Russ and Governor Jerry Brown at Big Basin. Late 1970s.

The Ranger Book doesn’t have a title yet

Unless my editor Elizabeth Flynn throws a hissy and sends it back, the ranger book is on its way. Here is a summary:
​
The book begins at Big Basin State Park in California in 1948. I was 10 years old. There is an autobiographical section regarding growing up in a family that camped and travelled all over the west to see the state and national parks. It follows me through raising a family and working nights as a Deputy Sheriff while getting a degree from San Jose State and Joining the Park Service.

The training of rangers is followed by my first assignment at Yosemite, and the wild times of the mid 1960s as flower children flowed from the Haight-Ashbury and hit the road to Yosemite. There are lots of adventures among the people and bears living foot-by-claw in the campgrounds and tales of rescues and motorcycle gangs. Readers will get to join me as I chase a black bear around the sunroom at the Ahwahnee Hotel in the middle of the night. (To be honest, the bear chased me for some of that time.)

The story moves on to Alaska and an assignment at Glacier Bay. There are stories of running a park patrol boat, and living in a remote village on the edge of a huge wilderness and the adjustments made by family. There are discussions about climate change and the observations made by scientists as the glaciers recede. A sojourn as the temporary “lone ranger” at Katmai National Monument is described. Readers will learn about the many active volcanos and the big population of Alaska Brown Bears present in that even more remote place.

We travel next to Washington D.C. and a one year temporary assignment as a biologist at the President’s Council on Environmental Quality. Readers will sit in on briefings of President Richard Nixon and dealings with the folks you got to know from the Watergate scandal.

As things start to become unglued in D.C, George Hartzog, the Director of the National Park Service discovers that a hapa haole Hawai’ian is actually a Ranger and sends me off to Maui to be the Superintendent of Haleakala National Park.

I get to meet a lot of Hawai’ian relatives and to spend valuable time learning about my heritage and managing a park that was founded during 1916; the year the National Park Service was formed.  Readers will learn about the “death lights" at Kipahulu, the rarest bird in the world, and what a terrible horseman I was.

After four years in Hawai’i, I resign and move back to Alaska and the reader will spend a year with my little family as we construct a home in the wilds using only hand tools.

The latter parts of the book describe some of the events that took place during my tenure as Director of Parks for the State of Alaska and later, California. I discuss my unsuccessful interview with Secretary Bruce Babbitt to become National Park Service Director, and a stint working to transfer the Presidio of San Francisco from the Army to the National Park Service.
 
There are brief discussions of my later work in Washington State, some essays about parks and advice to new park rangers. This is the 100th year of the National Park Service and 50 years since I joined and followed the trail that brought me so much adventure and pleasure in a career that many people desire but few are privileged to have. There were heartbreaks along the way but joy came along to balance the low spots.
I expect the book to be out by summer and will keep you posted on this blog.
 
 

Me the People…..Comments on the Oregon Standoff

What is there about our constitution that can cause people to twist the English language into the convoluted arguments put forth by the “militants” who took over the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge to protest the government policies on public lands?

America has evolved since the adoption of the document in 1787. Women can vote. Slavery is abolished. Certain human beings are no longer counted as a fraction of a person. We amended the original and ordered everyone to stop drinking and hardly anyone stopped so we amended the document again and now we can drink guilt free. Today we argue over whether corporations are covered under the first amendment right to free speech and there is talk of another amendment. We have a somewhat burdensome government and the tree of liberty needs occasional trimming, but the pronoun that describes us best is the collective one; it’s WE the People. Together we get to decide things.

Within that collective concept we are individuals with certain enumerated rights. The government may not take our property without just compensation. WE, on the other hand, may not take over someone else’s property. Driving a pickup truck onto the refuge and threatening the rest of us with firearms is tantamount to flashing a pistol in a store and claiming the merchandise by force of arms. Expecting to have the government turn over to an individual the property that belongs to all of us doesn’t compute in my book and I’m one of the WE that owns and uses that land.

I believe that some of this arises from too much time watching old western movies. As a kid I watched white people with guns committing genocide and driving Native Americans either onto reservations or to their deaths. Sheep men fenced the prairie and cattle men chased them off. “Sod buster” was some kind of insult. Some of the Bundy bunch watched those films and came to believe they had earned the right to free use of the public land just by being there and riding their horses around on the land while armed. Some have decided to not pay the rent they agreed to pay. If I rent your house, does that mean that after a certain number of years I can stop paying? Do my children now own that house?

