The Ballade of Bob, Ranger of the Wood, Who Was Not Good

Being a Dark and Faithful Account of the Most Woeful Misadventure Ever to Befall a Man of Forest Authority, or Indeed Any Man at All

In the deep and dreaming wood where the old pines press their fingers into heaven and the mist moves through the undergrowth like something that has forgotten what it was looking for, there dwelt a darkness older than memory, a silence older than speech, and a forest ranger named Bob who had once cited a badger for loitering. The wood kept its counsel. The wood had seen things. The wood had not, until now, seen anything quite like Bob.

Bob was not evil. Evil requires a certain architectural complexity, a cathedral of malice with flying buttresses of cunning and gargoyles of spite. Bob was a shed. Bob was a shed with the door left open and nothing inside but a rake someone had forgotten and the persistent smell of something damp. He wore his uniform like a flag of a country that had not yet decided what it stood for, and he patrolled his sector of the Whispering Pines National Forest with the solemn purpose of a man who does not know what purpose is but has heard it described and is doing his best.

Poor Bob.

It was on an autumn evening when the maples bled their seasonal crimson and the oaks let fall their congregations of leaves like tiny fallen sermons, when the sky had gone the color of a bruise and the stars were just beginning to clear their throats, that Bob first saw the camp. It sat in a clearing off the eastern trail, not far from the creek that locals called the Whispering Run because it never stopped murmuring its cold opinions about those who walked beside it. There was a fire, modest and well-kept, ringed with stones arranged with a care that suggested the hand of someone who had read extensively about fire-making and also about everything else. There was a canvas tent of considerable age and dignity. There were books. Many books. Towers of them, in milk crates and on folding shelves, their spines turned outward like the faces of an expectant audience.

Bob squinted.

Bob squinted because Bob always squinted when he was thinking, and the squinting was perhaps the most reliable indicator that thinking was, in fact, occurring, though the two events were rarely synchronized for long.

He saw a man. The man was old, white-haired, wrapped in a wool coat the color of charcoal and literary ambition, and he sat in a canvas chair with a leather notebook open in his lap, writing by the firelight with the focused gravity of someone transposing the secrets of the universe into a medium they might survive. He was, in fact, one Reginald Alcott Forthwick, three-time winner of the National Book Award, author of fourteen novels translated into thirty-one languages, recipient of the Medal of Arts, and a man whose Wikipedia page was longer than some constitutions. He came to this wood every autumn to write in solitude, as he had for thirty years, with the full knowledge and blessing of the park service, whose exemption letter was laminated and kept in a folder in the canvas bag beside his chair under the heading "For When Bob Comes."

They had not anticipated Bob specifically. They had not known to fear him.

Bob saw the man. Bob saw the books. Bob saw the fire and the tent and the careful order of the camp, and his brain, that faithful and limited servant, performed its slow calculation and arrived, as it always did, at the wrong answer with tremendous confidence. He stepped into the clearing. He put his hands on his hips. He achieved, against all probability, an expression of official authority.

Bob opened his mouth.

Oh, Bob.

"Sir," said Bob, with the gravity of a man pronouncing a judgment he does not understand, "I'm going to need you to pack up this homeless camp and vacate the premises." He paused and added, because he had once attended a training seminar on compassionate enforcement, "Sir."

The old man looked up from his notebook. He had the eyes of someone who has read everything and forgiven most of it, dark and patient and possessed of a depth that the Grand Canyon might study professionally. He regarded Bob. He regarded Bob the way one might regard a seagull that has just made a declaration about maritime law. He closed his notebook with the quiet deliberation of a man who has learned that the world requires patience in the same way it requires oxygen, constantly and without exception.

"I beg your pardon?" said Reginald Alcott Forthwick, in a voice that had delivered the keynote address at Oxford.

"The ordinance," said Bob, who could not have named the ordinance, "is very clear." He gestured at the books. "You can't just have all this. There are rules." He gestured at the tent. "Structures require permits." He gestured at the fire. "That's—" he paused, seeking the word, "—that's a fire."

It was, indeed, a fire.

The trees listened. Even the creek paused, as if the water itself needed a moment. Somewhere in the canopy, an owl turned its head one hundred and eighty degrees, which is a thing owls do, though on this occasion it seemed specifically motivated by disbelief.

"I have written," said Forthwick, very quietly, "seventeen books about the human condition." He uncrossed and recrossed his legs. "Three of them are considered canonical works of American literature. I have sat with presidents and wept with paupers and once spent a week in the Atacama Desert eating nothing but dried figs to understand thirst as a metaphor. I have a permit. I have always had a permit. The permit is in my bag. I will show you the permit." He began to rise from his chair with the careful architecture of the elderly.

"Sir," said Bob, "I'm going to need you to remain seated while I assess the situation."

There was no situation. Bob was the situation.

