May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view…where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you…beyond the next turning of the canyon walls.
—Edward Abbey, “Benediction”
I can’t decide whether I want to spend my next life as a little alpine bird or as a marmot. We should be careful before concluding that either of these would be stepping down.
—Randy Morgenson, Rae Lakes, 1965
IN MAY 2003, George Durkee, in full-dress National Park Service uniform, accompanied Judi Morgenson to Washington, D.C., where Randy was honored by having his name added to the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial on Judiciary Square. Judi ceremoniously placed a rose for Randy on a wreath representing all the peace officers who had died in the line of duty that year.
After the ceremony, at a reception held by the Department of Interior, Durkee honored his friend by making public the eulogy he’d written, but could not bring himself to read, at Randy’s memorial service a year and a half earlier:
We have come together to tell each other stories about our friend Randy and so try to bind him more firmly to our memories and our lives. In a too often chaotic universe, it is our shared memories that will help bring a sense of order—a common narrative—to a life lost. Like everyone else here, and I think especially Judi and the backcountry rangers, I’ve been telling myself a variety of stories over the last five years and none of them made much sense; none brought any peace. Although it reopened old and painful wounds for all of us, finding Randy at last gives us a way to heal and helps to answer the most painful question of this story—that there was nothing we could have done.
And so I’ll tell the story I’ve begun for myself. Today and in the coming years others can add theirs. From our collective memories we begin to weave a tapestry of a life that will keep him with us.
Wherever he is, I don’t envision Randy’s spirit smiling beatifically down on us from amongst a heavenly host. Nor is he a warm and fuzzy pika chirping at us from among alpine boulders. There was a fierce and wild energy to him—a misanthropy that kept him independent of others. Years ago several of the backcountry rangers, assigning totem animal spirits to each other (we don’t have cable out there…), decided Randy was a wolverine—probably the ultimate symbol of wildness in the Sierra. For me, and especially in the last five years, he’s a raven, riding uneasily on my left shoulder and looking out at the world with his unblinking brown eyes, muttering thoughts and opinions; occasionally pecking at my ear to draw attention to what’s around me; even occasionally drawing blood. Of all of us in the backcountry, Randy’s vision was the clearest, his wilderness philosophy the purest. He was—and for me still is—the conscience of the backcountry.
He’s left us small windows into his vision. The photographs are his enduring legacy, his most sustained attempt to bring that vision to the rest of us. We have lyrical passages from his station logbooks reminding us to pay attention. And there are lessons I take with me from Randy’s life and death—some of them not easy. The first is the most obvious: be careful out there. If the best of us can fall in what struck us as easy terrain, that’s a clear warning to spend the time to look for an easier crossing; to study an area a little more closely before moving across it; to take longer naps.
The other lessons that keep rattling around in my brain are a little harder. Randy was struggling with himself his last few years. He and I were not always easy on each other then; his pain radiated out to all of his friends at one time or another. We do not come with an owner’s manual to help us through such times nor, as friends, a blueprint to offer help so the offer is heard.
Randy’s last hike brought him to a narrow gorge in a high and remote alpine basin. An ancient stream rushes down that gorge and, though always facing the open sky, its roots lie in arctic twilight. From the cliff walls come the questioning cries of rock wrens. Distantly the ethereal call of a hermit thrush measures shadows moving slowly across the canyon. Then darkness and a murmuring stream, running down and over rocks, spray flying toward distant stars. Out into the stillness of an alpine lake, plunging yet again down and down, merging into the steady roar of the Kings River. Again, swiftly, down in a wild torrent past mile-high cliffs and sleeping trees leaning over steep banks, dreaming of warm spring days and bears rubbing against bark.
Finally, flowing quietly out into the great plains of the Central Valley, stars and a profound night sky take him. From the first mindful drip of melting snow to immanent silence is one continuous and joyful Sierra chorus. Randy’s voice has joined that song and, listening quietly, we will always hear it.