The farmer whose field we’ve commandeered is a classic American Gothic type–in the sense that “gothic” means glaring, mistrustful, and cranky. Despite the cash he’s been awarded to let obsessives in faux 135-year-old woolens tromp his property, he’s radiating grumpiness. Ignoring him, those of us who aren’t too obese crouch in a gully, gasping in the heat as the train chugs closer.

Boom! The artillery’s opening salvo makes my chest cave. Attack! We rush out, hooting profoundly. Suddenly, previously concealed Union troops swarm out of the train and form battle lines. As the Yankees shoot back and train-riding civilians fire away with cameras, our captain vainly commands us to maintain orderly files. I fumble to reload, dropping caps and spilling powder.

“Take some hits, boys!” commands Stuart. As we were briefed pre-battle, the appropriate times to die are when you’re flanked and outnumbered, when you run out of ammo, when you get tired and think you’re going to have a heart attack, and when the boss says to. It’s only fair that I take a quick hit, this being my first encounter with “the elephant,” macho reenactor lingo for the pandemonium of ersatz warfare. I spot a patch of dry grass. A fine place to expire.

From about 30 yards away, a Yankee warrior in 1970s-style aviator-frame glasses targets some sky above my head and pulls the trigger. I lurch back toward the grass, coming up short and landing in mud. My new $75 pants! I flop around, taking care not to crush my canteen ($35) and gingerly pitching my Enfield rifle ($400) onto dry land. I decide to “reenact” a fatal shot to the heart. Rising on my elbows, stoically moaning and whimpering, I watch the Rebs counterattack the train. Their charge pushes the front line ahead of me, and Doc Fontaine, our company medic, drops by for triage.

“Dead or wounded?”

“Dying–but please don’t splash fakey blood on my $25 shirt.”

I close my eyes and envision the ebbing of the life force. The sun and smoke, musket and artillery blasts, and lusty Rebel yells–all these sights and sounds wash over me. The grass chafes my neck, insects crawl and gnaw. This, I realize, is what it might have been like to die slowly and alone on America’s deadliest battlefield, to savor the noise, smells, and terror of one’s final breaths…

Uh-oh. Our boys are falling back. Now I’m in no-man’s-land. TBGs–reenactor shorthand for “tubby bearded guys”–stumble past. A chubby corporal stomps my ankle. Fortunately, the Union is soon repulsed and retreats again. The train rolls off, the wounded start helping the dead to their feet, and a sickly bugle croaks out its timeless call: Miller time.

Who are the estimated 20,000 humans, not only in the United States but also in such distant, war-starved lands as Germany, who regularly don gray or blue and spend their outdoor leisure time reenacting the American Civil War? More important, why are they still at it? A few years back, reenacting had obvious appeal: Among other perks, make-believe combatants got to do their thing in films like Glory and Gettysburg. And when PBS briefly wooed the under-80 demographic with The Civil War, large-scale buffdom became almost cool. But instead of passing like so many other fads, reenacting has become an indelible subculture. According to The Camp Chase Gazette, a monthly fanzine that’s reenacting’s answer to Variety, this year alone, hundreds of battles and “living history” encampments are slated. What’s the enduring appeal?

Reenactors will tell you they’re tapping into the values and folkways of America’s most hallowed conflict. (No, not slavery and mass amputations. Rather states’ rights, valor, and chivalric combat.) Scoffers tend to mock them as closet racists, kooks, or Trekkie-like geeks, and contemporary cultural stereotypes aren’t helping matters. Witness the recent episode of ER in which a deranged, accidentally wounded reenactor refuses to “get out of character.” Nor has the hobby’s image been helped by Larry Dewayne Hall, a Confederate reenactor arrested last year in connection with a string of murders committed in the vicinity of battles that he attended. “Suspect has humongous mutton chops,” the crackling police bulletins must have said. “Repeat: mutton chops.”

There is, of course, a third postulate: Perhaps most of these “soldiers” are good guys who are simply out to make friends, get drunk, shoot guns, and have fun.

Heroes, zeroes, or belly-full-of-beer-o’s? The only way to find out, I realize, is to march onto the Civil War’s blood-soaked playing field. My quest for the past begins in “the future”–on the Internet. Like members of other groups unable to satisfy all their aberrant urges in three dimensions, reenactors use cyberspace to keep in touch. I locate the appropriate site, where I’m immediately impressed by the sheer bellicosity of the breed, especially Confederates, many of whom think they’re still getting the ramrod from the North.

“It seems that most contemporary textbooks downplay the importance of contributations that Southerners have made, instead focusing on depicting us in a biggotted, racist manner,” Reb reenactor Rick Veal contributates. “Thus preventing [readers] from coming to the conclusion that the War was an illegal invasion of the South by the North….”

But it’s not just North-versus-South that divides these folks. There’s equal disrespect between the so-called hardcores and farbs. The hardcores are also known as button pissers, thanks to a notorious 1994 Wall Street Journal article that explored the hidden schisms within reenactordom. The piece profiled the elite Southern Guard, a unit so committed to verisimilitude that one soldier’s uniform featured brass buttons soaked in urine to achieve a yellowed “1860s patina.” Hardcores also practice “dead man’s bloat,” Method-actor portrayals of swollen corpses in the field, and engage in “spooning,” cuddling up on chilly nights with the other fetid, unwashed men of their units.

Farbs–the term is a derogatory derivation from the phrase “far be it from authentic”–are more easygoing types who like to enjoy modernity’s pleasures, such as camp stoves, insect repellent, beer, and soap, before and after battles. Hardcores disdain their often inaccurate uniforms and portrayals as “farby.”

Ultimately, I decide the only way to be scientific is to go farb one weekend, hardcore the next. Which leads to the ultimate question: blue or gray?

