This week's travels took me through northern California. As I neared the turnoff to Lassen Volcanic National Park, I couldn’t help but recall this story.
I’m usually a very law-abiding citizen. For instance, I’d rather drive the speed limit than deal with the consequences of going too fast. Cops and other authority figures should give me awards and gold stars. Instead, I seem to be a magnet for their need to harass somebody. Case in point, a trip to Lassen around the turn of the millennium. I was camping there with my sister’s family. This park is less crowded than many in California, and has cinder cones, fumaroles, and other features left over from recent eruptions.
Late one afternoon, we were finishing a hike near the campground. As you’d expect, there was very little firewood to be found in the campground itself, as the area had been picked clean by people looking for the easiest source of fuel wood.
About a quarter mile from the camping area, I noticed a field of manzanita, much of it dead. Now, anyone who has ever had to run a compass line through the stuff, or made the mistake of taking a “shortcut” through it, knows what it’s like. There are actually many species (106, according to Wikipedia, ranging from creeping plants to large shrubs). Your typical manzanita is a woody shrub with reddish bark and waxy leaves. All of the branches are in a state of perpetual curvature. If a straight piece of manzanita exists, I have not seen it. The intertwining branches act in the manner of the old Chinese finger trap, trapping the hiker’s boots and refusing to release them. A forester working in several hundred acres of manzanita is not going to have a happy day.
Back to the hike. Those dead manzanita bushes along the trail were the obvious solution to the firewood shortage. The well-seasoned, dense wood makes an excellent campfire. We dragged some of it to our campsite and built a fire as the sun went down.
Within minutes, here came a park ranger, drawn like a wayward moth to our fire. He proceeded to lecture us on having uprooted the precious flora of the park. I attempted to explain. All of it was dead, and lying on top of the ground. We had not uprooted anything. The ranger went to the next item on his mental list. Manzanita is locally endangered, he proclaimed. I’m a forester, I retorted, and I’ve seen thousands and thousands of acres of manzanita with my own eyes; it’s anything but endangered. The ranger was not about to back down. He played the favorite card of authority figures, the “what if everybody did it” card, and confiscated the wood that was not already afire.
Of course not everybody did it, or else there would be bare ground along the trail instead of hundreds of dead manzanita bushes. Logic does not impress authority figures.
This happened at the Manzanita Lake campground. Perhaps there was an unwritten rule about burning the namesake plant, dead or alive.
Lassen seems to be a favorite place for Rangers Behaving Badly, at least they behave badly towards foresterbob. There's a second story which I will save for another day.
I’m sure that some of you have had similar run-ins with people whose egos dwarfed the status conveyed to them by their uniforms and badges. Let’s hear ‘em.