WRITTEN BY RUTH EWING FOR GOOD HOUSEKEEPING MAGAZINE IN OCTOBER, 1956

Today I can laugh when I think back to my first frightening experience as a ranger's wife in a wild High Sierra outpost Yosemite National Park.   But it wasn't one bit funny then; not for this young tenderfoot.   I had always sworn I'd go anywhere with the man I married, live in a shack if necessary, but I had never dreamed I would have to prove it.

I was put to the test a little more than a year after my marriage, when, at the close of world war II, my husband swapped the olive drab of the Army Air Force bomber pilots for the forest green of the National Park Service and a life of patrolling remote park regions as a sort of public guardian angel.   Being a sheltered city girl with a conventional approach to matters of housekeeping, child rearing, and social life, this Heigh-ho-silver-and-away-we-go-to-the-backwoods proposition somehow did not seem attractive.

Herb's salary was to be $2,200 per annum.   (I thought I had heard it wrong the first time too, but it was $2,200, minus deductions and uniform expenses - and an annum still sliced into 365 equal parts.)   Naturally, at this point, I expressed what I thought was reasonable concern over ways and means.   Just how, I wanted my husband to explain, did one feed a family, including a newborn son, for a whole year on a ranger's pay?

"You don't have so many expenses in the mountains," was his lame reply.   "There'll be no movies to spend money on, no monthly utility bills to pay, no keeping up with the Joneses, no big entertainment bills--"

"You paint a very enticing picture." I said sarcastically.   "No beauty parlor, no dress shop, no fun, no nothing."

My easygoing six-footer just said, "Don't worry, honey.   You're going to love it ."

I'd have given odds against it.   Nevertheless, we loaded provisions, bedding, bottles, dishes, pots, pans, high chair, crib, and our five-month-old Bobby into our battered Chevy and headed for Tuolumne Meadows, a vast alpine grassland ringed in by massive domes and awesome snow-clad peaks, about 50 miles from Yosemite Park headquarters and 8,600 feet above sea level.   The three-hour ascent brought us in just minutes behind the season's first snowplow.   Officially, ranger Herbert Bayley Ewing and family were "at home."

Some home!   It was nothing more than two adjoining 12' x 14' tents with wood floors.   Equipment and furniture consisted of one wood-burning stove, two war-surplus iron cots, a wood picnic table with built-in bench seats, one shelf nailed to the tent frame, and two gasoline lanterns.   Period.

"Where's the bathroom?"   I asked.

Herb showed me the trail to the outhouse .

"Where's the icebox? "

Don't need one.   Nights get cold here."   Herb said.

"Where's the water, then?"

Herb kicked open the screen door and pointed.   Sure enough, in line with his finger, a full 200 yards away, I saw a spigot sticking up from the ground.

If I hadn't been so cold and hungry and scared, I'd have bundled up my infant and started for the East Coast right then and there, by way of Reno.   As it was, I just sat down on a sagging cot and sobbed.

Herb and I were a continent apart in our thinking.   I was a city girl with no taste whatever for the outdoor life.   Herb had been born in Yosemite, the son and grandson of a park ranger.   We argued that night until the gas lantern sputtered and ran out of fuel.   Then I said flatly that I would try it for just one week.   If it didn't work out, and it was a foregone conclusion it wouldn't, I would take Bobby back East where I belonged.

Anyone who tells you that mountain air is bracing must have made his observations on some Appalachian foothill.   Take it from me:   until you get used to it, the thin air at a mile and a half above sea level positively knocks you out.   During the next few days I puffed dizzily just going from faucet to tent with pail after pail of icy water. It was a full-blown career trying to keep enough on the stove for Bobby's formula, for diapers, for sterilizing, for bathing, for cooking, and for more diapers.   How I would have marveled at a kitchen sink with hot and cold running water!   Or at some simple little nicety like a doorknob !

With the stove burning all day long, that tent got so hot I had to keep the side walls rolled up.   That meant letting in, along wit the highly touted cool mountain air, swarms of mosquitoes, gnats, horseflies, and occasional thieving squirrels.

Remember the nervous fellow who couldn't go to sleep, waiting for the one-legged man upstairs to drop his second shoe?   I knew just how he felt.   Without having been particularly aware of them, I had lived all my life where the familiar, comforting sounds of trains, plans, trucks, autos, sirens, foghorns, and other voices of the urban night lulled me to sleep.