“Do yourself a favor and link up with a Union regiment,” I’m advised by Yankee reenactor Kim Allen Scott. “I believe recreation is what your readers are interested in, not some weird ideology regarding ancestor worship or political backlash.”

I pose an open question: Do most other guys buckle under peer pressure to join the winning team, or does the wisteria-scented Old South prove irresistible? “My impression is that there are at least twice as many Southern reenactors,” replies George Komatsoulis, a weekend corporal with a Union battalion. “Around the unit we think that it’s the ‘romance of the lost cause.’ I’ve heard people say this about bad guys in movies, that somehow they’re always more interesting than the good guys.”

That tears it: I will become Confederate Boy, marching in the doomed ranks of Johnny Reb. On the Net, I meet lots of friendly soldiers who invite me to muster into their units. For my first weekend, I decide to hook up with Jeb Stuart and his cushy train-raid encampment. A week later, I’ll join a more button-pissing outfit, the Army of Northern Virginia, at the Fight for the Hills, a hellacious reliving of the struggles for Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top. All of it, obviously, will transpire at the Mecca of Meccas: Gettysburg, where the South came to grief on July 1-3, 1863.

Under leaden skies, Gettysburg National Military Park looks sepulchral indeed when I pull into town on July 1. Despite the hordes of tourists clogging the approach roads, its rolling fields and rocky heights look like “hallowed ground” on a fine dismal day like today. Some reenactors with a supernatural bent consider Gettysburg the Grand Central Station of the spirit world, with sentry wraiths marching in the mist. Here in the gloom, even those who aren’t so inclined might have second thoughts.

I check into camp, which turns out to be farb central: a roped-off area inside a woodsy RV lot. My unit commander is Captain Chris Chesnut of the First Maryland (CSA). A thirtysomething chef in less unreal life, hairy-chinned Chris weighs in at 260 pounds–a textbook TBG. His wife, Debby, is here along with her mom, creating the real-life spectacle of a burly Confederate captain cowering from his mother-in-law.

Our camp is voluptuously appointed. Captain Chris has hauled along a stocked cooler (hidden in an ammo box), outdoor furniture galore, and a large tent with twin cots. We’ve also got a cookhouse, manned by the family of Ron Waddell. Fifty-two and lean, he’s brought his wife, Beverly, and daughters, Heather and Rebekah, from their home in nearby Lebanon to handle domestic chores. Ron is a full-time “living historian,” getting paid to visit schools as a period doctor. He portrays Jeb Stuart’s medical director, Major John Fontaine, M.D. He and his period-clad family have been doing the Civil War for nine years. Except for Beverly’s Amway distributorship and the kids’ schooling, it’s the focus of their lives.

That night I get no sleep. My fellow soldiers, so jacked up to be back in the friendly confines of the nineteenth century, gab for hours. The captain, my tentmate, thunders in around 3 A.M. with his boots on and commences cannonlike snoring. At 4, a late-arriving Dorkus confederatus whomps our tent, looking for his campsite.

The next morning is bonding and discipline time: We chew the fat, drill, and run through the script for our train raid. That afternoon, after the first battle, the grumbling skies open in a deluge. While I wait out the storm in an overly air-conditioned Plymouth Neon with four other farbs, a grizzled young Johnny Reb brags about an illegal encampment he took part in a few months back. A pair of local cops approached a hundred Rebs at their campsite to ask them to put out their fires.

The storyteller scoffs manfully. “They’re telling a hundred armed men what to do.” Other Rebs join in the virile gaiety. Strictly to himself, Confederate Boy asks: Huh? First of all, the hundred men were “armed” only with muskets and powder–no bullets. Second, not that I’m complaining, but with this group, such pseudomilitia bravado is just a pose. At the moment, a corporal is scurrying past our car, cowering under a colorful golf umbrella. No matter what their physiques or facial-hair situations, all these guys are TBGs deep down.

Actually, they’re not all guys. Back in camp, a Union private is drying out by our campfire–and he’s a she. Sunny Sonnenrein, of the 15th New York Mounted Cavalry and 124th New York Infantry, is a German-American portraying an immigrant soldier. Back home in Goshen, New York, her riding buddies got her into reenacting several months ago. Sonnenrein says she’s already totally outfitted–and hooked.

We talk about the discrimination faced by distaff battlers like her. In 1991, a reenactor named Lauren Cook Burgess filed a civil suit after the National Park Service booted her out of an Antietam reenactment for being a woman. Burgess won on sexual-discrimination grounds, but the ruling applies only to events on Park Service land. The prevailing attitude elsewhere is spelled out in the rules for the Tennessee Campaign, a multibattle fall 1995 event, the reenactor Lollapalooza: “If you are discovered to be a woman on the field, you will be removed from the ranks. Do not come to this event…unless you and your unit are prepared to live with the possible consequences of your actions.”

“We had a girl in our company who wore makeup and jewelry,” says Sonnenrein, distancing herself somewhat from too-prissy others. “Finally we couldn’t take it anymore and tossed her out. No one knows why she was interested in the first place.”

Ummm…to meet TBGs?

The rain returns, and we seek shelter under the captain’s canvas fly. While many a Civil War battle was fought in the muck, those guys had no choice. We do. We are medium core. Faster than you can say Digital Music Express, we pack up our gear and head for the twentieth century.

When I return the next weekend, the weather looks promising: dry and hot, no need for spooning. We’ll be replaying two Gettysburg battles, Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top, crucial Union repulses of uphill Confederate charges. Gettysburg is known as the High Water Mark of the Confederacy, for it was here that Rebel forces, peaking after a string of successes by General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia, were decisively trounced and began their slow decline. The Rebels’ inability to capture the high ground at Culp’s Hill and Little Round Top helped seal this fate, because it pushed Lee into ordering General George Pickett’s disastrous charge into the Union center.

