Well sir, about ten years later, armed with my more or less honorable discharge and my five-point veteran’s preference, I began a long series of sometime seasonal jobs as a ranger with the National Park Service. (I am one of the few veterans of World War II who has yet to find a steady job.) My first was in Arches National Park in Utah, then quite a primitive place, where I enforced the law (natural law) by pulling up survey stakes from a new road the Park Service was attempting to build into my park. That didn’t do much good; I moved on.

I spent three winters as a ranger in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in southwest Arizona, a lovely place swarming with rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, scorpions, wild pigs and illegal Mexicans. The only useful work I did there was rescuing rattlesnakes discovered in the campground, catching them alive with my wooden Kleenex-picker before some tourist could cause them harm, dumping them in a garbage can and relocating them by stuffing them down a gopher hole six miles out in the desert.

At Petrified Forest, the worst job I ever held in our National Park Service, I worked the box office. That is, I sold tickets to tourists entering the park and interrogated those departing. The latter task we carried out in this manner: the tourist, obeying the stop sign, would rein his car to a halt beside my station; looking him straight in the eye I would say, “Sir, have you or any members of your party removed any rocks or other objects from this National Park?” Looking me straight in the eye, the man at the wheel would reply, “Oh no, just looking,” and his wife, at his side, would nod in solemn agreement. Then one of the little kids in the back seat would say, “But Daddy, what about that big log we put in the trunk?”

So that’s why the rear bumper was scraping the asphalt; and here I’d thought it was just another Punkmobile. I’d radio at once for reinforcements; we’d open the trunk, remove the petrified log (worth about $3,000 on the curio dealer black market), club the driver into insensibility while his family stood around screaming, arrest them all, generally have the husband and wife locked up for five to fifteen years and pack the kids off to an orphanage where they’d probably get better balanced meals anyway. But such diversions seldom occurred more than two or three times a day. In general, the job was a bore; if it had not been for the financial rewards I would have quit much sooner. Financial rewards? True, a seasonal park ranger then was paid about $2.50 an hour. But the tickets! Each time I sold a tourist his admission ticket, I would remind him to keep that piece of paper in plain view at all times, verifying his right to be in the park. (Really. For Petrified Forest, like Grand Canyon or Yosemite, is a national park—not a people’s park.) When the tourist was leaving the park, I would lean out my window, extend my hand and say, “May I see your pass, sir?” The tourist would give me his ticket, I’d look it over, say, “Okay sir, thank you,” and he’d drive away, glad to be gone, and I would resell the same ticket to the next mark coming in off the Interstate. In that way I’d clean up about $500 to $600 on a good day, sometimes more on weekends when the action was lively.^* But as I said, the job was a bore; I moved on.