A few years ago some whacko “Constitutionalists” in Washington State printed up checks claiming they were entitled to a share of the government. One even bought a BMW with his phony check. Then they filed liens on the houses of judges, legislators and others creating havoc until the liens got lifted. I think it’s time for a reversal. Bundy Senior owes us a million or so bucks for using our land for grazing and refusing to pay the bills The Federal Government should file a lien on his ranch. Maybe it won’t cause him to pay his bills, but he won’t be able to sell the property or pass it on to his sons when they get out of jail.

For days now the water in Woodard Creek has been high. Really high. Parts of the county are flooding, but this creek, which is visible from the house, has stayed within its corridor thirty feet or so down in the gully where it erodes away some of the glacial clay, sand and stones we are perched on. The water is running high and turbid from the unusual rains we are experiencing.

In most years, at the end of November and the beginning of December, there are chum salmon spawning in the stream. If the weather allows, we sleep with a window open and, being a light sleeper, I am often awakened by the sound of splashing as the big female chums beat out a spawning redd in the gravel and the males fight for territory. The following day, I work my way down the old logging road and observe the fish. There are usually five or so spawners hanging in the current where the creek winds its way through our nine acres of woods; and once I saw a big blue torpedo of a steelhead shoot through on its way upstream.
I watch for Eagles flying above the creek or perched on limbs above it and they are an infallible sign that fish are in. Each day this week I have gone to one of my lookout spots hoping to see the fish, but the fast and turbid flood waters haven’t allowed it. But early this morning I awoke from a vivid dream and in my dream the fish had returned.

I was walking along a path next to a stream when I saw a group of salmon waving back and forth in the clear waters. The chums were accompanied by a large king salmon. Kings would not likely be here, but hey; it’s a dream stream. And not only that, but I yelled up the hill and my father, appearing just as he had when he visited me in Alaska in 1974, came hustling down the trail as I waved sign language about the fish I was seeing.

My father, a chief engineer on ships, was home from the sea and, with my mother, had come to rural Alaska to see the cabin I was building and to do what he loved to do; fish. He was a large Hawai’ian man; born one hundred years ago in Hilo and just a couple of weeks ago we celebrated with a family luau in Hilo and remembered him.

I can’t recall the last time I woke up with tears in my eyes. Perhaps it’s my advancing age and the accompanying melancholy. But I am thankful for the dream’s occurrence at dawn, the time of night when vivid dreams happen and one can remember the details. There was great happiness in seeing my father again and now that my subconscious tells me they are there, I will climb down and see if I can spot the fish.
 
​Russell Cahill 12/10/2015
 

Days of Infamy
A couple of days ago on December 7th I joined most of my countrymen and women and remembered Pearl Harbor. Last Month I visited the Arizona Memorial and paid my respects to the thousands of victims of the sneak attack by Japan. I remembered my dad, granddad and uncle who served in the war and my uncle Freddy’s severe burns and shortened life. On the news, as it is every year at this time were films of FDR’s “Day of Infamy”, speech; one of the seminal speeches in modern American History. After 74 years it continues to show a time when we rallied together as one to defeat evil.

On February 19, 2016 we will remember another infamous day. On that day in 1942, FDR issued Executive Order 9066 which sent Japanese American Citizens away to remote concentration camps because of their ancestry and their names. Places like Tule Lake, a wind ripped corner of California and Minidoka, Idaho and the desert east of the Colorado River in Arizona. There was no wholesale incarceration of German Americans during the same time.

One of my former secretaries graduated from Salinas High School that year and was sent to Tule Lake. My brother in law, at age 2 was spirited off to Arizona with his family. People were rounded up at race tracks and fairgrounds and deprived of their constitutional rights as American Citizens as well as their personal dignity. Housed in leaky barracks in severe weather places like Manzanar on the eastern slopes of the Sierra Nevada Range, The people made do with furniture crafted from produce boxes and vegetable gardens coaxed from marginal soils.

Banks got rich by foreclosing on the homes and properties of these Americans and, with a few notable exceptions where neighbors cared for the places, the people left the camps after the war to find their belongings and properties gone.

One of my friends was released from Tule Lake along with other young people who were accepted at Loyola University in Chicago; a generous gesture by the Jesuits. He was forced with others to stand outside the town limits of Alturas to wait for the bus and refused meal service and the use of rest room facilities. He completed a law degree and served in California’s government for many years.

I want to remember this just as I remember Pearl Harbor. The sneak attacks are now done by individuals. Nine Eleven to San Bernardino, it’s hard to pin it down. The rules of engagement have changed and we’ll need to adapt to fight the evil.

