Chapter 1

Definition of wilderness

1. an uncultivated, uninhabited region; wild

2. a large, confused mass or tangle

3. a wild condition or quality

During the summer I was a wilderness ranger in southeastern Utah, each definition took on new resonance, both personally and for the women I worked with...

I'd just earned a diploma from one of those effete and expensive East Coast liberal arts colleges, and my single-page resume largely boasted an esoteric line of coursework that prepared a person for virtually nothing requiring any common sense or real-world experience. I mean, what could somebody actually do with a B.A. in archaeology other than send applications to graduate school and pray that one of them would accept you, hopefully with some financial aid. Another summer working at yet another deadbeat job was something I really didn't want to do, so on a whim I fired off a job application to the federal government and then promptly forgot about putting it in the mail.

A week and a half later, literally two hours into my first day of work placing jars of pickles on shelves at a hometown grocery store, my cell phone went off, and after answering a couple of perfunctory questions, I was offered a job as a seasonal ranger in Utah. I ran out of the stockroom and never looked back! First stop, poring through an atlas at the public library. I mean, where exactly was Utah? A follow-up letter of hire described my assignment — a temporary six month posting at a small isolated ranger station located in midst of canyon country wilderness, working for a federal agency responsible for overseeing vast acreages of forest and desert not only there, but also throughout the American West.

I was truly confounded by the appointment, since up until then I'd never been away from my home state of North Carolina other than to visit Orlando and Disney World and knew little about the region of the country to which I was moving. Indeed, I couldn't even properly pronounce the funny Spanish sounding place names of the area's various rivers and mountains. It turns out the letter "J" is mostly silent and "G" sometimes sounds like a "W". Until I finally got the hang of it later that summer, people would laugh when I talked.

The pay absolutely sucked, and because I was only a seasonal employee there would be no benefits to accrue. As I would discover, my assigned housing also had some drawbacks — namely, a paucity of electricity and a very limited supply of potable water. But I was more than qualified for the job since it required little skill in anything other than a friendly smile and a demeanor that made folks think I actually knew what I was talking about.

My primary duty was to meet and greet backcountry hikers who at least during the cooler spring months of the year arrived in droves to explore southeast Utah's many narrow and deeply incised sandstone canyons, intent on discovering the eroded remnants of numerous cliff dwellings built by ancestral Pueblo Indians a millennium ago. Maybe my undergraduate coursework did have some relevancy after all!

The ranger station itself was not fancy, really nothing more than a rectangular sun baked mobile home with one small room converted into an office. It was located on a low sandstone bluff overlooking a dirt parking lot and nearly dry creek bed, whose water even during the wet season merely trickled from one small puddle to another in the pockmarked bedrock. Electricity came in the form of a wheezing and smelly Army surplus generator that all the rangers hated (its age was far older than any of us). So the thing was mostly kept turned off, save for an hour or two each day when batteries for the government radios needed charging. The generator was so nasty and noisy that it was actually preferable to rely on kerosene lamps and use a manual typewriter.

The Internet? Forget it! It was like moving back in time fifty years! My fellow rangers and I even planted a small garden down by the creek, not as a hobby but rather because limited refrigeration and great distances to the nearest store made growing what we ate a necessity. To offset the rotten salary, my job came with free housing in the form of another even smaller mobile home stuck into a grove of stubby pinion trees about a half-mile distant from the ranger station.

An identical trailer right next door was occupied by Hiram and Kate, newlyweds about my own age from someplace up near Salt Lake City. Like me, they had no prior experience as seasonal rangers. The two of them had first met at Brigham Young University, that Provo-based academic pillar of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. But unlike more devout practitioners of the Mormon religion, they never did try to convert me.

As was the case with most Mormons I would meet that summer, both were of Arian ancestry — blonde, fair skinned, and very fit, although Kate looked like she would plump out in future years if she didn't exercise and maintain a careful diet. But right now, I doubted there was more than an ounce of fat between them. In other words, they looked very similar to me in terms of stature and coloration. Hence we all sunburned easily, a fact pointed out by Kate who said I could have been her husband Hiram's brother.

My best perk was a brand new four wheel drive Jeep Wrangler with decals on the doors proclaiming to the world that I was an official government ranger. Fancying myself as a latter-day Indiana Jones, I posed for photos while leaning jauntily against this rig while wearing a pair of sunglasses and borrowed cowboy hat. These were sent back East to envious family members and college friends, the latter of whom were now mostly lazing around on an Atlantic beach somewhere down in the Carolinas. The implication was that I'd discovered a dream job in the midst of a wilderness nirvana.

