COLUMN ONE : Fires of Rage Stir in Rangers : Park officers complain that ‘being paid in sunsets’ doesn’t put food on the table. They endure substandard housing and salaries that have some hovering above the poverty level.

As the radiance of autumn succumbs to advancing winter, the spirits of Yosemite rangers are tumbling with the golden alder leaves. Fewer welcoming smiles shoot from beneath the brims of their Smokey Bear hats, a clue that something is amiss in one of America’s favorite national parks.

Defined narrowly, the rangers’ dark mood stems from a landlord-tenant spat. The National Park Service has billed rangers for thousands of dollars in disputed back rent on government housing, and indignant rangers have responded with claims for overtime pay they previously had no plans to collect.

The standoff is bitter and unprecedented, but it is merely a symptom of a far greater malady afflicting not just Yosemite but most of the 358 parks, seashores, monuments and battlefields in the national park system.

The nation’s park rangers, cultural icons who consistently rank as the most beloved of all federal employees, feel overworked, are underpaid compared to their counterparts in the less glamorous Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management, and must endure substandard housing that, in one case, consists of a large steel box.

Some rangers moonlight as paramedics to make ends meet. Others collect food stamps and subsidized school lunches. Meanwhile, the demands and stresses of their work mount: Park visitation is rising, the territory that rangers patrol is expanding and some spend more time fighting crime and even urban street gangs than leading nature walks.

It all adds up to a life that more rangers than ever are declaring to be not worth the sacrifices. Annual turnover in the Park Service has reached an all-time peak--doubling in the last decade--and applications for the once-coveted jobs have plummeted. Recruiting high-caliber people, Yosemite Supt. Michael Finley said, “seems to get tougher every day.”

“I love my job, but raising a family of five on $21,500 a year is pretty tough,” said Ranger Eric Inman, a seven-year veteran who patrols 600,000 acres of rugged desert at Death Valley National Monument. “There’s a saying about the Park Service, that we rangers are lucky and ought to ‘take our pay in sunsets.’ Well, sunsets don’t put meat on the table and after a while, you start to wonder how you can hang on.”

Park Service officials, celebrating the 75th anniversary of their agency this year, say that they are well aware of the woes besetting Inman and many of his colleagues. Park Service Director James M. Ridenour acknowledges that many salaries are too low.

Because of poor pay, he told Congress last year, the Park Service “is losing its ability to compete, especially for the pool of young, highly qualified recent college graduates” needed to protect America’s most prized monuments and wilderness into the next century.

Ridenour hopes to reclassify rangers under the federal government’s pay schedule, defining many of them as “professionals” rather than “technicians,” making them eligible for higher wages.

Officials say that more than $26 million was spent over the last three years to improve and replace deteriorated government housing at parks, and Congress has freed up another $11 million for next year. Such sums, however, are a fragment of the $500 million that Ridenour says is needed to bring ranger housing up to decent standards.

Although aware of the efforts afoot in Washington, many among the 3,300-member ranger corps say change is coming too slowly. Environmentalists--who predict that an overburdened, poorly compensated park staff will translate into weaker protection for natural resources--tend to agree.

“The rangers across the nation are demoralized,” said Paul Pritchard, president of the National Parks and Conservation Assn. “The attitude of the government has been, ‘Let’s see how much we can get out of these people before they squeal.’ Well, now they’re squealing, and who can blame them?”

The park ranger appeared on the national scene in 1914, when he--and it was he for many decades--replaced the U.S. Cavalry trooper as guardian of the parks. It has never been a comfortable life. In 1923, rangers earned $1,000 a year and had to buy their own uniforms. Living conditions were traditionally primitive; home was a drafty log cabin, a military hut or a tent.

From the beginning, rangers enjoyed a certain mystique, a tough-but-gentle appeal that Americans and foreigners alike seemed to find irresistible. They were the greeter, the teacher, the protector, the botanist, and the firefighter all rolled into one crisp green uniform.

Today’s rangers wear all those hats--and many more. Now, they not only catch poachers and spin stories beside campfires, but bust heavily armed drug dealers, protect endangered species and rescue overambitious rock climbers.