What we don’t need to do is repeat Executive Order 9066. For those racists and insecure Americans who want to separate out people based on religion, sexual orientation, race or national origin I have a message. You want a fight? You’ll have one! I will do everything within my power to keep this particular anomaly in our nation’s history from happening again. And if either party is stupid enough to nominate someone for President who spouts this bile I expect to have many allies in the fight.

​ Russell Cahill December 9, 2015.
 
 
 

​November 17, 2015
Yesterday evening I met with the members of the West Maui Book Club at the home of Kathy Davey. The meeting was held in a home in the middle of a coffee plantation well up the mountain from Kaanapali.  The women of the club are well read and very interested in Hawai’ian culture as well as the evolution of the books they read. I shared my background and the genesis of Kolea, and the members asked many questions about details in the story. They were particularly interested in what passages were based on actual events and the reality of places in the story.

I passed around a small jade adze carving Tom Prang had made and demonstrated the use of the nose flute. Remembrances about Hawai’i in 1946 and the 1970s held some interest, but they were mostly focused on the book and seemed to be genuine in their affection for the characters; particularly Pueo.
Perhaps because of the recent violence in Paris and the fact that they have been reading World War II memoirs and books about returning veterans and the difficulties faced by them, the was some discomfort about the warfare in the story. I talked about the theme that runs through literature about envy and the lust for power, and discussed my half-cocked theory about Polynesians overpopulating islands, and either fighting one another for territory or migrating to new lands; a theme that runs through today’s earthlings looking for habitable planets.

One member talked about the softness of the sound coming from the nose flute and the lack of harsh sound being conducive to beckoning a lover. She compared it to the somewhat harsher sounds of pan-pipes and other wind instruments; a fascinating concept. Some members were paddlers and I confessed to bringing a big fleet into the wind to get from Halawa to Keanae; an unlikely scenario, but one I found necessary to avoid a boring chapter and to get the warriors into position for the pincer maneuver through the Haleakala Crater.
I believe one member was uncomfortable with the whale killing and I explained the Makah and other Native Alaskan whaling history and the current situation with Native Americans and traditional whaling.

I read some material from my ranger book and there was a lot of interest in the Haleakala material. It was a definite call for me to work hard on the next book and to get it into publication in 2016. I am glad this was the place for my first book talk. The story of Kolea is grounded here and the interest of Mauians was a boost for a novice author.
 
Book Signing
Having only signed books with people I knew, this was a new experience. The Maui Library Book store is the biggest of its kind that I have seen. The used book area is extensive and they carry hundreds of new and used titles about Hawai’i. Lots of people come in and read while sitting on comfortable chairs and young people are frequent visitors to the science fiction area. Lots of women were in looking for fiction of different sorts and a few tourists came in as well.

I was assigned a table near the window and had prepared a sign indicating what I was doing there. I sold five books and the store kept six more on consignment to include on their Hawai’i shelves. I have some observations about how this all works.

I left a box of books with the sellers and thus avoided a business license hassle and sales tax issues. The store wanted a 40 % discount and I agreed. This pulls my profit down, but the issue for me at present is getting the book out in Hawai’i. I arrayed some books on the table and sent buyers back to the register for a sale. When they returned, I signed the books. Many people stopped for a chat and I had some interesting visits. An 85 year old man shared early Maui stories with me.

When people saw me sitting at the table they often avoided eye contact. I’m assuming they were avoiding an unpleasant “pitch”. There are so many of these in malls and markets, they get used to whipping by without making contact. A simple hello and a smile got some to stop for a chat. Once I was able to give a soft pitch about the book most showed interest. But $12.95 is more than most were prepared to pay for books in a place with 1 and 2 dollar prices.

I took some reading material and kept occupied during slow periods. Trying to do work on the lap-top wasn’t good. It set a social barrier and I quit when I realized what was happening. At Haleakala National Park I left a free copy with the people who sell the books and sold two more to employees.Free copies were left at some of Maui's libraries. West Maui Book Club sent a nice letter with two copies of Kolea to the Lahainaluna School Library with a recommendation.

I should have sent a press release to the Maui News and a nice notice to post at the store and perhaps the libraries. If I lived on Maui this would have gone better. The remote and unique aspects of Hawai’i make it a tough go. While the sales were meager. The experience was good. I’ll see how it goes at home.

This blog is part of the text for my Park Ranger book due out in 2016. Thanks for reading this.

 

I heard a loud noise and walked out to Libby Road to see if there had been another car crash. Three deaths in two different crashes on Libby happened in a three month stretch a couple of years ago. One was from a man ejected from his car into a tree on our place. But it wasn’t a car that caused the noise. It was a tall snag of a dead hemlock tree that snapped off and crashed down into the creek behind the house.

