Meet Ranger Rick: The Man, The Myth, The Legend

Every family has one. The person who walks into a room and becomes the room. The one whose name alone, when dropped into a sentence, makes everyone lean in a little closer, because whatever comes next is going to be a story.

Let me paint you a picture of my dad.

He is a proud union man, a devoted Norwegian-American, and a man with encyclopedic knowledge of every tree, landmark, and historical footnote in the Pacific Northwest. He will share all of this with you, unprompted, at length. He has opinions, strong ones, about politics, about church service times, about the correct way to do almost anything, and he will defend those opinions with the passion of a man delivering closing arguments to the Supreme Court.

He is also, without question, the most dramatic person I have ever known in my entire life. We call him Ranger Rick, and you will discover exactly why when you read The Unbreakable Anchor. Throughout my journey, my father has been both a primary inspiration and a source of complete unpredictability. Early on in my life, my brother and I had to learn to “read the room” to see what dad we were going to get.

The man. The myth. The legend.

Rick does not do small problems. In Rick's world, there are no small problems. There are problems, and there are catastrophes, and the distance between them is approximately three seconds.

A minor inconvenience in his presence has a way of escalating, rapidly, loudly, and with full commitment, into something that feels like it requires emergency services. He is not doing this on purpose. That's the thing. He genuinely feels it all at full volume, and he is constitutionally incapable of dialing it back. Everyone and everything is out to get him at all times.

The chaos doesn't just follow him. It finds him. In the most mundane situations, in the most unexpected moments, something will go sideways, and Rick will be at the center of it, fully invested, loudly involved, and somehow making it both worse and more entertaining simultaneously. My husband got to experience this firsthand helping with a project at my parents’ house. He had come upstairs to get a drink of water and in the two seconds he was gone, we heard a crash and a bang, and there came my dad up the stairs, blood pouring down his face with that same furled brow we’ve come to expect, and the extra dramatic sighs and moans.

“I only left him for a minute,” my husband said.

This was a typical day for me growing up. There was always some drama, always some huge catastrophe, and always an exaggerated response.

My mother is a saint. This fact cannot be overstated.

That being said, on the flip side, my dad could light up the room with his laughter, his jokes, and his tendency to do mischief. There was this time when we went on a picnic to Deception Pass State Park for Mother’s Day. I was a teenager then and it was a few months after my grandfather had died. There was a nice, paved nature trail there. My grandmother was with us, slowing in her years, but excited to be out of the house with the family. During this walk, my dad decides he’s going to pick up rocks and put them in her sweater pocket. My uncle, who was with us, teamed up with my dad and before we knew it, Grandma was walking slower and slower because by then she had two sweater pockets full of rocks. When she discovered it, the look on her face broke out into infectious laughter until the whole family was laughing so hard we had to take a break from the trail.

Watching time slow down for the people we love is one of the strange gifts of growing older ourselves.

There are a hundred stories like that one, some made it into the book, some did not. But the story that became family legend was the day my dad rolled his car, his precious 1972 chestnut brown Plymouth Duster. He decided to work on the brakes. His house, the one both my grandfathers warned him about buying, was on a steep incline.

The steep driveway that became part of family legend.

Stubborn as he was, my dad decided to work on it on the steep driveway, which made no sense to my mother. My grandfather had a six-car garage, complete with an oil-changing bay. He could’ve taken the car there, but the stubborn Norwegian in him decided he wanted it done right then and there. My mom was on the phone with his mother telling her that he was being stubborn and they weren’t coming over. At that moment I hear:

“Gotta go Mom, Rick’s rolling down the driveway.”

Sure enough, there he was, hanging onto the driver’s door for dear life as the car rolled down the hill into the neighbor's yard. It is a funny image now, a family legend told at Christmas and around the campfire on our camping trips. He could’ve been seriously injured or killed, but in typical Rick fashion, he came out of it with just some scraped knees that in his eyes should require hospitalization and certainly required my mom to wait on him hand and foot for weeks.

My dad’s 1972 Plymouth Duster after an ill-fated brake repair attempt.

But Rick’s antics weren't just confined to our steep driveway. His larger-than-life personality demanded a much bigger stage, and he found it in the great outdoors. There is no more enthusiastic tour guide in the Pacific Northwest than Ranger Rick, as long as you aren't in a hurry and have made peace with the fact that every road trip will double as a lecture series.

He approaches the mountains, the rivers, the trees, and the history of this state with the energy of a man who has been personally entrusted with its reputation. He will tell you the name of every tree. He will tell the strangers near you the name of every tree. He has never once sensed that an audience was disengaged, and he never will.

Growing up, my brother and I became experts in the history and plant life of “Warshington". I never quite understood the R, but it was there nonetheless, my dad’s own unique pronunciation of his beloved state. Watching him bestow this experience on a new generation is one of the quiet joys of my adult life. It’s why the waters of Lake Wenatchee, the hikes up Beacon Rock on the Columbia River Gorge, and the endless history lessons of the Oregon and Washington coasts are still with me. I have passed them on to my own children. I might have grandchildren named Lewis and Clark someday because of it. That is some legacy right here.

But his true legacy isn't just a mental map of the Pacific Northwest or a shared vocabulary of trees; it’s the fierce, unshakeable way he cares for the people within it. Here's the paradox of Rick: the same intensity that can turn a camping trip into a theatrical production is the exact same intensity he brings to loving his family. There is no in-between with him. There is no quiet, background version of my dad. He is all the way in, all the time, in the arguments, in the laughter, in the showing up.

And he does show up. Maybe not calmly. Definitely not quietly. But when the people he loves need him, he is there, opinionated, loud, occasionally making things slightly more complicated than they need to be, and completely, utterly present. My dad was my rock when I needed him, every time. He showed up to rescue me when the car didn’t start, when my friend locked her keys in the car two hours away, when I needed him to calm my anxiety when my husband was in the hospital, and he even showed up for my best friend when she lost her own father in a car accident.

Some of my favorite memories began outdoors with Ranger Rick leading the way.

He is chaos incarnate. He is also, underneath all of it, one of the most fiercely devoted people I have ever known. Ranger Rick is not a supporting character. He never could be. He is woven into nearly every chapter of this story, which means you have a lot to look forward to. Chapter One starts with him.

Learn more about Ranger Rick in The Unbreakable Anchor, coming this fall. Sign up for the newsletter to stay updated on the journey ahead.

*Some photographs in this post have been artistically altered to preserve family privacy while honoring the memories behind them.