Sitting in the duct tape-patched driver’s seat of his “US Government Ranger” Chevy, Dad popped open two Budweisers and unwrapped two of the white-bread-and-rattlesnake sandwiches that he enjoyed frequently now that the Central Valley was in the midst of a severe rain shortage. He flipped on his Jim Croce cassette and handed me a sandwich. Sheepishly, he glanced at the beers. “I forgot to ask if you drink beer or not.”

I laughed. “Beer is fine, thanks.”

“A girl after my own heart. Just don’t tell Royella.” He chomped on a bite of rattler meat, and I tried to copy him. “She wouldn’t approve.”

I had spent the morning in Dad’s truck, skimming my assigned 12th grade summer reading and watching him work. As a forest ranger—or in his words, “steward of the land”—his job involved implementing new Sierra National Forest regulations . He had explained that, to prevent the spread of fire during this time of drought, rangers were tasked to clear all trees with a circumference of 20 inches or less. His worn hiking boots crunched against the ground cover as he worked, twisting a measuring tape around tree trunks and carelessly spray-painting red splotches on the trees that were now doomed for the chainsaw.

Taking a gulp of my beer and trying to mask my distaste for it, I thought briefly, and with a glimmer of longing, of Rachel and Marissa who were staying at home in New York for a summer of fruity cocktails, fake IDs, and sundress-clad beach trips. And I thought with guilt of Mom, alone in our Brooklyn apartment while her two kids visited her ex-husband, our dad, at “Foxglove,” our summer cabin. Formerly a New York photographer, he had transformed himself into a California forest ranger over the course of a single year and had no plans to return to Brooklyn, largely thanks to Royella.

Looking out over the grove of cedars and pine, I could see that roughly two-thirds of the trees had been defaced with Dad’s red paint.  His new job seemed nothing but the government’s excuse for depleting the land, turning the flourishing forest dusty and barren under the guise of fire safety.  Mom and Dad hadn’t raised us to pay much attention to God, but somehow Dad now went around claiming that his new job was one of serving as a steward to the Lord by tending to His land. Royella, the local pastor’s beautiful widow, had introduced him to the concept of stewardship, and he had taken the bait.

I thought about my grandfather—who had passed the Foxglove cabin down to my father—and remembered a hike we had taken on a nearby trail a few years back.  Densely packed pine trees towered above us, shading the ill-groomed path from either side. Grandpa had kept his eyes trained upward, studying the trees as we hiked. Several times I had grabbed his arm to keep him from tripping on roots. As we hiked, he told me that my Aunt Taylor, his daughter, was pressuring him to partially log the property, to sell the valuable timber so that none of us would have a financial worry again. “Once we begin to sell, loggers will notice our property, it’s only a matter of time ’til they get the rest,” I remember him saying. “One cut and the forest is done. We can’t do it.” When I asked him what he meant, he said something about the government and about influential private loggers: cash for trees.

“How d’ya like it?” Dad motioned to my sandwich, jolting me out of the memory.

“Good.” I swallowed the bite I was working on. “It tastes like chicken. But tougher.”

“Yup, this guy’s surprisingly muscular,” he said. “Killed him yesterday, a little before you kids got here. Royella was actually the one who spotted him. He was coiled by the side of the house, near the pump.”

I squeezed my beer can, denting the side and sloshing liquid out of the top. “Dad,” I said, “would you mind going easy on the Royella mentions?”

“Sure thing,” he said.

After lunch, he drove me back to the Foxglove cabin. As I walked around the side of the house—towards the back door that led to my bedroom—I saw a truck similar to Dad’s parked around the side.  A bearded forest ranger sat in the driver’s seat and rolled down the window as he saw me.

“Howdy,” he called out.

“Hi,” I said.

“Do you know where Miss Royella might be?” he asked.

I shrugged. “She lives down the road. You could try there.”

“Nah,” he said. “We had an appointment to meet here, to take a walk to look at some timber.”

To be continued in the next column...