Today, replaying Culp’s Hill, we’ll clash on a rustic hillside eight miles from town. I track down my new buddies in the sprawling Confederate camp, where they’ve proudly set up ragged canvas flies over tree branches. Despite the Therm-a-Rest hidden under my period blanket, I feel last weekend’s farbiness melting away.

Nontubby and nonbearded Bryan Boyle, 39, from South Brunswick, New Jersey, works as a computer network engineer for Exxon Research. Bill Andersen is a stocky, witty, 32-year-old computer scientist from Baltimore. Bill’s brother Mike, 35, made the trip here from Milwaukee and resembles an Ed Harris with hair. Devin Shook is a lanky 33-year-old goofball, and Rich Dragos, a 36-year-old from West Islip, New York, can, I’m informed, drink a lot without getting stupid.

My new pals explain that they go into battle with rucksacks only, campaign style–no tents or fuss. “After the final battle,” says Mike, who’s been sleeping around in the woods for a week, “we just march back to the truck and drive home, while everybody else is here for hours breaking down their tents and stowing their farby gear.”

Taking a break from our hardcoreness, we ride into town to quaff brews at a cozy outdoor caf. At the next table is a pair of true button pissers: Johann, a dirty-blond, mud-caked Confederate, and his nonspeaking pard, whose name I don’t catch. They’ve been sleeping rough in the forest for two weeks, gathering stink. The manager of the bar won’t even let them inside.

Johann greets us: At least we can appreciate his authenticity. Showing off his basically disintegrated shoes, he shares his pedigree. “We’re unofficially part of the Southern Guard,” he says, “but we can’t handle all their rules. We like to do our own thing.” Bill, a self-described gun nut, launches an arcane discussion on armaments with Johann. Mike, recognizing a gleam in his brother’s eye, instigates a retreat from this killing field of tedious one-upmanship.

The next morning, as I scrounge around for a spare weapon, an Enfield rifle becomes available–but with a string attached. To get it, I’ll have to join the company of its owner, Steve Mercer of Columbia, Alabama, a 45-year-old captain with the 15th Alabama. Captain Steve is a true “lifer”: He’s been reenacting for 12 years and attends more than 30 events annually. Unemployed, he makes a few bucks as a “sutler,” selling reenactor goodies. Inside his tent, which is thick with customers, he gleefully relates what a soldierly good time his boys have. “Once, we attached a ball and chain to this guy in his sleep. He gets up to take a piss, near killed himself. Then we couldn’t find the key. So we had to saw it off. Ha!”

This antebellum frat-boy talk makes me wonder out loud what sort of initiation is in store. Captain Steve smiles slyly. As we chat away, I ask if some guys get so deep into the Civil War that they decide they fought in it in a past life.

“I know one guy who thinks he’s the reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson,” he says, voice and dander rising. “But that’s not possible, because the Bible says you don’t get reincarnated.” Visibly trying to restrain himself from a biblical rant, he rants anyway.

“Hmmm,” I say when he finishes. No one else speaks.

Soon enough, it’s time for my first drill with the 15th–and my hazing. Eyeing me narrowly as I stand at attention, First Sergeant Manning Williams maniacally tears open a cartridge roll with his teeth, battlefield style. Then he pours the black powder into his mouth, getting it nice and moist…nice and moist. After which he gives a Rebel yell, spits the powder into his hand, and starts spreading the halitosisy goo on my face, still screaming. Nobody seems to find this unusual.

Our first action will be the Battle of Culp’s Hill. Today there’s a decent crowd of spectators, and I decide it would be nice to get myself nobly wounded instead of dying with a grotesque gurgle. After 15 minutes I take a hit in my left arm, stagger around briefly, and then try to rejoin the fray using only my right wing. A female medic–a real one, not a reenactor–rushes up, thinking I’m actually hurt. I wave her off. Back in formation, I take another hit so I can flop around extra-pathetically. Soon as I do, here comes the medic lady again.

“Do you need some help?” she asks.

“Might need to amputate, ma’am,” I gasp. Wink, wink. She’s visibly annoyed–once again she thought I was really hurt. “Hey, lady,” I croak as she scurries off in a huffy clatter, “excuse me for being convincing. It’s my job.”

The night before their suicide attack in Glory, the black Union soldiers of the 54th Massachusetts used rhythmic call-and-response prayers to get in touch with their souls. The night before our attack on Little Round Top, the men of the 15th Alabama shoot guns and yell a lot. Reveille blows at 5 A.M.; figuring I won’t sleep anyway, I rouse myself at four for a look-see around, bumbling over to the Widow Barfield’s cookhouse for coffee.

A cherubic woman in her forties, Betty Barfield worked as a correctional officer for 12 years, but now she and her daughter, Maureen, travel to reenactments, cooking dollar-a-plate grub in Confederate camps. Except, she bitterly mutters, at the increasingly frequent events “where the promoters won’t let me set up,” lest it suppress official concessionaire income.

Belly stoked, I take a stroll in the elite section of camp reserved for generals. I nod at a lackluster Lee and then halt at the tent of General James Longstreet. Inside, I introduce myself to Tim Perry, a 39-year-old medical investigator and a dead ringer for Lee’s bushy-bearded right-hand man. Longstreet, played in the movie Gettysburg by a hilariously overbearded Tom Berenger, is widely revered, especially at Gettysburg, where he tried to talk Lee out of ordering Pickett’s Charge. I ask Perry how he managed to elbow aside the lesser dudes and assert himself as the alpha Longstreet. “There was another guy,” he snorts. “He came up and introduced himself to me. He was doing a Tom Berenger impression, not a Longstreet.”

The cream of the reenactor world is lined up in Perry’s tent to pay respects, and the fact that Confederate Boy, a mere grunt private, is monopolizing the great man causes plenty of consternation. I’m shortly elbowed aside by a Longstreet lackey who has brought along a comely female for the general’s perusal. Who would have thought there’d be a reenactor groupie factor?

