains the bucket of dead lionfish that Maria is using to teach a few lessons about the bay.
 
Maria wears a wide-brimmed National Park Service sun hat as she cuts off the spines of each lionfish with pruning clippers.  She talks about the fish as if they are people, going about their business but essentially poaching food out of someone else’s back yard, with the local police force nowhere to be found to stop them.  Wide-eyed small faces hover over her as she concentrates under a light and a magnifying glass to disembowel her subject and pull a small parrotfish out of the lionfish’s stomach.  “Ah!” Maria exclaims, “Look, a whole baby fish!”  Her audience ooohs appropriately.
 
Maria speaks in English, but side conversations among the children and their parents vary toward Spanish and French.  Their faces are fair and dark and a variety of shades of brown in between.   In pairs of two they are given a fish and a magnifying glass and a few tools and told to have at it.  The shy ones that I expected would be appalled were the first to dive in and start sawing their lionfish apart to see what was inside.
 
“Children come with fewer preconceived notions and that’s what I love about them,” Maria says.  “If they don’t come with an agenda, I can create an experience for them and they can take that experience anywhere they want.  It’s so gratifying when I am able to pull answers out of them and get them thinking.  I just love that.”

Walking in the Milk Jug
Peter Ellis

Peter Ellis works in a landscape of snow.  In order to get to his job, he has to cross a permanent snowfield and climb to the edge of a glacier.  Descending from his workplace at Camp Muir in Mt. Rainier National Park (10,180’ in elevation) or Camp Schurman (9500’) Peter often skis back to the ranger station at Paradise (5400’) at the end of his shift.  Ellis is a climbing ranger, a rare cultivar of the species specializing in introducing technical, high-altitude experiences in the National Parks to people with the preparation, equipment and fearlessness to seek them out.  There are climbing rangers in only a few places in the system, including the Tetons, Denali, Colorado and a few high places in the far west, including Mt. Rainier, a snow-capped volcano that backdrops clear-weather postcard views of the City of Seattle.

“Rainier is deceptive,” Ellis says, discussing the 14,410-foot massif he works upon.  “People underestimate how big the mountain is.  We’ve had Colorado climbers come here and say ‘It’s only 14,000 feet,’ but the prominence is big – it starts at 5000 feet and goes up to over 14,000.  And being this close to the coast we get some pretty serious storms.  We regularly clock wind speeds in the winter at Camp Muir that are over 100 mph.” 

Ellis started in 2004 at Mt. Rainier as a wilderness ranger, assisting people who want to backpack and camp in the Rainier backcountry.  He was climbing mountains as much as he could in his off time.  “I had no skills at this point,” he remembers.  “I tried to befriend some of the climbing rangers, and they’d take me with them into the snowfields, and on rock climbing trips.” 

Peter worked as a seasonal ranger for 10 years, all through college.  In the off-season he worked ski patrol at local ski areas and became an Emergency Medical Technician (EMT).  After graduation from college with a degree in geography he’d trained in all the skills necessary to become a climbing ranger, but inevitably he began to field the usual questions, often from his parents:  “OK, when are you going to grow up and get a real job?”
 
“I don't think I am,” he says.  “I get to go skiing on the clock, see the sun rise from Camp Muir, help people down off the mountain when they get in tough spots.  What’s not to like about that?”  In 2007 Peter did try to get a “real” job.  He started work with City of Bellingham in the city planning department, working at the desk almost a year until he decided he just couldn’t work indoors for the rest of his life.  Peter continued to work seasonal jobs in the park and in 2014 he was hired into a permanent position as a climbing ranger at Mt. Rainier.  He works eight days on, six days off.

In early January of 2012, an Iraq war veteran suffering from PTSD fired on rangers at a checkpoint in Mt. Rainier National Park, killing NPS ranger Margaret Anderson in her vehicle.  Anderson was a mother of two young girls.  Her killer, Benjamin Colton Barnes, was found dead in the park from exposure after evading a manhunt for nearly a day.  In June of the same year a second ranger, Nick Hall, died during a rescue on Emmons Glacier.  Hall was a Maine native, a quiet guy with a passion for the mountains.  He was described as the kind of guy who had an ‘I’d-rather-burn-out-than-rust-out’ mentality. 
 
“I was there,” noted Peter almost in passing, stunning both Simon and I in the midst of what was up to that point a cheerful conversation about equipment and weather.  “It was quite surreal.”
 
“We were working a rescue of 4 injured climbers, one with several vertebrae fractured, another with a head injury, one with a pelvis injury, and the fourth with a broken wrist and a leg injury – she was in pretty good shape.  We called the helicopter, in this case a big military Chinook, and set up a hoist out of the center of the ship.  Another ranger and I came up on foot from Camp Shurman. Two others were hoisted in to assist us.  We trained for this so we felt we were ready, though it was a tricky rescue on a steep slope at high altitude.  The helicopter crew lowered a litter to us and we’d load it up.  Then we’d hook the litter to the cable and they’d hoist the patient into the Chinook, and we’d repeat the process.  It was a windy day in addition to the downwash from the ship, which was hovering 25-50 feet above us.  We had already sent one climber up to the helicopter and were working on the second.  They tried to lower the litter and it starts swinging around in the wind.  I was lying on top of the patient as the litter is swinging around violently above us.  Nick called on the radio and asked them to pull it back up and drop it down 4-5 feet further away.  The patient was anchored to the slope.  We were hunkered down on our ice axes.  He and I moved a little ways away – putting our axes in the snow so we could get a better grip on the litter.  Nick didn’t have an axe in his hand when he unclipped the litter and it got caught by the wind and started to slide downhill.  Instead of just letting it go – I mean, it’s only a litter - he tried to hang on and in doing so he slipped and fell over backwards.  The snow that day had caused the initial climber fall.  The surface was very slippery and very hard and we were on a 37-degree slope.  It had rained a few days earlier and re-frozen, so when Nick fell, he picked up speed rapidly - both he and the litter.  His ice axe was still stuck in the snow.  I watched him fall and go sliding of control, start cartwheeling and then disappear and go out of sight over the edge of the mountain.   The helicopter immediately went looking for him.  They put a ranger on the ground where he’d landed.  The ranger radioed back that he’s not urgent.  We all knew what that meant.  I had just watched my friend drop to his death.”

“I definitely questioned my career at that point.  There was a lot of reflection – thinking what would Nick do if one of us died.  Well, he’d keep on keeping on.  He’d use it as an opportunity to get better.  We decided that’s what we are going to do – to honor him.” 
 
 “My wife would have been just as happy if I said ‘I’m done’ but she immediately understood why I wouldn't do that.  She knows how much I love doing this.” 
 
This kind of calling is a very mixed bag for Peter’s marriage.  The good thing is that Peter is home for blocks of time while he is working, and then for an extended period while furloughed.  The two of them are thinking about enlarging the family but it’s a tricky schedule to work parenthood into.   The good thing is that her parents live about five miles away in Bellingham and they can’t wait to have grandkids.  The Park Service has generous paternity leave, but it will still be tough. 
 
“Several climbing rangers have kids,” Peter noted as we talked about the possibility.    “One of our rangers just climbed the mountain with his 10-year-old son.  Kept feeding him candy to keep his blood sugar up and he climbed all the way to the top.  But, really, if my kid wants to do chess club I’m totally OK with it.  One way or the other, though, they will be around all this snow – it’s my work.”

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