Forthwick sat back down. He looked at the fire for a long moment. He looked at the trees. He looked at the sky, where the stars were now fully operational and going about their ancient indifferent business. He looked at Bob, at this man in his ranger uniform with his clipboard and his squint and his absolute weaponized incapacity, and something crossed his face that was not quite amusement and not quite despair but occupied the fascinating territory between them, the same territory, one suspects, where great literature is made.

"What," said Forthwick, with what a generous person might call patience and what an honest person might call the breath before a scream, "do you believe this situation to be?"

Bob consulted his clipboard. "Unlawful encampment," said Bob. "Possible vagrancy. Possibly two counts of vagrancy." He frowned. "I'll have to check whether the books count as a separate count."

They did not. The books did not count as a separate count. No court in the history of jurisprudence had ever found a man vagrant on the basis of having too many books in the woods.

Bob did not know this.

Forthwick breathed in. Forthwick breathed out. It was the breath of a man who has characters in fourteen novels, characters who do terrible things to one another across six hundred pages, characters who commit betrayals and atrocities and small domestic cruelties that are, in their way, worse than all of it, and who has, through the writing of them, developed a tolerance for human failure that borders on the geological. He reached slowly into the bag beside his chair. He produced a folder. The folder was labeled, in the clear and deliberate hand of a man who has chosen every word of his long and celebrated career with enormous care, "FOR WHEN SOMEONE NAMED BOB COMES."

He had known. He had not known it would be Bob. But he had known it would be something like Bob. Thirty years of these autumns, and the forest had finally sent him its representative.

Bob took the folder. Bob opened the folder. Bob looked at the letter inside with the focused concentration of a man who is reading and the separate phenomenon of a man who is understanding, and for a long moment these two things failed to coincide. The letter was from the Regional Director of Parks and Recreation. It used phrases like "distinguished author" and "annual artistic residency" and "formal exemption granted." It had a seal. It had two signatures. It had Bob's supervisor's name on it, which Bob recognized, and his supervisor's supervisor's name, which Bob did not recognize but which he felt, somewhere in the deep and lightless cavern of his instincts, was probably important.

The folder contained, additionally, a small handwritten note that said: He is not homeless. He is not a vagrant. He has more money than you will ever have. He has written things that will be read when you and I and everyone we know is dust. Please go away. — R.A. Forthwick, written in anticipation.

Bob read this note.

Bob read it again.

Bob looked up at Forthwick, who was looking at him with the expression of a man who has already, in his mind, begun writing this.

"Sir," said Bob, with a dawning and terrible uncertainty, "are you... a famous person?"

And there it was. There was the question. There, in that clearing, in that dark and dreaming wood, with the fire crackling and the stars burning their cold distant fire and the creek resuming its low editorial commentary, there was the fullness of Bob made manifest, the complete and perfect expression of a man who had been given authority over the woods and had responded by becoming the woods' greatest cautionary tale.

Forthwick looked at him for a very long time.

"Yes," said Forthwick, at last. "I am." He paused. "Are you?"

Bob did not answer. Bob was not, by any reasonable definition, a famous person. Bob was, in fact, a person who had once been asked to leave a Trivia Night for arguing that the sun was a planet. Bob was a person whose file in the regional office contained the notation "reassign to sector with minimal public contact." Bob was a person who had, two springs ago, attempted to relocate a family of deer by "shooing" them, which had not worked, but which had produced a twelve-page incident report.

Bob handed back the folder. Bob took several steps backward. Bob did what Bob did best, which was retreat from a situation he had created into the darkness from which he'd come, carrying with him nothing but the clipboard and the squint and the absolute certainty, already forming, that this had gone pretty well.

And the wood closed behind him like a book.

And the fire burned on in the clearing, warm and small against the vast indifferent dark, and Forthwick opened his notebook and his pen moved across the page, and what he wrote there, in the firelight, in the old wood that keeps all secrets and forgets nothing, became the first sentence of his fifteenth novel, the one the critics would later call his masterpiece, a dark and shimmering comedy about a fool in a forest who almost extinguished something beautiful without ever knowing it was there.

The book was dedicated, in the spare and certain language of a man who chooses every word, to: The Ranger. He knows why.

Bob did not know why.

Bob never knew why.

But somewhere in the archive of the universe, where all moments are kept whether we deserve them or not, there is a clearing in an autumn wood, and a fire, and a great man writing, and the shape of Bob disappearing into the trees, and the old creek murmuring its cold and endless verdict:

Thus always to the foolish. Thus always. Thus.

Bob went home and watched three hours of television and slept without dreaming, which is, perhaps, the only mercy the story offers him.

It is not much of a mercy.

But it is Bob's.

Here ends the Ballade of Bob, Ranger Third Class, of whom the wood remembers nothing, and the books remember everything.