Later, visiting the nearby Union camp to find my pal Sunny Sonnenrein, I feel eyes burning holes in my back. It’s like sitting in a bar while a TV displays a police sketch of yourself. Nobody helps direct me to Sunny’s unit; in fact, more than one blue coat brays, “Go back where you belong.”

Back in the Rebel camp, I’m told of the enormity of my gaffe: Cross-army fraternization is not encouraged here. “At some events,” a Texan notes, “they post pickets and take prisoners. You coulda been captured.”

This underscores a point I’d already noticed. The deeper we move into the weekend, the more my reenactor buddies–1,300 Feds, 1,200 Rebs–seem to be embracing an 1860s antipathy for one another. “Do you ever find yourself hating the other side?” I ask, my inauthentic pen poised over my farby notepad. “Does the violence ever get real?”

Silence. I get a sense of figurative wagons being circled, as the men exchange nervous glances. “Never,” someone finally says. “Never. Safety is our primary concern.”

“What about that guy who bayoneted that other guy?” (I’m making this up, but you never know.)

“We, uh, I haven’t heard about that.” Too bad.

That afternoon, as me and some pards hunker down waiting for artillery to soften up Little Round Top, an Army of Northern Virginia private gripes about a proposal to place a statue of Arthur Ashe alongside Richmond’s Civil War heroes. “I don’t mind them putting up a statue for an ‘African-American,’ ” says the fighter-philosopher, “and I don’t mind them putting up a statue for a guy who dies of AIDS. But I’ll be damned if they put up a statue to an ‘African-American’ who died of AIDS!”

Everybody grunts. Apparently there’s a fourth reason to reenact that I failed to consider: to protect the South from memorial statuary honoring skinny, lovable clay-court specialists.

No time to think about that, though. Soon bugles blare, and we get the order to charge up a 45-degree hill on this 90-degree day. A single thought unites us as we enter a hailstorm of Union lead: I’d like to die pretty soon; preferably in the shade. In fact: there!

Unfortunately, my battle-tested pards beat me to the shade, so I have to survive awhile. Farther uphill, peeping over the top of a breastworks, I aim at a Union artillery man. Blam! The bluebelly takes the hit. Yo! What a feeling!

But the tide turns, of course. Little Round Top ended when Colonel Joshua Chamberlain’s 20th Maine, after holding the Union’s left flank all day, sent the Rebs skedaddling with a fixed-bayonet charge. Now as then, most of my outfit has been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner, and a wave of blue is roaring down the hill to finish us off. It’s a crushing Confederate defeat. I haul gray-clad butt downhill, canteen clanging against my side. The crowd cheers the massacre as I run for cover behind a small line of Southern backup.

Pausing for breath, I take a last look back at the field of mayhem. The dead are rising awkwardly, while Yanks are clomping downhill and offering helping hands to the boys in gray. As I shuffle toward my car, people make sympathetic faces as if I’ve actually survived a battle, and the larger crowd applauds in sincere appreciation. The moment is genuinely moving.

I overhear a tourist dad describing the leaders of the real battle of Gettysburg to his young kids. “There was Armitage, who was an old pal of the Union’s Hancock…” Just then, a resurrected Reb swaggers past, ripping off his heavy coat and shirt, taking a swig from a can of Miller Genuine Draft, and letting go with a loud burp: “Don’t forget Brrrrrobert E. Lee.”

No, indeed. With men like this honoring his memory, his name will resonate forever.

Jack Barth served time as an overstressed Yosemite National Park worker grunt in the June 1995 feature “A Park Boy Is Born.”

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For an exhausted youth we'll call Park Boy–indeed, for each of the 130 young Yosemite employees bunking here in Camp Six–it's been a long week of scooping ice cream, shoveling manure, and “polishing the porcelain,” all to give Yosemite National Park's 20,000 daily visitors a breathtaking and sanitized-for-their-protection experience. But today was payday, and now it's time to knock back some frosty brews and swap gripping yarns with coworkers.

When Park Boy first signed on here, he knew that, as tough as the job might get, the camaraderie with his peers would pull him through. And, he thought, who knows? Maybe there'd be a Park Girl. Maybe two! Well, that hasn't happened yet, but now, as the clock ticks toward midnight, Camp Six is Partyville, USA. People are dancing, drinking, and laughing, and someone is blasting R.E.M. just a tad too loud for that cheap stereo. Park Boy always hated R.E.M.–bunch of posers–but here in the wilderness, all senses intoxicated, their distorted riffs sound prophetic indeed. “Yeah,” he thinks, “maybe I am 'losing my religion.'”

Suddenly, his reverie is smashed as two sets of headlights sweep across the camp. Tires skid to a halt; clods of dirt rain against canvas tents. Like hypnotized chickens, Park Boy and his fellow grunts stare dumbly as the invaders swoop in.

“R-r-r-rangers!” someone shouts. But it's too late. Friday is payday for the men in gray, too, and they're in a mood to party–ranger style. Moving with cruel, practiced efficiency, they zero in on sweet, baby-faced Tina, who's sitting on a tent cabin's wooden steps, clutching a bottle of Sierra Nevada.

“Let's see some ID!” roars a goon as he slaps the ale from her trembling mitt. Tina sobs. The ranger scoops her up like a puppy. She shrieks and pumps her arms furiously, futilely, as he pops open the lid of a bear box with his foot. Campers are supposed to store their food in these, but tonight the only “item” inside will be Tina.