Even in summer, night temperatures at Tuolumne average below freezing.   My first teeth-chattering attempts at midnight diaper changing proved that neither mother nor baby were doing well that way.   So I made a pint-size sleeping bag for Bobby from seersucker and pillow stuffing, complete with arms, a zippered back, and--most important--a waterproof snap-in pad.   Then I'd put five layers of diapers on him--one for luck--and zip my little towhead up for the night.   The little traitor seemed to love his new way of life, horseflies and all.   Of course he had no outhouse problems.

Here, about the only break in the silence came nightly when a crash as of cymbals indicated that a prowling bear had just whacked the lid from our garbage can.   Considering the thin canvas wall of our tent, such nocturnal noises were anything but lullabies for me.   Only sheer exhaustion enabled me to sleep at all.

I'm not sure why I didn't call it quits after that first week.   It was nip and tuck.   All I know is that things did improve.   Somehow Herb and another ranger managed to scare up enough pipe to run a water line to our tent.   In my book that achievement, "Operation Little Squirt" goes down with the building of the Roman aqueducts.   I took to my daily washing chores with new spirit.

Gradually, some of Herb's pioneer know-how rubbed off on me.   I got the knack of ironing his uniform shirts--pocket bellows and all--on the rough picnic table, using kerosene iron.   And even at that altitude I learned how to bake what passed for a cake.   At least the squirrels thought so.   I was out of the rut and into a groove as far as squaw labor was concerned.   I'm not denying that I would still have given half a year's pay to clatter down some boulevard in spike heels and a swishing skirt and to take in the sights and the sounds and the feel--both internally and externally--of a big metropolis, dirty old air and all.   But I loved seeing my blond, fair-skinned Bobby get tan and healthy in the bright mountain light of the "high country."   And to know that for Herb, there was work to do and satisfaction from doing it.

I can now throw a saddle a third my own weight over a horse and cinch it up.   I can pack a mule and often do, throwing a squaw hitch that would be a credit to a professional mule skinner, and I can run the station when Herb is away.   About once a week now I have a reason to don feminine attire, which means denim riding skirt instead of denim pants.    That is when we go out to dinner.   We really do, at the little High Sierra hikers' camp on Merced Lake.   That is our only social activity during the summer.   There is no church.   On the other hand, unless you cheat at two-handed gin rummy, there is no sin either, so we come out even.

That first summer taught me a lot of elementary things you don't boil a three-minute egg in three minutes at high altitudes, horseshoes last only six weeks on rough mountain trails, never walk behind a horse without making a noise, and never stand on a granite dome in a lightning storm.   And as some of the park service esprit de corps seeped through my weather-beaten skin, I began to understand the urge that made a man like my husband want to be a ranger in spite of the meager pay and the hardships of the job.

For the past three years, Herb's summer assignments have take us to Merced Lake Ranger Station.   Although this is the most beautiful outpost region in the park, it is perhaps the most remote as well.

But our log cabin is a tremendous improvement over the old tent.   It has a kitchen with a wood stove and hot and cold running water (hot while the stove is burning), a combination living-dining room with fireplace, and a bedroom, which doubles as a food cooler.   And we have a homemade shower outside the cabin, where we bathe by candlelight after dinner--that is, when we can spare the hot water.

Our period of isolation is over sometime in mid-September, when we return to our more comfortable winter quarters area.   Herb's duties then vary from traffic patrol, ski-area supervision, or desk work in the chief ranger's office, to dramatic ski-rescue missions.   Instead of fishing and riding for recreation, we have skiing, ice skating, and a round of social affairs.   Bobby goes to grammar school just a few hundred feet from our house.

What does it all add up to after these nine years?   Herb is now thirty-six, I'm thirty-four, and Bobby is ten.   We are up to $4,035 per year.   I supplement that income by working part time in winter at a Yosemite photo studio, and I earn pin money as Yosemite correspondent for three city newspapers.   Materially, our rewards are modest, and we shall never be rich.   We may live out our lives as ranger-and-wife right in Yosemite and retire, as Herb's folks have done.   Or we could be transferred to Alaska, Hawaii, or to any of the thirty-odd other states in the union that use rangers.

Meanwhile, we have abundant health, civil-service security, some prestige in our domain, and many fine friends.

I don't know exactly when I caught "Sierra fever" and fell in love with these wonderful mountains.   It was a gradual process of sharing adventures and some misadventures and scenic grandeur.   Sometimes when we go out on an overnight ride and bed down in our sleeping bags by a lake or stream, I lie awake a while and think about my lot as a ranger's wife.   It is then I realize that I'm happy just keeping the men in my life happy.

It's Herb's turn to say, "I told you so," but never has he reminded me of that day when he predicted, "Don't worry, honey.   You're going to love it."