"Is there a lot of cattle grazing here?"
"Hella."
I looked out the window at the black cows lazing in the expanse of desiccated hills. All of this had once been mining country, with little towns connected by railways, but now the towns were long gone and the mines mostly closed off. All that was left were the dark green oaks and the dry grass and a bleached sky. Thank Christ I was looking at it from the ranger's air-conditioned F-250. My job requires me to visit every trail in the park district, and I'm sure I could have achieved some kind of hard-won wisdom if I had traveled this particular park on foot, trudging along in the hot dust, but I was okay missing that opportunity for enlightenment.
The ranger was only 22 years old, still cherubic and pimply. He wanted to become a firefighter one day, "to serve the public", and also because it seemed "badass". I hardly ever have what might be mistaken for a maternal instinct, but my heart twisted at the thought of someone so young doing such dangerous work. Though maybe he was tougher than I gave him credit for. He had been at the park less than a year and had already found two dead bodies; suicides, unrelated. He seemed okay with it, in the sense that he didn't know how to talk about it exactly. To be fair, would anyone?
Eventually we passed by some ranchers doing work on one of the trails. Cowboy hats, long-sleeved pearl snap shirts in baby blue gingham. They moved their trucks out of the way and watched us go by. Some waved, some just stared. I asked the ranger who they were and he laughed and said he had no idea. This park is massive, and it's surrounded by other massive properties: land banks, ranches, miscellaneous private land. Plus, while we were currently, definitively, on public land, some of these parks have deals with cattle ranchers, giving them grazing rights. Hence, hella cattle grazing, and unknown ranchers.
Ranching makes up over 90% of all the agriculture in the East Bay. It's fairly common to have to hike past cattle gates and around fenced-off areas. The parks aren't just one big open space. This mostly isn't an issue at all except sometimes here in this park the mountain bikers cut holes in the fences so they can zoom around wherever they want, unrestricted by the concept of boundaries. The cows follow suit, and it's not unheard of for a cow to end up miles away, all the way at the entrance parking lot, having what is probably the adventure of her lifetime. But it's a problem for the ranchers which means it's a problem for the rangers, and everyone's mad at each other.
Mountain bikers are apparently a real menace everywhere, something I had already felt in my heart to be true but was grateful to have confirmed by the rangers. While visiting a different park, one of the rangers there (cheery, middle-aged, worried his older daughter spends too much time online) was telling me about how mountain bikers come to public meetings for park district plans and complain that the district doesn't do enough for them. They get angry that they're not allowed on narrow trails but cows are. "Should I pretend to be a cow then?" This ranger's particular park is covered in bootleg trails, many of which were formed by mountain bikers cutting through the grass. These aren't on park maps of course, but they're well-documented on the websites mountain bikers use to plan routes. They have names like "Chutes & Splatters" and "Crack Baby", and the mountain bikers get annoyed that the rangers don't maintain them. "Do they seriously think I'm going to make a sign for 'Crack Baby Trail'", the ranger deadpans.
As a hiker and, yes, a terrible cyclist, I'm not inclined to sympathize with the mountain bikers. They're always free to find another hobby that isn't annoying. Like hiking, for example. I've never bothered anyone while puttering around the trails.
But there's a friction here, too. At yet another dry, giant park, the ranger who escorted me around (big, bald, stoic) recounted all the arguments he's had with the ecologists in the park district. In his park, there's one little loop trail that doesn't connect to the rest of the trails. Hikers would like for it to connect, and he'd like to make that trail for them. But it would go through critical habitat for the Alameda whipsnake, a threatened snake that has already lost most of its habitat. So the ecologists refuse to permit any plans for new trails, frustrating the ranger. Like every ranger I've met, he too wants to serve the public, and this is what the public wants. But the ecologists don't serve the public, they serve the wildlife. And the park district as a whole has to serve both.
~~
One morning I was shadowing the surveying team, the people who use very precise instruments on tripods to accurately map out, to the hundredth of an inch, all the boundaries and features of the parks. There was a gigantic eucalyptus tree that needed to be cut down along such a boundary, and the surveyors had to figure out if it was the district's responsibility or not. It seemed obvious to me that it was indeed our responsibility, but surveying is very much not a field that runs on vibes. It's all trigonometry, lasers, and prisms. The truth is out there and the surveyors will find it.