“Hey!” Park Boy protests. Uh-oh. Four Maglite beams converge on his face. It's his turn now…

With a sweaty shudder, Park Boy wakes up, realizing that he's had the nightmare–again. He's been in Yosemite less than a week and hasn't witnessed any such goings-on, but the folklore-generating resentment of the drones has invaded his brain. He rolls over on his musty cot and punches the pillow. Think of waterfalls, trees, cuddly creatures, he commands himself. Think of that girl from Chico State. But it's no use. As soon as he drops off, his subconscious mind will start unspooling the terrifying second half of a movie called It Came from Park HQ.

In the morning, crusty with dried perspiration, Park Boy makes a vow: Ignore outlandish horror stories told by bitter malcontents. And as long as you're making vows, how about never again mixing s'mores with the Schlitz Malt Liquor Bull after 10 P.M.? Whoa.

Call me Park Boy. And know that, like literally jillions of Americans, I've always been fascinated by the inherent romance of working in the grand, green, throbbing expanse of a national park–the ultimate escape from our miserable urban lives. And I've wondered: What sort of people are drawn there? What exactly do they do? Can they get cable?

Hence my plan: to spend a manic week performing a wide variety of scruffy tasks at one of the system's true showstoppers, Yosemite. In the process I'd get behind the scenes to ladle out runny Stroganoff, fluff pillows, gingerly pick cigarette butts out of urinal screens, and rub shoulders with the locals, students, and drifters who stoke Yosemite's mighty engines.

I was also on a mission. As the week progressed, I'd scramble up the power ladder, ideally climbing into the ranks of rangerdom itself. By doing so I would surely gain insight into several important themes of national park sociology, including one that became apparent within hours of my arrival. Namely, that many of Yosemite's cowering proles regard the rangers as bully boys–a cross between Big Brother and Eddie Haskell. Could it be? Could the rangers' obvious need to maintain order in a park that is buffeted by two kinds of people pressure–from both its hordes of urban visitors and its often rambunctious, sometimes criminal workforce–have created a cadre of control freaks? Or was it all a gross exaggeration? As a quest it had everything, including a grail. Before I left, to make sure I really understood where the rangers were coming from, I was determined to rise high enough to behold myself in a mirror, standing tall and wearing the ultimate symbol of in-park clout: a snazzy, stiff-brimmed ranger hat.

There are two avenues to employment in a national park: the National Park Service and the local concessions company. Park Service jobs include administration, maintenance, and rangering. The 1,800 summertime concessions jobs at Yosemite run the gamut from piloting a shuttle bus to bellhopping. I want to do it all, so by telephone I contact Yosemite Concession Services and Park Service officials. Keith Walklet, the information services manager for the concessions company, takes to the project with gusto, speaking excitedly of the various uniforms I'll get to wear. The Park Service folks are eager to help, too. Lisa Dapprich, a public affairs officer, tells me that I'll need a pair of green pants and appropriate shoes for my Park Service duties. The park will provide a shirt and–I'm jumping the gun here, but I have to ask–a totally happenin' ranger hat?

“No, I'm sorry,” she says. “That would be a federal offense.”

I grumble “we'll see” and ask if I can staff an entrance station, work the desk at the visitor center, fight a fire, and, best of all, ride along with rangers on action-packed night patrol.

Yes, yes, no, NO. “The rangers are kind of funny about that sort of thing,” Dapprich says in a measured tone. “Would you like to shovel manure at the stables instead?”

“That would be…great,” I say. And I mean it. I am at the trailhead of my adventure.

I arrive at Yosemite early on a Monday morning in midsummer. There's plenty of glorious scenery–trees, dirt, rocks, other stuff–but my senses are more attuned to the fact that, even at this hour, the blazing heat has already sucked the crispness out of the air. At the administration office in faux-rustic Yosemite Village, I'm loaned the rest of the motley uniform that I'll wear while on Park Service detail: a belt, a cap sporting the Park Service shield, and a woman's gray shirt.

As a team player, I make no comment about receiving a woman's shirt, though I do ask one last time about my ranger hat. (Same reply.) Then I don the uniform and set out jauntily for the concessions operations center; en route, I'm accosted by jabbering foreign tourists who mistake me for an authority figure. Where ees la toilette? Vhere ist der El to das Kapitan? Hustling inside to safety, I meet the concessions company spokesman, Keith, a friendly guy in his thirties. He plunks me down in a spartan classroom with three other new hires for an orientation session. Along with general blab about lodging and dues for the employee union, we're told:

No drinking or liquor-buying is permitted in uniform.

Men are allowed only one earring. Men with long hair must tie it in a ponytail–no unsightly Doug Henning shags.

Although we've already passed a drug screening just to get this far, we have at our disposal a “wellness center” that offers substance-abuse counseling and four Alcoholics Anonymous meetings per week, along with monthly AIDS testing, free condoms, and weekly smoking-cessation workshops. There are also talent shows, dances, barbecues, and intramural sports.

Overall, it's like summer camp for older kids, with maybe a bit more drudgery and 12-step than we'd like.

Next, Ranger Ron Hamann, a sinewy community-relations specialist, pops in for a more pointed presentation. At first, it's as if we're on the same side: In a martial voice, he says we can be his “eyes and ears.” He recounts horror stories about impatient campers at Wawona intimidating the weak into prematurely vacating their sites, about sedans tearing across innocent meadows…

But then, when Ranger Ron shifts to the topic of drugs, it becomes clear that his visit is also a warning: Just say no, or else. “We had drug dealers living in Boys Town,” he says, referring to one of the workers' camps. “Boys Town!”

During the Q & A, to keep the discussion spirited, I ask him if the rangers follow a live-and-let-live policy toward “backpackers waaaaay out in the woods lighting up a joint.” Mistake. He looks at me hard. Later, at lunch, the ambient pollen that can make being outdoors so disagreeable is causing my nose to run, and I'm sniffing. “Allergies?” Keith asks with cocked eyebrows and a smirk.

