He did not come back to work for the National Park Service, or stop the war. My dad and the others took all the mattresses from all the houses down to the flagpole in case he jumped, and put a metal trash can upside-down over the posts. When he put the other noose around his own neck I wasn’t allowed to watch anymore. He dropped a dummy in a noose out of the boat and called it Bush, and it swung back and forth whenever JD stood up. His box to poop in, my dad learned when he and the sheriff from town went up in a cherry picker to talk to him, said “Bush box.” He was set up to stay. His boat was labeled “Bush Boat” in black letters. He wore his government-issue flat hat in the boat, a fake mushroom planted on top. JD also flew a flag, the stars and stripes upside down and blowing in the wind.
I liked the rules, the importance of the stars-on-the-outside and the never-touch-the-ground. They often closed the visitor center alone, and the help of a kid who really liked folded cloth meant they didn’t have to lay the flag down on the floor and hope no one saw. Later, I’d point to where the paint chipped off and say, “That’s from when the boat was up there.” I knew the flagpole well: When I could, I’d run down at the end of the rangers’ shifts and help them fold the sheet-sized flag into a neat triangle. It was a tall flagpole, narrow and painted sandstone pink, not like the stocky steel poles at school, and he’d rigged a rope and pulley system, not completely unlike the rope used to raise and lower the American flag every day, to hoist a small orange rowboat almost to the top. It was the start of the first Gulf War, President’s Day weekend. We knew him the way everyone knows everyone in small National Parks, as a friendly maintenance worker who offered horse-drawn buggy rides at holiday parties and had a history of using public lands as the backdrop for his dramatic criticisms of the agencies who managed them.īut this was a new move.
Maybe I just liked the pride that came with knowing. I liked to be the one to know things, a six-year-old authority on all the local events. Maybe I had heard something, metal scraping on metal as the boat ascended. “I heard something squeaking early,” I said. “What the…” said my dad, and went for his uniform, green, gray, and a gun on his hip. Pajama-clad, orange juice in hand, I surveyed the desert landscape through the front door window, and announced, “There’s a boat on the flagpole.” My family’s National Park Service home overlooked the Wupatki National Monument visitor center, not yet open for the day, and the boat and the figure standing in it were undeniably positioned at a height boats and people did not belong, high above the empty parking lot and the sandstone paths and visitor center half-tucked into the hillside.