But it could be lonely. Southeast Utah is a hotbed for the Latter Day Saints, and other than a few renegade biker-types or backcountry eco-terrorists, the non-Indians who called the place home were mostly descended from a band of intrepid Mormons who settled the place sometime in the 1880's. Needless to say, the Latter Day Saints proved universally unfriendly to newcomers (this had something to do with their continued practice of polygamy), and they eyed anybody associated with the federal government with outright hostility and suspicion.

As for the Indians, they were friendly enough but if one wasn't fluent in either Navajo or Ute, communication was nearly impossible -- lots of smiles and hand gestures had to be substituted for the spoken word. Even the local radio station — indeed, the only station — spent half the day broadcasting in these native tongues! I loved listening to Navajo Gospel Hour! The McDonald's commercials were a hoot, especially when promoting French fries or Big Macs to the backbeat of native drums.

Despite what I told my friends from back East, I struggled with bouts of loneliness since with the onset of three months of insufferably hot temperatures, only a handful of intrepid or very foolish souls bothered to visit the place. This isolation forced the seasonal rangers hired that year to bond closely, both for work and for play. Jerry, the mostly absent chief ranger, rarely ventured out from a cozy air conditioned government office in Cortez, a cosmopolitan city of about 5,000 souls nearly 100 miles distant. But wisely, he implemented a buddy system for our personal safety and to help us retain sanity.

The need for a partner wasn't due to local bad guys since most of them took a "live and let live" attitude, but rather that the desert could easily kill you, either through snake bite, thirst or an occasional rock slide. It was unnerving to be perched atop a sunny exposed rock outcrop, only to have one's body fall in and out of shadow in the blink of an eye, and then look up to see two or three vultures circling overhead. Even the healthy had to watch out!

Since they were married, it was natural that Hiram and Kate would be partners. So my assigned colleague for this six-month seasonal stint would be a twenty-six year old, third generation Japanese American oddly named Brooke. Slightly less than five and a half feet tall and on the thinish side, she possessed a thick glossy mane of raven colored hair extending nearly down to her well formed buttocks. Her overall anatomy was firm from years of hiking deserts and wintertime skiing up in the mountains. As a connoisseur of the female form, I decided immediately that the girl had no need for a bra since her breasts were small to the point of being non-existent. This was something of a disappointment because I'd always been a big tit man. Kate was much better endowed, but alas she appeared happily married.

On our first Jeep patrol out into the pinion and juniper scrubland, Brooke and I exchanged bios. She'd grown up in Denver and said that during the Second World War her grandparents had met while locked up in one of the many Japanese internment camps scattered across the western United States. I had always considered this incarceration an injustice, and was surprised that Brooke simply shrugged this off as an historical footnote. Despite her ethnicity, it seemed there was a full-blooded American girl packed into that lithe Asian body! I also learned she'd been on the six or seven year plan for a college degree, taking winters off to work at ski resorts throughout the Colorado Rockies.

Brooke confessed to liking marijuana and other harder drugs a little bit too much, saying this contributed to delays in her education. Although these habits would manifest themselves as the summer progressed, I wondered if something else had played a role in the length of time it took her to earn a degree. Over the next few months, I would witness many of Brooke's mood swings, which reminded me of a former roommate my sophomore year who'd been diagnosed with bipolar disorder (that was one semester I couldn't wait to end!). At times, Brooke seemed to have a tremendous level of energy and when she talked, her mind would jump seemingly at random from one topic to another.

On other occasions, however, she would be downright lethargic and in the dumps. One day while she was not at the ranger station, I went into her living quarters and poked through a variety of personal effects, finding empty prescription medication bottles that I knew were used to relieve episodes of mania and depression. It was dismaying to learn that she'd discontinued taking this medicine as the labels directed.

There was another job-related issue that I was discretely warned about by our boss Jerry, on his very first visit to the ranger station. A year earlier, in what became known as the notorious "flat rock incident," some local Mormons out to embarrass the government had videotaped a couple of seasonal rangers screwing out in the middle of the desert and turned these images over to a sympathetic congressman. The entire program that now employed us was nearly done away with in the ensuing political flap. In fact, I had this job specifically because none of the prior year's seasonal contingent had their contracts renewed. Hiram and Kate had been offered co-ranger jobs specifically because they were married to each other; the fact that they were Mormon didn't hurt since it was hoped this would keep some of the local anti-government types off our backs.

Brooke, on the other hand, declared vehemently that this ranger posting out beyond the edge of civilization was an opportunity to dry out — a self-imposed sobriety, so to speak. The girl wanted a few months of abstinence, believing it would reign in an impulsive streak of risqué behavior. But as I would discover, one of the symptoms of Brooke's bipolar disorder -- especially during the manic stage -- was a compulsive need to have sex and have it often. Despite her name, she was anything but placid when aroused! Her unrestrained promiscuity would conflict with the number one rule of employment, stressed time and again by our boss, which was that carnal fraternization between the troops was strictly verboten.