I arise early the next morning and don the powder-on-navy blues of the shuttle-bus driver. Actually, my first job is as a shuttle-bus driver's “assistant,” which is, in fact, no job at all. Luckily, the driver, Jack Peters, an upbeat 47-year-old with an unlined face and graying hair, is one of the more interesting guys at Yosemite. As the free transport merrily rolls past dewy meadows and sylvan groves and rigidly enforced no-parking zones, Jack describes park life.

He's been here since 1981, working four days a week and pounding backcountry trails the rest of the time. Jack spends his winters surfing throughout Asia. “People I know who started when I did are cynical and jaded now,” he says. “It's because we're bombarded by tourists. To a solitary guy like me, having all these people in your face is a nightmare.”

I brace for a bulging human phalanx, but the early-morning shift is dozy: hikers on their way to Half Dome, campers coming into town for supplies, staff heading to work. The bus fills steadily, though, and eventually people are crammed in the aisle. At one point, as Jack is making an announcement, a German woman thrusts her meaty face into his and interrupts with a question. He looks over his shoulder, flashes me a see-what-I-mean smile, and then politely answers.

Later, bus emptied, I commend Jack for his cool under large-lady fire. He shrugs. “To me, a real unsung hero is a guy like Tony, who's been washing dishes for like 37 years.” Jack illustrates by making zombie dishwashing motions. “Never complains, perfectly happy washing dishes.” His shuddery body language says it all: not me.

After my shift, I return to the Park Service office to hook up with Rita McMurty, Yosemite's volunteer coordinator. While I'm waiting, Marla Shenk, a public affairs official, introduces herself with a frown. “You must respect the uniform,” she says, glaring at some hairs that peep manfully over the top button of my blouse. Before I'm abused further, Rita shows up, and we drive to a distant campsite in the Yellow Pines picnic area, there to have a look at the lowliest of Yosemite's low: kids, ranging in age from 18 to 23, who are working in the Park Service as “volunteers” in exchange for a tent site and perhaps a tiny stipend. Surveying the towheads and their mean accommodations, I ask Rita if she'd take 'em younger.

“Younger becomes a problem,” she says. “There's a lot of drinking going on in the camps. And have you met many kids who are mature enough to say no to a drink? I haven't.”

And it's here, among the wet-nosed thistle-pullers and trail-menders, that I'm forcefully reminded of my debased status. For two days I've been a bit puffed-up that everybody keeps calling me a VIP. Now, as I imagine that I'm interfacing with Rita on a colleague-to-colleague level about the problems of wayward youngsters, she informs me with a helpful smile that this means Volunteer in the Park.

Properly stung, I decide it's time to pull up on the bootstraps by doing some actual work. Hence, at six the next morning, I head out for a long, hard day of weeding, recycling, and hash-vending. First stop: the Park Service barn–a simple structure a stone's throw from Yosemite Falls–where I shake the callused hand of Bob Slater, a civil-service cowboy wearing a naughty novelty cap that reads BEN DOVER. As we rustle about in the shadows of towering granite walls, most of the valley is still aslumber. The only sounds are the snorting of the horses and their firehose-like urinations.

Bob explains that the horses and mules are used for rescues and trail-crew supply. Today, we're packing a mule train with sacks of concrete needed by bridge builders on Merced Lake. Bob, who speaks in a gruff, Wilford Brimley manner, lets me load 90-pound sacks onto a sweet old mule. Being a puny City Boy in real life, I almost pass out, so I swallow my pride and ask for help. Bob is cool about it; he heaves to and doesn't hose me down with ridicule.

Groping for a job that I can “hack,” Bob has me scoop up manure left by the mule train. Good, earthy labor, this. Heading for a shower afterward, I'm stopped repeatedly by tourists. Once they catch a whiff, though, they decide to look for a more fragrant ear to chew. Say… I silently debate whether to stop bathing for the duration.

But bathe I do, bright and early the following day. I also step into a cloud of talc and a stylish work suit whose earth-tone hues would be labeled “Taos” in a mail-order catalog. It's service sector time for your humble Park Boy, and I'm bespiffed for a morning stint as a bellhop at the Ahwahnee, a stately, art deco ultralodge whose serene grounds are redolent of mint, fir, and that other cultivated green stuff–money.

I hook up with senior bellman Domingo Serrano, a 24-year veteran who shows me the ropes. This morning is downright hairy; two tours are departing within a half-hour of each other, and the only scheduled bellhops are Domingo and the Boy. As we hustle from room to room, a profusely sweating Domingo teaches me how to save my back by using my leg as a lever to heft luggage onto the cart. Another bellman, Steve Harding–who has the placid, open demeanor of the hippie teacher on Beavis & Butt-head–comes to the rescue just when it looks like we'll never finish in time. When we're done, I ask him to name some stars who have stayed here.

“Stars? Let's see, there was O.J., Carlos Santana, Robert Redford, Chuck Woolery…” Woolery!

This, however, was just a warm-up for my big question. One especially famous piece of Ahwahnee lore has it that when Queen Elizabeth visited in the early seventies, she brought her own royal toilet seat.

“Not true,” he says, attempting a cover-up.

My next chore is scooping ice cream at Degnan's, a fast-food emporium in the Valley's urban center. Here I'm under the tutelage of senior scooper Morgan Kreamer, a stocky undergraduate from the University of Southwestern Louisiana. As we coax half-melted lumps out of the so-called freezer, Morgan regales me with harrowing tales of life in the camps.

“I've been here over three months,” he says. “I'm staying at Camp Six. Two people tried to hang themselves in their tents there this year. One, who just broke up with a girl, died. The other didn't even close his door, and someone saw him and saved him. Also, two people hung themselves in Boys Town this year.”

Morgan takes a much-needed breath. “At Camp Six, half the people drink every night till they pass out, the other half don't drink at all.”

“Which half are you in?”

