The Ranger Station

The Ranger Station
©Joanne Heyser Harris

Kids get bored and try to keep life interesting. No less so with us on Paiute. I seem to remember tp-ing someone's cabin, scaring campers in the public campground and generally wandering the mountain to see who was in residence and who had left the mountain. We never stole anything, but there were several abandoned cabins from the Gold Rush and lots of stuff to pick up. Every cabin had a coffee grinder tacked to a tree. There were old bedframes in most cabins and an ouythouse nearby.

Fritz started trying to dig up old graves until Mama found out and put a stop to it. She was afraid of what diseases might be left in the grave. Also the depredations were repaired, showing someone was monitoring the graves. Never knew who.

We kids usually became friends with the summer forest fire guards since Audrey (Andrea) was in her middle teens and the guards were in their late teens or early twenties.

One summer we had shared a joke with the guard and a friend of his. And Englishman took an American guest on a red coat fox hunt. The punch line was, “We say, 'Tally-ho the fox,' not 'Kill the little bastard.'”

We had been off the mountain for a week or so, and to announce our return we sneaked up to the ranger station at night and ran some long underwear up the flag pole. We had printed “Tally-ho the fox” on the underwear. Unknown to us, the ranger station was empty because of a fire in another district. During the three days the guard was gone, the district ranger came by. He removed the banner and suggested to the guard that it “lacked dignity.”

A few years later a girl friend and I came up to stay at the cabin for a week. This year there were two guards, one of whom was married. We visited back and forth and we all rode a couple of horses in the public meadow. They came over for dinner the evening before we had to leave. While dinner was cooking we left them at the cabin. We told them we had to doctor a horse who had cut himself on some barbed wire. Actually, the horse was well and we intended to nail the door to the ranger station outhouse shut. We did so and returned to the cabin for dinner and a pleasant evening.

Next morning we got up around 5:00 and I went to the outhouse and sat down. “Hmmm, lots of dew on the toilet seat,” I thoght. “Hmmm, pretty sticky dew,” I thought. Investigation showed the dew to be jam. We weren't the only ones who could sneak around at night. About a quarter mile from the cabin on the road out we found a sign that said, “Have a dry trip home.”

The next time, someone left a bucket of water above the cabin door. It got my father.