There are three big snags from trees snapped off in wind storms during the last ten years. All are visible from our living room and bedroom windows. The western hemlock trees seem to get a rot of some kind and snap off during storms. We had an arborist come out and deal with two trees that could have endangered the house. I asked them to take off the tops of these 100 foot tall trees and leave some snags for critters. (Note; I'm capable of wielding a chain saw but not stupid enough to cut these trees down with the chance of smashing the house.)

To some, the snags are ugly. But here’s the reason to keep some of them. We’ve seen Red Breasted Sapsuckers, Chestnut Backed Chickadees, and Brown Creepers nesting in holes bored into the snags. Big Pileated Woodpeckers chipping out hollows and Owls, Hawks and Bald Eagles perched on them while either resting or waiting for something edible to show up below them.

I built a bat house and put it up on a cedar. Some woodpeckers used it as a sounding board. Like loud drunks in a bar, the males try to attract females by seeing who can make the most noise. We saw bats flying onto one snag and crawling under the loose bark to try to get some sleep. I assume it was because of the woodpeckers. There is a multitude of other critters that use the snags. Insects and other invertebrates are in there feeding and helping break down and prepare the wood to fertilize the next generation of forest trees.

The bird houses I put up in the forest draw breeding birds in the spring, but nature’s bird houses seem better. And we and our guests can be entertained watching all the avian action outside. There is a danger from leaving some snags in places they can do damage to homes and threaten people, but under safe conditions leaving some snags will give the critters we share our homes with rooms of their own.

 
On producing a book.

 Are you writing one? Are you thinking about writing one? Getting a book written is the first step. It may be easy or difficult or both. The next steps are hard to understand, and the publishing and book business is undergoing a rapid transformation right now. Here's one old guys experience with it.

The arrogant side of book publishing was never more evident than when I wrote and e-mailed publishers in Hawai’i. Kolea is a distinctly Hawai’ian book. I figured someone would want a novel based on Hawai’ian characters and if not, then rejection slips might give me a clue about improving, rewriting or even scrapping the project. I followed all the directions put out by the publishers and submitted a synopsis and Bio. What I found was a black hole. I didn’t receive even one acknowledgement for the submissions. Not a rejection slip, phone call or e-mail in this age of automated replies.

I looked into self-publishing. It turns out to be relatively simple. Amazon has made the process so easy that thousands of books are being cranked out. Some are good and some not so good. It requires an investment on the part of the author and a roll of the dice. Then there follows a lot of work selling the book. A couple of my friends published a really good cookbook. It was a slog, but it turned out good because the book was good and they worked very hard to sell it.

Luck has played a big part in my life. There have been downs, but the ups exceed them by miles. Here’s a short version of the publishing luck. I was having lunch at a favorite seafood diner in Aberdeen, Washington one Saturday when I spotted a flyer put up by the South Beach Writers Group. I signed up and got to pitch my book to Jen Gilbert of Booktrope, a Seattle publishing house with a new model for publishing. I wrote about the experience in an early blog. Now that the book is published I’ll give you a rundown on the experience.

I was told that book sales are largely done on line. Borders Books has gone under as have many of the familiar mall book stores. Independents like Powell’s in Portland, Oregon, Elliot Bay Books in Seattle and others have survived but the future is cloudy. Still, even though some “indies” have disappeared, others pop-up to replace them. Our local indie, Orca Books seems to do OK and Browsers Books on Capitol Way has started selling new books as well as their excellent supply of used volumes. And another bookseller has showed up in the downtown area at Last Word Books. But Amazon is the 800 pound Gorilla in all this and is the place to sell books.

As a member in poor standing of the anti-social media army, I was shocked to find it a requirement that I have a social media “platform.” Thus this blog, Facebook and twitter are now my companions. All this stuff is done on the internet. My editor is in Seattle. Proofreader is in Georgia. Book Manager in Ohio. The cover designer is in Red Deer, Alberta, and the guy who orders the books is on some farm somewhere in the Middle West. A Star Wars fanatic in Texas helps me out when I can’t figure out how it all works. The way this works is my guys all get paid out of the royalties. I may make the same as I would have by self-publishing but I don’t have to gamble 5,000 dollars at the front end. I’ve spent about a thousand, but I have 225 books to sell at signings and to send to libraries and reviewers to try to get some traction in a very competitive market. So financially it’s great. Currently there are eight reviews of Kolea on Amazon.com and they are largely positive. The criticisms are duly noted by yours truly, and are actually very helpful.