“Well, at school I'd be in the drinking half, but here liquor is so expensive, and we get so little money…” Letting that thought drift, Morgan shifts ground and hits me with a good Scary Ranger anecdote. “One morning these rangers came into a guy's tent and handcuffed him. We asked why, and they said, 'He was late for work.'”

This sounds dubious, but Chelsea, a perky teen scooper standing nearby, says she was present to witness it: “I remember thinking, 'It's really not a good idea to be late for work here.'”

“They knew he smoked dope,” Morgan chimes in, “so they used being late as an excuse to enter his tent.”

Of all the themes recurring in the Park Boy saga–You Don't Want Rangers in Your Face, Generation X-ers Moan Frequently–the one that recurs most often is Irksome Encounters of the German Kind. Later that day, passing the check-in desk at Curry Village on my way home, I hear a German man asking a female clerk if the trail to Vernal Falls would be tough for someone with an injured leg.

“Oh, yes,” she replies confidently. “It's a steep, strenuous trail to the falls. It's difficult even for me.”

Instead of saying, “OK, I'll skip it,” the man sizes her up as a typically lazy, unmotivated American. “Yes,” he continues, “but would it be difficult for a German man with a bad leg?”

“Oh, yes, I would advise strongly against it.”

“How many miles is it?”

It dawns on the clerk that she's being ignored. “Around, uh, two miles.”

The guy wrinkles his face, practically clicks his heels, and departs without thanking her.

Like one who has mastered a video game, Park Boy has earned admission to the next level. It's quasi-ranger time! I make my debut on the firing line: the visitor center information desk. Susan Gonsher, the manager of the field interpretive staff, sets me up for a four-hour shift behind the island-style structure, which is ground zero for ranger-public interface.

“Four's the maximum,” she says. “More would be too stressful.”

After 20 minutes, I can field 90 percent of the questions, since just about everybody asks, “What's good to do here?” I ask them to define their parameters, which are almost always (1) I have two hours to spend, max, and (2) I don't want to move my butt at all.

Tourist slothfulness is a running joke. Smart-alecky young volunteers pass the desk and mimic their questions. “I have five minutes in the park,” they prattle. “What should I do?”

“Buy a Coke,” comes the reply.

“Shoot some video of the parking lot,” says Park Boy.

At the info desk, I also meet the overtly disgruntled Keith Bischoff, a grungy young man who sells books and souvenirs in the center. Here's a selection of Bischoffian gripes.

On rude park guests: “When I worked in housekeeping, this angry guy asked me to tell the frogs to stop mating and be quiet.”

On employee dating: “The ratio of guys to girls here is five to one. If you're a fat, ugly girl, you'll do great.”

On his “friends,” the rangers: “On Friday night, payday, the rangers come over to the camps and hassle the employees. One ranger tore up a hand-rolled cigarette and sniffed it. They made the guy lie in the dirt.”

Keith continues. “Another ranger shot himself and said some criminal did it. They had a massive manhunt, closed down the park. Everybody knows he shot himself, but nobody did anything. I don't think he's here anymore.”

Whew! And you wonder what inspires Park Boy's nightmares. Verifying Keith's tales would rob me of valuable toilet-swabbing time, but I can tell you that the last rumor is based on events of July 1993, when ranger Kim Aufhauser received a flesh wound in one of his legs during a still-unsolved episode that launched an ultimately fruitless manhunt. The search for his assailant involved 180 rangers and local cops and required clearing more than 1,000 visitors from a 53-square-mile area.

As Keith tells it, Aufhauser was an über-ranger, able to levitate up sheer cliffs, wingshoot mosquitoes with a pistol, and eat rocks. He was forever campaigning for rangers to be equipped with automatic weapons and FBI-style protective gear. Fearing that his pleas were falling on deaf ears, he allegedly decided to dramatize the rangers' plight by staging a criminal attack and wounding himself. After the incident, he left the Park Service, but among Yosemite worker bees, he'll live forever–fairly or not–as an eerie symbol of ranger “enthusiasm.”

The rangers at my next big post, the Arch Rock entrance station, a humble hut at Yosemite's southwestern access point, are a friendly bunch known to other park workers as “fee-cees”–affectionate slang for “fee collectors.” The entry-fee booth is air-conditioned, but whoever has to lean out and take the cash is pretty much roasting in the sun. The hut boasts a carbon monoxide monitor, a traffic counter, and a peculiar air-circulation system that looks like a homemade job taken from Popular Mechanics.

I'm here with three lively women: Julie Crossland, Amy Ronay, and Lynette Mangus. I ask them about people blasting through the gate without paying, and they smile confidently. There's a ranger station three miles to the west, so we can ambush anybody coming or going. A surprising number of people do try to zip through, they acknowledge, mostly “confused” foreigners.

At the moment, there's a lull: no cars for several minutes. This indicates that the next vehicle will be an RV or a bus followed by many grumpy car drivers. I take this opportunity to ask about the perception among Park Service employees that concessions people are ruffians. Ranger Amy, who has worked in both capacities, says that while it isn't easy to get hired by the Park Service, it's “a piece of cake” to get hired by concessions. “Except that nowadays they're drug-testing,” she says, reconsidering, “so most people fail.”

“Yes,” Ranger Julie says, mulling the point, “the younger kids working concessions do seem more well scrubbed since they started the testing.”

A car pulls up to the hut's exit side, where I'm stationed. The driver is agitated. “Stop that guy in the RV behind me!” he shouts. “He's been weaving all over, running people off the road.”

I alert the rangers and halt the RV. The couple in the car behind it furiously beckon. “That guy should be arrested,” says an angry woman, pointing at the RV. “He smashed into an oncoming car and kept on going. Took the side mirror off!”

