Walking a Thin Blue Line

He looks just like a cop, standing there in his blue uniform, the silver badge on his chest glinting in the sunlight. There’s the gun too, a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol that he keeps holstered on a thick black belt.

Paul Ehrhardt, pausing in his driveway, identifies all the doodads on his belt: the extra bullet magazines, the pepper spray, the handcuffs -- almost everything a cop needs in the field. Only Ehrhardt isn’t a cop. And neither are the 10 other members of his group, which organized a year ago and has since roused alarm among the locals.

The group -- a motley collection of gun hobbyists, volunteer firefighters, outdoorsmen and ex-military men and their wives -- calls itself the Oregon Rangers Assn. Their self-appointed mission is to help keep law and order in the forests.

Eventually they plan to recruit more members and to encourage other citizen groups around the state to start patrolling their own regions.

Never mind that no government agency officially recognizes them, that neighbors call them vigilantes. Twice a week, the rangers conduct armed patrols, usually in pairs, driving and hiking on back-country roads in the lush mountains on either side of town.

“You’re either part of the solution,” Ehrhardt says, as he loads his truck in preparation for a patrol, “or part of the problem.”

The problem, in the words of fellow ranger Bryon Barnes, is there’s “a whole lot of woods and not a whole lot of people patrolling them.” The rangers say Oregon’s forests are being desecrated by vandals and garbage dumpers, pot growers and poachers, and there aren’t enough police to stop them.

The rangers’ goal is to deter the bad guys by simply being present in the forests and, when appropriate, to report crimes and criminals to authorities. Nothing remarkable has happened in this first year, but if things should get ugly, they’re prepared. The group’s arsenal includes two AR-15 rifles (the civilian version of the military M-16), six pump-action shotguns and numerous hunting rifles and handguns.

“They have no authorization to be doing what they’re doing,” says Doug Huntington, a spokesman for the federal Bureau of Land Management, which manages most of the public land patrolled by Ehrhardt’s group. “They give the impression they’re law enforcement and they’re not. When people arm themselves and go into the woods to enforce the law without any real authority, we can’t condone it. We don’t condone it.”

But they can’t stop it, either.

This Side of the Law

Oregon law allows people to carry firearms on public lands, and every member of the group has a concealed weapons permit and is certified to be an armed security officer. Oregon State Police investigated the rangers on suspicion of impersonating police officers but found their uniforms and badges just different enough to escape prosecution. The state police badge, for example, is a five-point star; the rangers’ star has seven points.

Some wonder whether the group represents a new kind of post-9/11 militia. Unlike the militias of the late 1980s and 1990s, which were anti-government and often white-separatist in ideology, the rangers and a number of other isolated groups seem intent on making up for what they perceive as government’s failure to enforce the law. These groups see themselves as aiding government.

“We have a rather comprehensive invitation to be preoccupied with patriotism and domestic security right now,” says Richard Mitchell, a sociologist at Oregon State University who published a book last year on militia and survivalist groups. “It shouldn’t surprise us if some people take matters into their own hands. They’ll see it as a form of community service.”

Typically, these groups figure out what skills and tools they have to offer and then come up with a “trouble scenario” in which they would be useful, Mitchell says.

There’s also the element of trying to transcend everyday life, says James William Gibson, a militia expert at Cal State Long Beach. Being part of such a group “helps some people get out of the routines of their ordinary lives and have a modest adventure,” Gibson says.

In New York last summer, a rabbi called for citizen patrols to protect Jewish neighborhoods in Brooklyn from terrorists. A group of 50, armed with handguns, shotguns and baseball bats, conducted a few patrols before protests forced its disbandment.

In Baytown, Texas, armed citizen volunteers last year took part in twice-a-week police ride-alongs to help local law enforcement. The volunteers had concealed weapons permits and took part in arrests. City officials recently banned volunteers from carrying weapons in the police cars, but the ride-alongs continue.

In Arizona, a number of citizen militias have formed near the Mexican border to help stop the flow of illegal immigrants from Latin America. The groups, under the wary eye of the U.S. Border Patrol, claim to have hundreds of members.

As with the Oregon Rangers, the stated goal for each group is not to oppose or replace law enforcement, but to be an unofficial adjunct; to be, in a phrase that Paul Ehrhardt repeats like a mantra, “part of the solution.”

“They’re walking a thin line,” says Lane County Sheriff Jan Clements, who along with the Oregon State Police has kept a close watch on the rangers. Clements says the group so far has not crossed the line.

The Volunteers

Ehrhardt is 55, compact and raven-haired, amiable with a deferential way of talking, as if every sentence comes with an implied “sir” or “ma’am.” He exudes earnestness.

“I’d rather be doing this than win the lottery!” he says.

The formal leader of the rangers, Ehrhardt twice tried to become a police officer, once with the Lane County Sheriff’s Office and again with the Junction City Police Department. He changed his mind on the first and failed the agility test on the second. Now he says he’s glad about not making it, because he can do his own kind of civic service “without all the paperwork.”

Ehrhardt says he doesn’t mind the grousing from local police. Having been a volunteer firefighter for the last 10 years, he says he’s seen a lot of it. Police and fire agencies tend to be very territorial and complain about each other all the time, he says. The scrutiny on his group, he believes, is just part of that.

On this day, he’s patrolling with his wife, Robin, 44, a nurse and co-founder of the group. The other members -- six men and three women -- are busy with other things. All have day jobs: There is a rancher, a hairdresser, a freelance photographer and a truck driver. Two work at a local tire shop. One works for a cellphone company. Another is in the Navy in Guam, and her husband, also a ranger, works at a scuba-diving shop. The couple in Guam manage the group’s Web site and help with patrols when they’re home.