According to surveys, the public thinks they’re doing a fine job; rangers typically receive an 85% public approval rating--the highest by far of any federal employee. But along with such appreciation goes an attitude that is familiar--and troubling--to most who wear Park Service green: Many visitors view rangers as among the most fortunate workers on Earth, people living the good life in spectacular settings.

That sentiment apparently extends to the highest levels of government: “I remember when (Interior Secretary Manuel) Lujan visited here a few years back,” recalled one veteran Yosemite ranger who asked that his name not be used. “He stood up in front of us and said, ‘We pay you people to live here?’ He had no concept of our struggles.”

The truth is, most rangers live a meager existence that many would find intolerable. For starters, they don’t all reside at the foot of El Capitan and enjoy daily views of Yosemite Falls. The 80 million acres administered by the Park Service include sites in the grit of New York City and the frigid isolation of Alaska.

Government housing--which many rangers are required to occupy and pay rent for as part of their assignment--remains notoriously substandard. Dilapidated trailers shelter rangers at Grand Canyon National Park, and rustic cabins with leaky roofs, poor insulation and no modern conveniences abound at Yosemite.

Consider the experience of Greg Zeman, Yosemite’s jail supervisor. For more than five years, Zeman, his wife and two children lived in a two-bedroom, one-bath house built in 1919. The pipes were rusting. The roof and bathtub leaked. Wind gusted up through cracks in the floors. Lack of insulation led to electric bills that sometimes topped $300 a month. In a futile attempt to keep out the ants and 6-inch-long centipedes, Zeman spent $300 of his own scarce savings to plug gaps in the floorboards and siding.

“The place was literally falling apart,” said Zeman, whose infant slept in the living room and breathed diesel fumes from the steady rush of tour buses on the highway 25 feet away.

In October, Zeman finally landed a new house. His son and daughter have to share one of the two bedrooms, and that troubles their parents a bit. But there are no leaks, and the lanky, amiable ranger calls it “a palace” compared to his previous digs.

Almost anything would rank as a palace compared to the housing shared by the two rangers on San Miguel Island, in Channel Islands National Park off Ventura. Home for these hardy men is a 20-by-8-foot shipping container. The toilet is a nearby pit in the ground, and heat is a rare luxury because it’s tough to haul propane to the remote station.

“It’s a box,” said ranger Art Wilke cheerfully, “but it’s a nice box.”

Patsy Smith, housing officer for the Park Service, said officials are committed to replacing the box and other examples of inadequate housing. “That is pretty bad,” she said of the island quarters. “We’re trying, but you can’t change everything overnight.”

Rangers say lousy housing would not be such a big deal if only the pay was higher. Most newly hired rangers earn $15,171 a year. Ron Mackie, the chief interpretive ranger at Yosemite and one of the most highly paid people in the park, is a 31-year service veteran and makes $38,000 annually.

“It kinda burns me up to think I’ve been at this all these years and still make $2,000 less than a rookie cop in Fresno,” Mackie said.

For Inman, the Death Valley ranger, an annual salary of $21,500 is not enough for his family of five to get by on. In the past, he’s supplemented his income by driving an ambulance on his days off and by peddling home-grown eggs and vegetables, which he sold from his office while stationed in Yosemite. He also counts on overtime pay from fighting fires. This year he fought no fires and, consequently, “there’s nothing left in the pot” for Christmas.

“We’re $500 above the poverty line,” Inman said. “We buy used clothes, we shop at the cheap warehouse food stores, our kids get (subsidized) school lunches. . . . But we’re still going deeper and deeper into the hole.”

Such stories are common, according to Rick Gale, president of the Assn. of National Park Rangers. And it is people like Inman--highly trained, seemingly dedicated, but weary of barely scraping by--who are throwing up their hands in disgust and getting out, he said.

Park Service turnover is 5% annually--more than double the rate it was 10 years ago, said agency spokesman George Berklacy. More telling, perhaps, is the declining interest in permanent Park Service jobs. The average number of applicants is 25; in recent years, 150 people queued up for the posts. Applications for seasonal ranger jobs are way down as well, from about 50,000 a decade ago to 4,000 in 1990, Berklacy said.

“When we go to job fairs and talk about the salaries and benefits, they don’t quite roll on the floor in laughter, but it’s close,” Gale said.