As I got to know Brooke better and watch her behavior both on and off the job, I concluded that she was a skilled provocateur, capable of getting into trouble with virtually everybody she worked with, especially guys. She admitted this in a fit of candor on the next day long Jeep patrol, telling me that her exile to the Utah backcountry was also to be a respite from men, most of whom had so far treated her as a fuck toy, or far worse, as sexual prey. Although neither of us realized it at the time, by early summer Brooke would again succumb to both these perversions.

I tried adhering to Jerry's admonishments and initially kept my carnal thoughts in check, but heck, I was a single guy just past my twenty second birthday, who less than a month earlier as a college senior had my pick of dozens of undergrad coeds. So in truth, Brooke roused my carnal thoughts from the instant I laid eyes on her. One of these occasions early on was an off-duty bonding exercise for all the new hires, the event being an evening cookout at the far southern tip of Muley Point, an isolated sandstone cliff from atop which one could see a large spread of southern Utah's arid desert landscape.

Getting there was not easy -- after departing the paved road, we were led down an eight-mile dusty back country track before reaching the top of a sheer 1,500-foot precipice. I was awestruck, as were my colleagues, at the sheer number of buttes and spires dotting the Navajo Nation's Monument Valley, and far off mountains beyond the borders of Utah that dotted the horizon of three other states. Closer in were the labyrinthine goosenecks of the San Juan River, called this because of the entrenched sinuous meanders cut thousands of feet deep into native bedrock at least two billion years old.

All the rangers attended (including some I'd never before met housed some fifty miles distant at another ranger station), as did Jerry who was accompanied by Elisa, his rather cute but straight-laced Mormon wife. So booze was completely out of the question or at least well hidden out of sight. Brooke showed up last, wearing tight jeans and a faded, somewhat threadbare t-shirt cropped off several inches above her navel. She seemed charged up and excited and I wondered if she was on some type of drug.

Evenings in the high desert can get chilly and as the sun dipped towards the horizon, the day's warmth quickly dissipated. My new work partner had neglected to bring her jacket and soon broke out in goose bumps. Since she had no need for a bra, there was no hiding a set of nipples that became protuberant and erect in the evening chill. As the temperature notched downward another degree, they became easily discernable through the thin cloth of her old shirt, which had shrunk due to repeated washings and now clung tightly to her lithe torso.

These wonderful nipples more than made up for Brooke's nearly imperceptible breasts, since even when not erect they were the size of small thimbles. To my private delight, it didn't take much for these nubbins to stick straight out, which is something they did due to all sorts of stimuli including cool temperatures as was happening right then, but also due to physical exertion, and at times simply because they rubbed against the inside fabric of Brooke's shirt. One of my friends from back East referred to this "Erect Nipple Syndrome," a phrase he used when pointing out a woman who had pert, hard nipples poking outward from beneath a thin garment of clothing.

Despite her earlier vow of abstinence, Brooke snuck more than a couple of pops of booze out behind a tree with us other non-Mormons and became even more giddy and flirty. She was obviously showing off, but seemed oblivious to the effect this was having on all of us guys, even Jerry whose eyeballs were now mostly riveted to her chest. Our heads swiveled in whatever direction she walked. Then there were Brooke's outlandish tattoos. One of these was located on the smooth area of flesh just above her buttocks, comprised of what appeared to be cherry blossoms (she was Japanese, of course), surrounded by a series of geometric forms.

Brooke also sported a pair of blue green tattoos wrapping around each of her biceps — geometric configurations that I knew from my anthropology classes to be of a Maori design. I also noted that Brooke's belly button was adorned with one of those little barbell shaped pieces of jewelry, with each tip capped by a round knob of gold. Unfortunately, Jerry's wife also took notice of Brooke's rather dramatic anatomical alterations and to the guys' collective disappointment prudishly made Brooke pull on a bulky sweater that had been stashed away in her husband's vehicle.

Although the show was over, I concluded that my co-worker was a very hot ticket. And Brooke's nipples, oh my! Unlike a typical girl whose nubbins simply reacted to chilly air, this particular wench possessed a pair of fat, turgid, pointy, fearless suck-till-you-drop specimens. Despite any misgivings I had about her mental state, it was now my life's mission to fasten lips around those things. The prior year's Flat Rock Incident be damned!

Despite the loneliness, I really couldn't have asked for a more perfect summer job. It certainly beat stocking grocery store shelves back in North Carolina, and so far I'd managed to avoid cleaning out campground toilets — a task other seasonal rangers I met complained about bitterly. But vandalism of archaeological sites by looters digging up Indian graves in search of buried pottery and jewelry was an ongoing problem, and a big reason the government set up a ranger station out in the middle of this wilderness.