Dukes of Washakie
It was my first week as a field tech, and I’d just been caught trespassing by a landowner in Wyoming. My supervisor offered me the opportunity to put in some extra work by matching up printouts of aerial photos with what was actually on the ground, a process called “ground truthing.” The idea was that for each polygon on the photo, I’d be able to provide detail on what it actually was — perhaps an alfalfa field or a fallow pasture. I wanted to demonstrate my work ethic because recommendations from previous supervisors are essential in getting work as a field tech, and more practically, I had nothing else to do to fill the time. I was doing bird surveys in the early morning and was back at my remotely located camper and done with work by 11AM. So why not drive around a bit to kill some time and show my eagerness to help the project while I was at it? NO TRESPASSING! REALLY! I navigated to the location shown on the printout and found myself at a gate marked with a “No Trespassing” sign. I hesitated. Hmm, I thought, I’m not really trespassing, I’m just going in for a closer look, I’m just doing what I was asked, I’ll just pop in for a few minutes and be on my way. And pop in I did. Big mistake! I had been a field tech for only a few days, and I’d already violated what is unanimously known to be the number one rule of the trade – DON’T TRESPASS! I was inexperienced and I exercised poor judgement; my major miscalculation (the first of the afternoon) put my job — and maybe more — at risk. The stakes were high and my judgment was clouded because this was the job that was going to deliver my salvation from a lifetime of corporate drudgery. I’d staked my future on this job paroling me from a life sentence of imprisonment within a cubicle with no view of the outside world — a cursed, synthetic existence with the sun replaced by tubular fluorescent lights with their subtle but incessant hum and trees replaced by plastic potted plants. The landowner was in a truck, I was in a truck. He was a farmer in Wyoming, my truck had federal government license plates. I thought that this fact would help my case, make me seem more official and show that my presence was related to some valid, scientific business. Another critical rule I failed to follow: know the culture where you’re working. If it’s one thing that Wyoming farmers and ranchers don’t like, it’s the specter of government overreach. Maybe it would have been worse if I’d had a red license plate with a hammer and sickle, but then again maybe not. NO WAVE? NO GOOD! I was oblivious to this, so I did as I’d been instructed to do when encountering other motorists in the field — I waved at him. He didn’t wave back. Even as the greenest field tech working in America at the time, I knew right then that I was in trouble. Taking stock of my predicament, I could tell that the landowner had positioned his vehicle with the intention of blocking off the narrow dirt road where our trucks stood. But he’d inadvertently left just enough room for me to squeeze my truck between his back bumper and a fence. During extreme situations, your mind races and you only have a few seconds or less to make a decision. Was I going to be arrested? Shot? Should I try to explain the situation and how I ended up on the property? My heart and my mind were going into overdrive, and I couldn’t pull a single clear thought out of the jumble of swirling fears and scenarios playing out in ultra high speed. I’m not proud of what I did next, but all I can say in my defense is that I didn’t have time to consider the ethical implications of my choice. He left me an escape route and I took it. Then the chase was on. THE CHASE I had a head start because the landowner had to turn around and probably wasn’t expecting me to take my audacious course of action. I rumbled along the dirt road and saw that he was giving chase — running away wouldn’t be as easy as I’d hoped. The pursuit kicked into high gear when I made the transition to the paved county road by bouncing over a small bump, causing all four tires to briefly lose contact with the ground in what felt to me like a slow motion flight from the Dukes of Hazzard. As I recovered from the rough landing which bounced me around in the driver’s seat, I was in the thick of my first (but not last) high speed pickup truck chase. There was no soundtrack of banjo music or upbeat electronica as I sped off through the agricultural expanse of Washakie County with my pursuer still visible in my rearview mirror. Flooring it in a 15-year-old Ford F-150 doesn’t result in quite the same electrifying thrill as the same action might in a Ferrari or even a Toyota Camry, but I felt the rush of adrenaline just the same as the truck sluggishly climbed to its maximum speed of 90 or so miles per hour, the steering wheel vibrating frantically like a handheld back massager gone haywire. I was too busy keeping control of a vehicle that wasn’t designed for high speeds to worry about my personal safety or even my job safety, my focus on my task allowing me the clarity that had eluded me just moments before. I soon realized that in addition to my head start, my other advantage was piloting a truck not quite as old and beat up as the landowner’s; the image of his truck in my mirror receded and then disappeared, and I was