RANGER GROOVY

It was a sunny morning in Santa Rosa, California in the Spring of 1985.  I was six years old and had rosy cheeks.  I had the requisite bad haircut, my mother still dressed me for the most part and I still thought that scientists built Frankensteins and giant robots.   My world was still very small, happy and relatively care free.

My kindergarten teacher, Ms. Lewis was a seven-foot-tall puppet monster made of scouring pads, a green Captain Cody Elementary School soccer jacket and dry, dead skin who hated children with every fiber of her being (1).   That morning, she announced that she had a surprise field trip for us.   You'll notice that I did not call it a fun surprise field trip.   Ms. Lewis did not do fun.

At 11am, this husk of a formerly passionate teacher ushered the class out of the olive drab double-wide that served as our classroom,  along the metal staging that ran in front of building, down the steps and out to the grass in front of the school.    A painted, decommissioned short bus was parked on the lawn, and folding tables had been set up all around it.    As we approached the bus, Ms. Lewis introduced us to an individual that I'm going to call "Ranger Groovy".  

Ranger Groovy was tall and skinny.  The combination of his high-cut, brown, official-looking shorts and grimy Birkenstock sandals made his hairy legs look impossibly long, and an unwashed ponytail dangled out from under the ranger hat he wore on his head to the small of his back.  I'm pretty sure that he was wearing a tie-dye shirt under a poorly buttoned boy scout shirt.  He had come to teach us all about pollution using his menagerie of taxidermied animals who were killed by litter.

Ranger Groovy first walked us past a dead raccoon propped up on a log in a surprisingly lifelike pose.  The poor little critter had a six pack ring draped around it's neck.  Nearby, there was a rattlesnake on a square of astroturf with a bag of nacho cheese Doritos jammed in it's gaping maw.   There was a trout with a six pack ring around it's neck and a family of chipmunks that had apparently become so distraught by the election that they also decided to commit mass suicide by six pack ring.  An incredibly stupid beaver who had decided to chew on a can of Old Milwaukee instead of a log, and then died when he attempted to floss it out with a six pack ring sat in a kiddy pool full of crisp, white foam cups.

Lesson learned, Ranger Groovy.  Six pack rings are the most efficient killing machines ever devised by man.

After we completed our stroll through his museum of crappy natural history, Ranger Groovy gave a speech about the responsibility each and every one of us has to make the world a better place.   While his entire message genuinely had a profound impact on me, there was one phrase he used that has stuck with me for twenty nine years for all the wrong reasons.  At the very end of the speech, he pointed at me and said "Remember, we're all captains here on Starship Earth."

Upon hearing the term "Starship Earth", I became skeptical of the horrors that Ranger Groovy had on display.   It was possibly the dumbest combination of words that I had ever heard.

Don't get me wrong.  People who litter are fucking douche bags and litter definitely harms and kills animals.  I'm not in any way disputing this fact.

All that I am saying is that, given some of the other characters (2) that lurked around my school, I am not convinced that Ranger Groovy wasn't just some dude who lived in a bus behind Ms. Lewis's decrepit swamp shack (3) and did the poor old broad a favor by mildly traumatizing her students once a year by flinging the contents of an old Alpha Beta (4) bag from the back of his bus on a bunch of stolen taxidermy that he couldn't pawn for drug money.



(1)  Okay, yes,  that is probably a grossly inaccurate portrayal of the woman, but she did tell me and my classmates that we were the worst students that she had ever had (a statement she had notoriously repeated to at least the last five classes she had taught).

(2)  My music teacher, Mr. Hadlock for example, was clearly just a creepy drifter with an acoustic guitar.   I say this because he had a photo of a topless hula dancer inside his guitar case and the only time I saw him outside of school, he was buying a rack of beer and snarled "Scram, kid." at me.  Ere go, scary drifter.

(3)  There's no way that she didn't live in a swamp shack.   

(4)  Alpha Beta was a California-based chain of liquor stores.  I don't know if they are still a thing.  I wasn't allowed to go anywhere near the Alpha Beta up the road from my house as a kid.