The Last Season by Eric Blehm Read Free Book Online Page A

which no doubt made an impact on Randy, whose favorite poem as a youth was “Ranger’s Delight.” The humorous amateur poem, found in a book on the Morgensons’ bookshelf entitled Oh Ranger, by Horace M. Albright and Frank J. Taylor (1928), was bookmarked by Dana with a slip of paper on which he’d scribbled “Randy’s favorite.”
    The season’s over and they come down
    From the ranger stations to the nearest town
    Wild and woolly and tired and lame
    From playing the “next to Nature” game.
    These are the men the nation must pay
    For “doing nothing,” the town folks say.
    But facts are different. I’m here to tell
    That some of their trails run right through—well,
    Woods and mountains and deserts and brush.
    They are always going and always rush.
    They camp at some mountain meadow at night,
    And dine on a can of “Ranger’s Delight,”
    They build cabins and fences and telephone lines,
    Head off the homesteaders and keep out the mines.
    There’s a telephone call, there’s a fire to fight;
    The rangers are there both day and night.
    Oh, the ranger’s life is full of joys,
    And they’re all good, jolly, care-free boys,
    And in wealth they are sure to roll and reek,
    For a ranger can live on one meal a week.
    The poem, reportedly written by someone known only as “Canned Tomatoes,” was said to have been found in a ranger cabin in El Dorado National Forest around 1928. Randy’s taste for literature matured with his years, and he quickly graduated from “Canned Tomatoes” to many of the same authors his father quoted with ease. Soon enough, Randy, too, was quoting Thoreau and Muir from memory, and family and close friends nodded their heads knowingly. It was obvious that the cone hadn’t fallen far from the pine tree.
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    THE YEAR-ROUND RESIDENTS of Yosemite often referred to their valley as a “granite womb.” Shielded from the problems of city life, they didn’t lock doors. Keys were left in the ignition or atop the sun visor in the car, and children weren’t limited by backyard fences. One of Randy’s childhood friends was Randy Rust, the son of the postmaster. Rust remembers when kids walked around with bows and arrows, BBguns, and fishing poles. “We never shot anything but cans,” says Rust. “The big difference back then was that when we saw a ranger, he’d stop and shake our hands and check out our weapons, talk to us like we were real mountain men—and then be on his way with a tip of his hat. Today, if a ranger saw a kid walking around the valley with a BB gun, that gun would be confiscated in a second.”
    As teens, they’d “float down the Merced in old inner tubes, and fish,” says Rust. “Nobody had television in the valley till we were in high school and radio reception was horrible. Sometimes we’d all gather at different houses—the Morgensons were one of the families with a phonograph—and we’d listen to records. Sometimes Mrs. Morgenson would be painting in the front yard, and sometimes she’d make lemonade for us with a pitcher and glasses, served on a tray. The Morgensons were very proper.”
    Randy walked or rode his bicycle a quarter mile to the two-room schoolhouse on meandering pathways where he would often get “lost” after school, barely making it to the dinner table in time for the carving of a ham or meat loaf. That is, unless some guest was joining the family for happy hour before dinner, during which the adults would enjoy a cocktail or two—in front of the fire in winter or loitering in the front yard watching the shadows creep across Half Dome in the spring and summer. Randy, an eager listener, was rarely late when guests like Ansel and Virginia Adams, or some other distinguished Yosemite visitor whom his parents had befriended, was expected. Often, Randy was requested to choose the