Ranger Julie tries to question the offending driver, but he is–yes!–an uncomprehending German. Luckily, I'm totally fluent in the language, so I translate. Ranger Julie asks me to tell him to pull over and wait for an enforcement ranger. “Pullen Sie over, mein Liebchen,” I sprechen to him. “Remainen Sie hier, jawohl!” He is quite put-out, pretending not to understand and yakking away angrily to his pals. When the ranger cop arrives, packing heat, one guy in the RV suddenly learns to speak English sehr gut. The veil lifts–oh, you mean that accident. As the dust swirls, I derive much pleasure from the swagger of authority and linger at the entry hut beyond my shift, sniffing and preening like Deputy Barney Fife. Is there perhaps a connection between my sudden surge in job satisfaction and the power that I am able to wield? Yes. I want more power, more, more! And The Hat.

Of course, I don't get either. As expected, the Park Service PR flacks never line me up for a live-ammo ranger strut-along. They do, however, offer me a chance to join walkie-talkie-toting Ranger Brent Taylor on his bike patrol of the campgrounds. On a beautiful summer afternoon, me in my almost-a-ranger garb, we pedal briskly among the various drive-up campsites. Although I'm psyched to break up knife fights and the like, Ranger Brent cools my jets by reciting the hit parade of typical infractions: improper food storage, loud music, and too many people at a campsite.

Sensing my disappointment, Ranger Brent shares a stemwinder from the bike-patrol files. “One time there were these foreigners,” he says, “and they had 12 people. We told them there was a limit of six per site. They said OK, drove away, then came back with just six. We looked on the roof of the vehicle, and under all the stuff piled up there we saw all these legs and arms sticking out.”

A riveting tale, but overall, if Bike Ranger were a TV show, it would be pretty humdrum. The campgrounds, though fully booked, are dead. We coast past golden-agers loafing under canopies in lawn chairs. They grin nervously as we wave, eyes darting about their campsites for some petty violation that might raise ranger dander. As I prepare to ride into the sunset, a beautiful young woman wiggles up in a microbikini, brandishing a Coors.

“Help, Mr. Ranger, help,” she exclaims with singsong irony. “I was rafting on the river, and I don't know how far I floated. I can't find my campground.” Ranger Brent's eyes widen, and he shoots me a look that says: “It's all right, Park Boy. I can handle this one. Good-bye. Good luck. Get lost.”

I leave him to it. He's got The Hat, and I haven't got a chance.

Thwarted in my efforts to walk like a lawman, I decide to wind up my stay with a final night on the other side of the thin gray line. So on Friday, armed with a six-pack of truth serum, I head for Camp Six, where the scariest campfire stories you'll hear are about the camp itself.

Morgan, the ice-cream man, lives here with a roommate in a tent cabin. There are hardly any trees in the camp, and even with the sun a distant, orangish blob, the tents are stifling. A few years ago, Morgan explains, a tree blew over during a storm at Camp Six and killed an employee. “So they cut down a bunch of trees, and now it's all hot and sunny with no shade.”

Morgan takes me on a tour, proudly extolling the Ping-Pong table, laundry, and easy access to the Merced River. Under questioning, however, his pride crumbles. He admits that this is considered the worst of all employee housing, and that almost everyone here is on the list to move elsewhere.

He introduces Tammy and Jason, a young married couple. They live in Tent 69 (“Easy to remember, ha ha!”), aka the Tent of Death. This is where a Camp Sixer hanged himself earlier this year. Things could be worse, though. A friend of Tammy's who's waiting to get hired is illegally camping down by the river. This morning, Tammy says, she woke up surrounded by coyotes. Needless to say, she's getting a little anxious about that job.

“When you first start working here,” says Morgan, “they usually start you out with just 15 hours a week. Food is so expensive, you can barely hang on.”

And with that, Park Boy's sympathies begin to shift back to the have-nots. Sure, judging by the not-so-heinous ranger behavior I witnessed, it's probably true that the kids working here whine too much, but at some point you have to ask, What about the little guy? The plight of the Yosemite peons calls to mind the hapless Okies in The Grapes of Wrath, laborers forced to spend their meager salaries on overpriced goods at the company store. And just as the Joads waited nervously for the union busters, Park Boys and Girls await the avenging rangers. Why, it's an outrage.

After sundown, as the alcohol emerges, no one person is assigned as a lookout, but all seem attuned to a special ranger-alert frequency. Someone offers me a chaw of tobacco, and I tear off a hunk and jab it inside my cheek. Bad idea. Shortly, as the nausea kicks in and I'm reeling about the camp, I stagger past youngsters engaged in pathetic flirtations, mostly involving smutty double entendres. The stage is set for a ranger raid: booze, loud music, wannabe fornicators groping wildly, a green-faced Park Boy reeling and moaning. So where's John Law?

Just then…hold on! A jeep is swerving noisily into camp. Is it time to face the cold brutality about which I have only quakingly dreamt? Nah. It's just some acned bacchanalians on a beer run. With an agonized groan, I stagger miserably into the night…

Later, his stomach still in turmoil from tobacco juice, Park Boy has the dream again, but with a twist. After manfully wrestling baby-faced Tina from the ranger's grip, he hot-wires a truck and makes a break for the Yosemite boundary. Pursued by a host of cackling demons–foaming rangers, demanding tourists, and a purposeful German man with a bad leg–Park Boy almost makes it, but he's thwarted at the gate by a circling blockade of eerie, driverless RVs. Murmuring ominously, a tightening ring of rangers unsheath their batons, and one grinning fiend closes in to administer the coup de grâce. As wood splinters on his skull, Park Boy catches a final glimpse of his attacker's face. And the face is…his own!

Park Boy groans happily and smiles contentedly in his sleep. Tonight, Morpheus's embrace will be sweet indeed. For he is finally wearing The Hat.

Jack Barth, author of American Quest and Roadside Elvis, is currently at work on Eastern Europe Au-Go-Go.

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