There’s a lot of political considerations in all of this. National parks could not afford to stay the same. You need to continually be considering the public you serve and support. The Park Service needs a constituency and that just broadens constituency, as I see it. Field people would argue, and I was a field person, from a more narrow perspective even such things as historical areas, whether something should be in the National Park System. And then, the recreational areas such as Cape Hatteras. It is a good example of being more like a national park then what might be a recreational area. And so, in some ways, is Point Reyes. There are some recreational areas that are so heavily recreation oriented…
Like the reservoir type…
Like the reservoir type. I know people who I’ve worked with who are not too happy [about recreational areas] if their background is national parks or that type of area. Big changes have occurred, I know in ranger activities. When I was a ranger in Sequoia, rangers were expected to do everything. We gladly did so. Dick Boyer, Jack Anderson, Ted Thompson, Bob Branges, Jack Raftery, we were in Sequoia together at that time. We did everything. Sometimes we’d clean restrooms, do road patrol, the phone line would go out, why maybe we could find the break, I remember doing that. Just everything that needed to be done, we would do it if nobody else was around to do it. If there was somebody else to kick rocks off the road, you could leave it to them, but if they weren’t, boy you’d do it. And you’d fix phone lines or whatever. We had an image of being top notch public servants, and we did not carry a gun. We were friendly, we were accessible, I remember as a seasonal ranger, Henry Schmidt assigned me to campground patrol in Giant Forest and the first thing he did was tell me, “you have got a walk, you can’t drive your pickup through there.” Well, I thought that was being pretty hard on me, but I came to realize that the only way to patrol the campground is on foot. Because you’re accessible, you can talk to people, they feel like they can talk to you, and now for many years more often, the rangers patrol through in their cars. First of all it was pickups, the sedans and they’re in a capsule and they’re going a little too fast and people are reluctant to want to stop them and ask them questions like they would if you were walking through. They have gone to having cars that have the light bars on top, they’re definitely law enforcement types, like the city or state police. Now they wear guns and people don’t have the feeling of accessibility and of friendliness that they had with the park ranger of years ago. I think we’re really lost a lot.
