The Men They Called Cowards

Say a word with me, and feel how it sits in your mouth. Coward. Mary Emma Showalter heard it from her own professor in nineteen forty-two. With the war on, she took a dietitian's job at a camp full of men who would not fight, and her professor told her she'd be working for cowards. She said fine, then she was a coward too, and those men were her brothers and her friends. That answer turned the professor around. The CCC shut down that year. Those boys had done the building on this mountain, and the park needed somebody to do the keeping. In August the first twenty-six conscientious objectors reached the old camp at Pinnacles, Mennonite farm people mostly, and their own families fed and clothed them. They painted the signs along this road, fought the fires, and shoveled snow off the highway by hand, though plows were to be had. They weren't saints. One of them nailed the camp director's hat to the dormitory wall, and confessed it by letter years later. "I never had so much fun in my life." Only once did Superintendent Freeland recall them refusing a job. The Army wanted the old barracks, and asked them to take the buildings down so it could haul them off. They were polite about it, he said. "No. That would help the war." Hold that up next to this. The park had another job on its books for those same men. Razing undesirable structures, it was called. It meant the houses and outbuildings of the families moved off this mountain. One objector, Herbert Zim, the man behind the Golden Guides, went around with the rangers studying those old homes, hoping a few could be saved. Men who'd say no to the Army did that job, and I don't know what they said to each other at night. May of nineteen forty-three. A four-year-old girl wandered from her home near the park line on a Monday afternoon. By Tuesday hundreds were combing the foothills. Freeland told them she'd climb. So the search went high, and a big crew of objectors from Mary Emma's camp at Grottoes went with it. Saturday afternoon, one of them came on her, alive, on a rocky slope, five days and nights without food. He stayed with her. Two others hiked nearly five miles for help. She had pneumonia and she needed blood, and she lived. The local papers gave those men the credit. She told her mother she drinked water from the leaves, and that rabbits sat close to her at night. I've turned that over by a good many fires. A little girl on top of a mountain in the dark, rabbits sitting close, and coming up through the woods toward her, a man some folks had a word for.