So far I don’t have any idea if this thing will get wings. My book manager, who lives in Ohio set up a “blog tour” in which bloggers review free E-book copies of Kolea. In a week it touched tens of thousands of potential readers but so far any resulting sales have not shown up. I took a copy to Orca and they assumed I was another self-publisher and said they’d take two on consignment. I went back later and explained the Booktrope system and that the book was out in markets already and they said they’d order two. My friend Margie went in and ordered 13 books for the book club and I became the local best seller that week, passing the late Harper Lee. Orca has now sold 40 or so, many of them to my friends who are buying them for gifts. Amazon has sold 25. I’ve sold that many myself.

My friends ask, “When’s the book tour?” Russ Cahill doesn’t have a book tour. Sarah Vowell has a book tour. Her publisher sets it up with speaking appearances all over the country. I will have to make my own. I wrote the nice folks at the West Maui Book Club and asked them to take a look at my book. They did, and I will speak to two of the clubs in Lahaina in November. (side-trip from a family reunion) I also have a signing at the Friends of the Maui Library book store the following day. It’s in a mall with lots of traffic. And my friends are holding a beer, wine, appetizers and book signing bash for me at their home here in Oly in a couple of weeks. My daughter Joan accompanied me to the big Hawai’ian event at Seattle Center last Saturday and we passed out one-sheet flyers about Kolea. I’ve sent copies to Hawai’ian cultural resource places and libraries and have given them to local libraries. King County Library system just ordered 6; a good sign.

The net result of all this is that I have to push this forward myself. I’m working on two other books at present and the writer gets interrupted frequently by the sales person. But Hey! I got the book out. Thanks for reading this. The Maui folks wrote a nice article about Kolea which you can read at    http://www.westmauibookclub.com/WMBC.RussellCahill.htm

Some Notes about Hawai’ians
(excerpt from a book in progress)

In 1973, my friend John Bose was writing a column for a local paper, and asked to join me on a trip to Molokai where a meeting of the Aboriginal Lands of Hawai’ian Ancestry, (ALOHA Association) was taking place. I was unable to be a voting member because of my position as manager of substantial Federal Land. But like many beginning organizations, the association was spending a lot of time arguing over penny-ante monetary issues instead of discussing potential land claims. I volunteered to be the treasurer and straightened out the books.

John attended the meeting as a journalist, and after the meetings were finished, I took him to Pukoo to see where my family had come from. One of my Grandmothers brothers lived in the old house and invited us in for a cold drink. Uncle Jack was a throw-net fisherman, and his walls were decorated with items he had found while fishing. One unusual glass float caught John’s eye and he said, “Oh! I really like that one.” Uncle Jack immediately took the float off its perch and handed it to John. “Here,” he said. “Take this with you.” John replied, “I can’t take this.” And then a discussion ensued between the two with Uncle Jack insisting and John trying to give it back.

The upshot of this was that John took the float home and wrote a column advising people not to admire things in the houses of Native Hawai’ians. Saying you “like” something is tantamount to saying you want it. Hawai’ians, particularly those old timers raised in rural Hawai’i, will insist that you take it with you. The innate generosity reminds me of the generosity of American Indians. They helped early immigrants to survive and were rewarded with the loss of their lands and livelihoods. They guided the vanguard of Euro-Americans across the continent and were killed and rounded up onto reservations. In Hawai’i the people lost their own government most of their land and most of their culture. Young Hawai’ians are making serious attempts to regain some of what was lost but the population of Hawai’ians, now down to about ten percent in their own islands, has an uphill battle ahead.

On leaving Molokai, Uncle Jack handed me a white wrapped hind quarter of a deer. I asked when he had shot it. “Oh no,” he said, with a big grin. “Da buggah ran down from da hill, Sistah opened da freezer and da buggah jump right in.” So, when my luggage came down the ramp at the Maui Airport, amidst much Hawai’ian hilarity, it was accompanied by a leg of venison that may or may not have been shot during hunting season.

My fondest memory of Hawai’ian generosity is of a drive I took around the unpaved portion of East Maui. At one point in the graveled road near Kaupo there was a one way stretch that wove down into a gulch and back up the other side. Cars and trucks couldn’t pass so you looked down to see if anyone was coming, and when you saw the dust cloud you waited your turn. On the day in question I was returning the back way from Kipahulu. I looked down and saw that an old truck, travelling very slowly, had started down the opposite side. I was stuck in the heat with nothing to do but wait. After what seemed like an hour, but was probably ten minutes, the old truck crawled up the hill and as it passed, an elderly Hawai’ian man reached over and handed me a can of beer from a cooler sitting next to him on the seat. He said nothing and drove on. Sitting in a government car in uniform on a blazing hot day, I considered the propriety of the situation, cracked open the ice-cold can and sucked down the coldest and best beer I can ever remember drinking.