Some days you just have to pick up your marbles and go home.
We’ve had a lot of rain out here this winter, and I’ve been suffering from cabin fever. Big time. I’m headed to Baja next week and it’s supposed to start raining again, but hey, it is what it is. What I really wanted to do this morning was get to the range to shoot my .45. The range I belong to (the West End Gun Club) is private, it’s tucked behind the hills in the San Gabriel Mountains, and getting there literally involves driving across a stream. Usually there’s only a couple of inches of water in the stream and getting across is no problem. But all that changed with the recent rains. The little stream became a torrent, it’s still a torrent, and it’s moved huge boulders downstream. It’s been that way for a couple of weeks now. I was hoping the water level had gone down and I would be able to get across this morning, so I loaded up the Subie and headed up in the mountains.
When I got to the stream, I could see there was no way I was going to get across short of renting a helicopter. Our little stream was deep and fast a couple of weeks ago when I made the video above, and it’s stayed that way, with the addition now of the aforementioned boulders.
Okay, there’s a commercial range open to the public deeper into the mountains. I’d have to pay to shoot there, and I hadn’t done that in years, but like I said, I had cabin fever and I wanted to shoot. So I rolled another 15 miles or so deeper into the mountains.
“It’s $20,” Grizzly Adams (the guy behind the counter) told me (that’s not his real name, and I’m probably insulting folks named Grizzly Adams everywhere by assigning the moniker, but you get the idea). “It’s another 6 bucks for a target stand,” Grizzly continued, “and more if you need targets.”
Nah, I’ve got my own stand, I told him, and I brought my own targets with me.
“Drive through that gate and turn left,” he told me. I did.
As soon as I parked, another Grizzly Adams type came up and asked me, “Do you see what’s different between your car and every other car parked here?”
Hmmm. I didn’t know. I looked. I thought about it briefly. My car had no primer spots and missing body panels?
“I don’t know,” I said, “and I really didn’t drive out here to take a quiz. Make it easy and just tell me.”
“You’re supposed to back in,” Grizzly No. 2 said. Sure enough, I was the only one who had parked like a normal person. Go figure.
“Okay, I’ll turn my car around,” I said. It’s better to just do things sometimes than to try to argue or comprehend the reasons why. But we were on a line break, people were downrange changing their targets, and I asked if I could set up my target stand first, and then turn my car around.
Just then one of the shooters ran up. “Hey, my gun’s still loaded,” he said to Grizzly No. 2, who as it turns out was also the rangemaster. Wow, I thought. This is a big deal. The rangemaster (and I’m using the term very loosely; the only thing this guy had evidently mastered was controlling which way parked cars faced) had failed to do his most important job: Making sure all weapons were clear before he allowed folks to go out in front of the firing line. I mean, wow, there were folks downrange with a loaded rifle on one of the shooting benches. Pointing downrange. In the Army, best case, that would get you a lifetime of KP duty and maybe a couple thousand punitive pushups.
Then he compounded the felony.
He didn’t tell the people downrange to move aside and return to safety behind the firing line. “Just leave it alone,” the rangemaster quietly told the guy who owned the loaded rifle, which was pointed downrange, while people were out in front of said loaded rifle changing their targets. He allowed the folks who were downrange, in front of the loaded weapon, to continue their activities. I’d never seen anything like this on any range, and I’ve been doing this a long time. I was shocked.
“You know,” I said, “I think I’ve seen enough,” and with that I got back in my car and headed back to the little building at the entrance. I went inside and told Grizzly No. 1 what had just happened. “You’re running an unsafe range,” I told him, and I explained I didn’t feel safe being there. “I’d like my $20 back,” I added. All of this (from the time I drove in, paid my $20, went to the line, and returned to this guy’s counter) happened in the space of maybe 3 minutes.
“Can’t do that,” Grizzly No. 1 said. And with that, he smiled a gap-toothed, maybe-my-parents-were-related-before-they-got-married smile, and pointed to a small sign on the wall.
No refunds.
I looked at him. Then I looked at the sign again. Then I looked at him. He was still smiling. I smiled too. Sometimes I wonder what I’m going to put on the blog the next day, and I had been wondering about that as I drove out to the range. Problem solved, I thought. I still had a touch of cabin fever, but I had no new bullet holes in me and I knew what the 28 February ExNotes blog would be all about.