Among the many rangers who have left the service for other federal agencies are Randy and Kathy August, who left Yosemite this year to work for the Bureau of Land Management in Las Vegas. Aside from the poor pay, the Augusts said they became fed up with the service’s treatment of dual-career couples.

“We spent eight years in the Park Service together, and we were never able to get career-level jobs in the same place,” Randy August said. Instead, the Augusts reluctantly accepted posts as much as 200 miles apart, paying rent for two homes and rekindling their relationship on weekends.

“I moved to BLM in January,” said August, who took a position where he has fewer responsibilities but earns $3,700 more a year. “Within three months, my wife had a job in the same office. That says a lot about both agencies.”

In a break with their tradition of silent loyalty to the Park Service, many rangers are speaking out about their gripes--and pressing for change. In 1988, a group of law enforcement rangers allied themselves with the powerful Fraternal Order of Police, forming two chapters that have mushroomed to 800 members. There is talk of unionizing if their complaints are not addressed.

Yosemite is the epicenter of a new movement. In the early 1980s, a group of rangers and other park employees sued after the government changed the way it sets rents for government housing. The change caused rents to soar; Ron Mackie’s, for instance, went from $200 to $800 a month.

The employees lost the final legal round last year, and that left the matter of $358,349 in back rent they had not been required to pay since taking the issue to court. Supt. Finley and others at Yosemite suggested forgiving the rent in the interest of employee morale. Sources close to the case said the Park Service administration agreed, but Interior Department officials insisted on collecting the money.

This fall, the bills started to arrive at the homes of people like Jim Tucker, a second-generation Yosemite ranger and father of three. Tucker, whose bill is $3,400, is among many resentful rangers who are responding with bills of their own--for uncollected overtime pay dating back six years.

“If they want to play the game this way, then fine, we can too,” said Tucker, who figures he’s owed $5,000 for the long hours of on-call duty he has served without compensation.

“They’ve really created hard feelings with the back rent bills,” said James Snyder, the Yosemite park historian. “It’s always been rare for people to speak out (publicly) against the Park Service. But a lot of people feel violated by this.”

So far, 12 claims for overtime have been filed in Yosemite, averaging about $3,200 apiece; more are expected. In fact, Finley, who calls the standoff “a tragedy,” predicts that the government will ultimately spend far more on the back pay than it collects in back rent.

Interviews with rangers in other parks bear out his prediction. Employees at Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Death Valley and several other sites say they may follow the lead of Yosemite’s rangers and slap the government with overtime bills.

“It’s really not surprising,” said Gale, the park ranger association’s president. “When you’re having trouble feeding your family and you’re hit with something like this, you get to the point where enough’s enough.

“These rangers feel like they’ve been kicked around, and they’re just tired of it.”

Ranger Comparison

They may be more widely recognized than their counterparts in the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, but rangers who patrol the 358 parks, monuments, seashores and battlefields administered by the National Park Service are actually paid less. Here are some comparative statistics: NATIONAL PARK SERVICE RANGERS

* Numbers: 3,325 in 1990 ; 3,210 in 1980.

* Average annual pay: $24,000 after 7 years.

* Entry-level pay: $15,000.

* Top pay: About $40,000 after 15 years.

* Education: 66% of all applicants had college degrees in 1990; 92% of all applicants had degrees in 1980.

* Responsibilities: Wildlife management, patrolling, search and rescue, resource management, public education, historic preservation, scientific research.

* Average age: 34.

* Average service: 12 years.

* Total acreage: 80 million acres in 1990; 40 million acres in 1980.

U.S. BUREAU OF LAND MANAGEMENT RANGERS

* Numbers: 112 in 1990; 17 in 1980.

* Average annual pay: $25,700 after 2 years.

* Entry-level pay: $16,900.

* Top pay: About $43,000 after 10 years of service.

* Education: 90% of all applicants had college degrees in 1990; 1980 figure was not available.

* Responsibilities: Law enforcement, public education, search and rescue, patrolling, resource protection.

* Average age: 38.

* Average service: 3.5 years.

* Total acreage: 270 million acres in 1990 ; 343 million acres in 1980.

SOURCE: National Park Service; U.S. Bureau of Land Management

Compiled by researcher Tracy Thomas