Forest rangers are jerks. Every single one of them. I feel justified in making this statement because I recently dealt with two of them, and they were jerks.
My friends and I decided to go camping recently. We picked Old Forge in Greeneville as our location. As with all the national forests that I’ve ever been to, there was a charge to use the nature. After we paid our $7 per car and put the permits on our dashboards, we set up camp and proceeded to have fun.
We went hiking. We went swimming. We looked at frogs and trees and rocks and what-have-you. We built a fire. We drank water. We made hot dogs.
Things we did not do (pay attention, this is important later): Drugs. Have any drugs. Think about any drugs. Bring alcohol onto federal property. Cut or tear down any greenery. Any ritualistic sacrifices of any kind. Be excessively noisy.
So we continued to have camping fun until well into the night. After the sun went down and we could not see the rocks and trees any more, we contented ourselves by staring at the fire and making immature jokes about each other’s obese and promiscuous mothers.
Around 11:30 p.m., two flash lights approached our campsite. Being an amicable group of young people, we greeted said disembodied flashlights as they stepped from the path into our campsite.
Being jerks, the flashlights failed to greet us as they flashlighted around our camp. They checked every corner of our site before asking us if we were having a good night and if we minded if they looked around a bit.
Seeing as we were doing nothing wrong and they had already poked around, we gave the verbal equivalent of a shrug. After they could find nothing but cigarettes the flashlights saw fit to introduce themselves and start indirectly threatening us.
“I’m Ranger Unnecessarily-Angry-and-Pushy, and this is Ranger Tired-but-Going-Along-with-Me. You boys know that you’re on federal property and if we find any contraband, everybody goes to jail, right?”
Becoming the spokesperson for our group of apparent criminals and already being annoyed with the ranger’s behavior, I said “Sure, OK.”
“And you don’t have no drugs on this site?” Angry said.
“No, sir.”
“And you boys paid for this site?”
“Yes, sir.”
Angry then proceeded to ask us if we understood the “going to jail” concept roughly 15 times in a row. As though, if he made it clear to us that we would get in trouble for having drugs, we would suddenly admit to it. I think he was hoping for something like: “Oh, wait . if we have drugs, we are going to go to jail? I wasn’t sure the first 14 times, but now I understand, and as I do have drugs in tent, please take me to jail.”
Because we did not fold to his fierce flashlighting, he then threatened to bring dogs in. At this point, I was tired of the hassling and all sorts of responses that would only exacerbate things that were running through my head.
“Oh, yeah, we had drugs, but we ate them all. Good thing for us that Tennessee has no internal possession laws.”
“Well, shucks, no sir, we don’t have any drugs, but we were having rampant homosexual relations. All over your nice federally protected campsite. No drugs, just gayness.”
As I did not go to jail, obviously I refrained myself and only gave another verbal shrug. I think my lack of fear made Ranger Angry angrier because he took me aside and accused me of pulling down greenery.
Ranger Tired pointed out that the downed greenery was in fact at another campsite and thwarted Angry’s attempt to pin this on me. Seeing that his last feeble attempt at taking us to jail for no reason had failed, Ranger Angry begrudgingly told us to have a good night and left to wander circles around our site for the next hour.
What we did to deserve this treatment, I’ll never know. I suppose the rangers were stereotyping us based on the fact that we were college kids from out of town.
Maybe it was a slow night and they wanted some entertainment so they figured that they’d surely be able to find drugs or alcohol on us. Maybe they have had trouble with college kids and drugs at Old Forge before and the rangers were just going on the assumption that all college kids are the same based on their experiences with a small group of them. Basing your opinion of an entire group of people on what a few bad examples have done to you is a terrible thing to do. Forest rangers are jerks.

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