Foul Forester

Entering teenhood, tests at public school indicated an aptitude for forestry. Students were then tasked with interviewing people working in their field of interest. I looked up a local forest ranger living and working in the Lafayette area and requested an interview. He agreed to it and a time and date was set. I was looking forward to it, eager to get the inside scoop.

The interview was intended to be the first step on a lifelong journey my 8th grade English teacher had encouraged her students to actively seek by preparing a list of probing questions and talking one-on-one in cogent manner with domain experts living in the community, but it quickly became the absolute end of a ten-year dream for me. As an eager eighth-grader fueled by images of working in pristine wilderness performing selfless public service for the good of the forests and wildlife within, I arrived at the poorly-lit, dilapidated, depressing little wood frame home of the USFS Ranger to be interviewed, knocked confidently on the door with firm right hand knuckles precisely on time, gripping a small, spiral-bound notebook in my other hand, and a head chock full of hopeful questions. Instead of the rugged, inspiring figure I imagined I would be interviewing, a small, spherical, balding man in wrinkled, ill-fitting uniform answered the door. His posture was poor, the stench of cigar smoke held too long inside the house slammed into my olfactory receptors with unpalatable force, and the man’s hard frown instantly signaled profound, weary inconvenience and defeat at the sight of me.

From his first terse, openly snarled answer, the ranger’s deep bitterness saturated the humid air of his smelly, unkempt, cluttered living room which was haphazardly decorated with late 1950s melancholy. He didn’t answer questions with any degree of professionalism, much less enthusiasm; he responded to each one with resentment and unmitigated disdain, his face set in an expression of impatient, weary misery. Every grunt, every cynical observation was a venomous, unsaid commentary on the United States Forest Service. He spoke of the "forest" not like a natural wonder to be revered, honored and protected but like an endless bureaucratic swamp filled with tedious paperwork and bureaucracy, describing his work not as environmental stewardship but as thankless, low-paying clock-punching. He made no effort to mask disappointment with his chosen profession.

I listened intently, pen hovering uselessly over the page, watching the palpable resentment that seemed to cling to the worn out little forest ranger like the peeling wallpaper of his dingy digs. The Forest Service, which I once considered a heroic, cinematic vision of adventure and purpose, suddenly took on the gritty, heartbreaking reality of a badly faded, humidity-curled photograph. By the time the interview was over and I carefully closed the notebook containing my meager notes as I thanked him for his time, my decade-long notion of working to preserve green forestlands had been completely, thoroughly dashed.

I left that suffocating little house with a devastating clarity: the USFS was not a noble calling, but a toxic cage to be avoided, and decided to seek a professional future elsewhere. Just over fifty years later, a conversation with another forest ranger temporarily thrust in charge of the district station from which the Hermit's Peak/Calf Canyon Fire originated, she admitted to me feeling deep bitterness toward her profession for what it had done to so much natural beauty and to so many of the people who lived there. She had invited me to meet with her to talk about it. I had refused, unwilling to listen to another depressing forest ranger talk about their professional discontent. I needed to focus entirely on recovery and rebuilding.