The Ehrhardts make their living by running two adult foster-care homes on their seven-acre property, which is also headquarters for the Oregon Rangers Assn.

In the back of what appears to be a quaint country homestead is a gun range, which up until April was used by the rangers to hone their shooting skills. Neighbors complained to police about bullets flying through their property, and officials shut down the range as a training ground, citing zoning laws. The law, however, allows the Ehrhardts to shoot on their property, so bullets have kept flying and the neighbors have kept complaining.

“We’re under siege here,” says Michelle Palodichuk, who has lived on the adjacent lot for 26 years. Palodichuk calls the Ehrhardts vigilantes. Other neighbors call them worse names, and one is talking of having a neighborhood meeting to figure out what to do.

Wallace Keeler, 92, born and raised in the area, echoes the concern felt by many locals: “They’re out there patrolling without any authority but acting like they have authority. Most of us here like the outdoors. What’s going to happen when we run into them out there?”

The Ehrhardts, though annoyed by the complaints, say that as long as they’re not breaking the law, they don’t have to change.

The whole idea of the rangers started quietly enough, with just Paul and Robin Ehrhardt taking treks into the woods. Paul, an army veteran, had a zeal for guns and weaponry; Robin, with nursing and helping the sick. The couple’s first date 10 years ago was at an emergency medical technician class at a local fire department.

They both caught the volunteer bug in a big way. They signed up at local fire departments. They married and became regular volunteers for the BLM and the U.S. Forest Service, clearing trails, cleaning dumps, repairing signs and equipment. In some ways, Robin Ehrhardt says, they’ve been patrolling the woods for the last decade.

It was during these stints that the couple saw the extent of lawlessness and lack of law enforcement in the woods. The BLM, for example, employs only two law-enforcement officers in the Lane County region.

For years, the couple talked about creating a citizens group to fill the void, and they finally did it after recruiting some like-minded friends. Like the Ehrhardts, most of the other rangers are ruralites native to the region.

Barnes, one of the original members, says he’s a ranger purely “for the personal satisfaction thing.” It has nothing to do with money or “getting my name in the paper,” but with “making an iota of difference” in keeping the woods and mountains safe and pristine. “That’s all that really matters to us,” Barnes says.

‘We Don’t Go to Movies’

Lane County is mostly farmland and forest. It stretches from Oregon’s central coast to the Cascade mountains, a space twice the size of Delaware, and 90% of it forestland. The rangers generally limit their patrols to places they can drive to in a couple of hours.

Within 15 minutes of leaving their home outside Junction City, the couple, in their silver Jeep Cherokee with its own dashboard-attached shotgun at the ready, are already deep in the woods, on an old logging road that winds like a gray ribbon between the lush, green foothills of the Coast Range.

“Paul and I, we don’t go to movies,” says Robin Ehrhardt. “We do this.”

Along the way, Paul Ehrhardt, with a slight movement of his arm, gestures toward every passing road sign. Nearly every one has been shot up. Most mangled are the signs that read “No Discharging of Firearms.”

At one point, he stops the truck and the couple listen.

“There’s someone up there shooting,” he says. The sound of gunfire cracks in the distant air, and for a moment, Ehrhardt considers his options, then drives away. The gunfire was coming from land owned by a timber company. He points to a small sign that says so. “If it was on public land, we would have gone up that road.”

And who knows what they would have encountered. The couple brim with stories of close calls and tense encounters. There was one time, on a volunteer stint, when Robin Ehrhardt and a Forest Service worker drove into a grove where a drunken party was taking place. Most of the revelers appeared to be underage, and a large man approached their vehicle wielding a baseball bat.

“That bat was intended to hurt,” Robin Ehrhardt says. She and her companion sped off before trouble started. It all happened very quickly, but she clearly remembers her fear. She says such parties, often involving teenagers, take place in the woods every weekend, and often result in some misbehavior, from littering to shooting up signs, trees and even animals.

Every few miles, the Ehrhardts point to garbage dumps, spots where somebody unloaded a truckload of refuse, everything from discarded pictures and books to refrigerators and car parts. Sometimes entire cars. The Ehrhardts groan at each sighting.

“What I’d like to do is reunite that garbage with its rightful owner,” Paul Ehrhardt says while surveying one site.

Instead, the couple use their global positioning system to determine the coordinates of every new dumpsite, and then turn the information in to the BLM. This kind of pedestrian work makes up a large part of what the rangers do, they say, along with locating marijuana patches. Sometimes the patches are small plantations, with dozens of plants 10 feet high.

Looking for Trouble

At three different spots, Paul Ehrhardt climbs out of the truck and tromps deep into the forest, a forager seeking treasure, to look into several marijuana patches he found last year. As far as he knows, the growers harvested the marijuana, and he wants to see whether they have replanted. None has, but he says he’ll keep checking.

The Ehrhardts say they have found eight plots of marijuana in the region, but police so far credit them with not a single case-solving lead. What worries law-enforcement officials the most is what might happen if the rangers ever run into the growers.

“Anytime you go into an area where there’s drug-growing or drug labs, there’s the potential for violent confrontations,” says Sheriff Clements. “Those people will go to great lengths to protect their enterprise. The rangers might find themselves over their heads.”

The Ehrhardts and the other rangers say they would much rather report criminals than confront them. Firearms, they say, would be used only as a last resort. But if things get ugly, they say they are capable of taking charge.

“If I’m going through a park and a guy is just beating his wife, I mean really beating her, I can’t just leave,” Paul Ehrhardt says. “I’m going to have to do something. I’m going to have to protect the public.... We don’t want to use them, but if we need to, if we get into something spooky, we have the weapons at our disposal.”