Well, maybe. The surveyor I was shadowing said it was always impossible to get to the absolute truth. "Every surveyor will set up their instruments differently, will align everything differently. Our measurements will always differ, even if it's only by a fraction of a fraction of an inch," she explained. She showed me how to level and adjust the tripods so they were over exact coordinate points on the earth, but of course my idea of "exact" and hers wouldn't be quite the same. "Surveyors are always just approximating the truth. We'll never reach it definitively."
There was a folly to this, of trying to map out perfect straight lines and exact points and a pure, mathematical truth to a landscape that had none of these things. I pointed this out and she laughed, agreeing. It's kind of a silly job. But it needs to be done and the Sisyphean nature of surveying didn't stop it from being enjoyable. We were outside, shooting the shit, philosophizing about the nature of truth and the truth of nature. Could be worse. There could be a mountain biker nearby.
Sometimes hikers would pass by and ask us what we were doing, but unlike the rangers, the surveyors didn't care too much about interacting with the public. They kept their answers monosyllabic and got back to work. The truth is a demanding master and it wouldn't find itself.
~~
My friend James1 once told me about a thought exercise he used to go to sleep. Instead of counting sheep, he imagines that every day he can kill 100 living creatures (arms dealers, mosquitoes, bacteria, whatever) and he tries to figure out the optimal deaths to make the world a better place as fast as possible.
It's a strangely enticing thought exercise. I have often felt that if everyone just listened to me and did what I thought was best, the world would be perfect. I'm a beautiful genius, I've never had any bad ideas. I predicted a friend's breakup, and the exact reasons for it, a full 4 years before it finally happened. So I can be trusted with complete control over everything I think.
Unfortunately, working for a park district is an exercise in relinquishing that control. I have my own ideas about why public parks should exist, and so does everyone else, not least of all members of the public themselves. The mountain bikers, the campers, the people who hike with Bluetooth speakers, fishermen, birdwatchers, foragers, Indigenous people trying to have sacred ceremonies: everyone has a different relationship to the land and what they want from it. And then there's the wildlife, and the land itself: soil, rocks, water. A river will naturally change course, which the land around it depends on, but this is often tricky for humans (cue the surveyors who want to find the absolute truth of the river). How do you juggle all this? Can you?
~~
At the end of Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master", Philip Seymour Hoffman says to Joaquin Phoenix, "If you figure a way to live without serving a master, any master, then let the rest of us know, will you? For you'd be the first person in the history of the world."
~~
When I'm hiking the trails instead of getting escorted around by rangers, people often come up to talk to me. Two kids told me about a small peacock they saw on a farm and looked at me like I was the biggest idiot on earth when I asked if it was a baby (obviously it was just a small peacock). An old man who'd just gotten knee surgery was walking his dog and told me about all the horses he owns. Another man told me about a catfish he'd caught recently, and exactly how he cooked it. Sometimes people ask for directions. Sometimes they mistake me for a ranger and thank me for the work I do. A lot of old guys see a cute small woman hopping out of a truck and want to talk to me about literally whatever.
And I have to talk to all of them. That's what public service is, after all: serving the public. I never felt a need to be so ingratiating when I worked at design agencies, for example, even though I was serving clients then. Really I was serving the idea of Design, of some kind of aesthetic truth. The clients were often obstacles to that truth. But here, in my job at least, there is no abstract truth. I'm here for the people.
Originally I had wanted to write strictly about public land and what it's all for, but that's a topic I'll need to chew on for a lot longer. I have no idea how you balance the needs of everyone. Maybe I never will. But I have found a lot of clarity in knowing who I serve. As it becomes all too easy to be a misanthropic agoraphobe, it feels quite literally healing to replace that misery with a sincere love and curiosity about all people -- park goers, Target cashiers, the person next to you at the gas station. If we all must serve some master, then like the park rangers I'll gladly serve the people. It's never boring.
Who do you serve?
~~~~
1 James is my favorite man in the world and the one person I trusted to plan my bachelorette party; either you understand why from this anecdote, or you don't, in which case look both ways before you cross my mind as I'm falling asleep. Haha just playing :)