The Horror
Let’s call him Baggins. It’s not his real name but it captures his true name’s spirit. Lisa used to work with Baggins when she was a backcountry ranger in the National Park Service. At the time he worked in the front country. I didn’t know him well, only met him briefly a couple of times. I doubt he knows my name
I’m not sure that Baggins was a hard luck case. Probably not. But he had moments of excruciatingly bad luck, moments which agglutinate into legend.
Early in his career, Baggins had worked as a backcountry ranger on the Olympic Peninsula. Most of the coastal beaches in the Park are a two or three mile hike from the nearest road.There’s always a question about how to handle toilet facilities at the beach. Letting people shit just anywhere they want at a pristine old forest beach is a bad idea. So do you use a simple wooden privy and fill it in and bury it when it’s full, or do you bring in a porta-potty? Think carefully about the answer, because the backcountry is tough. You can’t haul a porta-potty down the trail in a wheelbarrow. Trying to land a porta-potty by Zodiac doesn’t work much better, so if “Porta-Potty!” is your answer, you’re flying it in attached to a helicopter. Unlike the privy, the porta-potty can’t be buried when it’s full, so you’ve got to fly it out too.
At the time of our story, the beach in Baggins’ territory had a full-up porta-potty. The Park Service flew in the helicopter and it was Baggins’ job to stay on the ground and hook the porta-potty up to the hovering copter’s pickup cables. I’ve got no idea how tough a job that is, since Lisa managed to avoid the job through her tours of duty. But Baggins couldn’t avoid it, nor could he avoid the purplish-brown slew that cascaded onto him when the porta-potty broke while being yanked into the air.
Miles from the road, covered in toxic human mess, forced to clean up the full spill. Bad day at the office.
But you don’t want to think about that any more. You want to move on to the rest of the story, because look, there are sentences below this. Let’s go. Leave the slewage disaster behind.
We pick up Baggins’ adventures several years later. He’s still working the coast. There’s a report of a dead whale out at the beach and Baggins and another ranger hike out to take a look. Whales die sometimes, the beach stinks for awhile, maybe people avoid the area, other times you can tolerate the stench, the Park wants to know which it’s going to be.
So the rangers hike out to the coast but they don’t find the whale, not right away. It’s been stormy and the beach logs have been pushed all over the sand and up into the rocks, so maybe the whale got taken out to sea. But no, there’s still a stink in the air, so it’s probably on the beach somewhere. Baggins walks up on a dune for a better look.
The dune collapses. Baggins drops into putrefying slime and rotting meat, one giant wet sucking sound later he’s trapped neck-deep in whale carcass and gases are blorching out the corpse through the Baggins’ hole. Covered in sand it had looked like a dune, but no, all along it was the rotting whale of doom.
I never heard details on how Baggins got out of the whale. I did hear that he had to burn his clothes and shave off all his hair. The putrefying whale oils were so nasty that his clothing and hair couldn't be cleaned, only destroyed.