Stair chronicles: In which things don't go well at the Bunker Hill Monument and attempts are made to deceive

Friday 2/6/26

On Wednesday, I walked to Charlestown, hoping that the Bunker Hill Monument would be open for the first time since the snow storm from a week and a half before. The weather had warmed up, too, with the temperature being thirty degrees. There was little wind, the sky mostly blue.

I had walked to Charlestown four or five times since the storm, thinking I might be able to run my stairs there. On each of those visits, there were these two little drifts of snow--the exact same drifts of snow, untouched; one was in front of the door that led from what is called the lodge--a kind of mini-museum that one passes through if one is to enter the Monument--and the other was in front of the door of the Monument itself.

The latter was about a shovelful's worth of snow; the former, let us say two. Light, wispy snow that had blown there and remained. Clearly no one had opened either of these two doors since the storm. The small snow mounds were exactly the same each time I was there.

I tried to think optimistically on Wednesday, the first day of the week that the Monument is normally open. I was falling off the pace. I had been on pace to run 1000 circuits of Monument stairs in ten months--that's 600,000 stairs--and then with the closures and some winter lethargy on my part I was really starting to dip such that I remained barely on pace for 1000 circuits in a year, which is the plan each year.

These stairs are important to me beyond the physical, with things like publishing and the borderline unendurable quality of my life. I figured maybe a bit of positive thinking would help and then, voila, I'd find the Monument back open for stair-running business.

I got there at 12:40, which is twenty minutes before the Monument would normally open at this time of year, and there were no signs of life beyond a mouse who was on the metal deck between lodge and Monument. An actual mouse, about an inch-and-half in length, at this spot in which I'd never seen a mouse before. There is no real cover up there for such a creature. It's a largely treeless hill, save around the fringe.

This mouse had clearly had the run of the place and been enjoying the peace and solitude. It looked up at me with an expression of, "What the hell are you doing here?" I should probably take this as a sign to get back into "Love, Your Mouse," and get it finally finished for good.

No one had been there. The little snow drifts remained in place. I was annoyed. I started walking back down the hill, another day wasted on the stair front, when I decided to see if the main museum across the street was open. It was.

In I go, and there's no one there. It's just me. This same thing happened the last time I was in there. The museum is small. You go up some stairs to what is considered the first floor. There's a desk where a ranger should be. To the right was a gift shop, but everything has been removed. Says something about our government right now. Even the state of this place. Doesn't look like a serious operation, with part of it resembling a construction site with no construction being done. That area is cordoned off, and there is a bucket. To the left are some displays. There are more on a second level, and that's it.

I go up to said second level. No one there. I'm in this museum by myself for five minutes, same as the last time. Finally, a ranger comes up from downstairs. This isn't one of the rangers I'm friendly with. I don't think this guy likes me at all. He's rude.

A few weeks ago, I finished running my circuits in the Monument and discovered that the sweatshirt and fleece I had left on the fence outside weren't there any longer. This was the ranger who was in the lodge at the time. I asked him about my sweatshirt and fleece, and he said he didn't know, he just got there, with a tone clearly indicating that as far as he was concerned that was the end of it. I had to ask him to check the closet that wasn't ten feet from where he was, where, lo, my clothing had been placed by a kinder ranger, as had happened once before when it was snowing.

He has this attitude of contempt. I encounter that for so many reasons. Obviously with publishing people because of what I am and they are not/what I can do and which they can't. I encounter it with beefy white women in their thirties and forties in the Monument on account of the whole fit-white-male-minding-his-business-and-being-dedicated thing as I pay them no mind. And so forth.

I politely, in a friendly voice, ask this ranger if he has a sense, if he had to ballpark it, when the Monument might open again. He had this surly tone, this put upon, put out tone, like I had woken him at two in the morning and told him to get outside and start shoveling on a day he was planning to sleep in. Pissy, like a petulant teenager.

He tells me he has no idea, that the Monument is closed because of all the snow and ice inside which is checked daily.

I leave. I walk for about five minutes back towards Boston, before I turn around, because this guy has obviously lied to me. No one had been inside that Monument. Again I enter the museum. No other visitors, just me and him, nothing for him to do work-wise but sit there and get paid for it.

I start by saying, "Sorry to bother you again"--for I am always polite, and that's one reason why the publishing people who are lit up in these pages can't retaliate with examples of "Look at the horrible thing he said to me, that's why I acted towards him like I did and it's not because I'm an envious, evil bigot who resents that man for being on a totally different level than I am and the people just like me in our incestuous system"--and then say that the doors at the Monument haven't been opened since the storm.

You know what this guy does? He pulls out his phone and shows me a photo of one of those snow piles that now has a big boot print in where the middle was, saying someone went up there a half hour ago, which is also a lie. It was more like fifteen minutes or, to put it another way, basically right after I had left the museum the first time. I was the only reason a park ranger went up there at all in this entire time.

And here I have this lazy, snotty pudge ball lying to me. I hate laziness. I hate dishonesty. I think there's no way I hallucinated what I just saw back up at the Monument before paying my first visit to the museum, but I'd double-check anyway. Back up the hill I go, and what do you know, there's a ranger shoveling out the two little drifts. First time anyone has been there.

This is not one of the rangers I'm on a first name basis with, but he's friendly. I give him a "Hey, brother," and ask him when he thought, if he had to guess, when the Monument might be open, at which point he confirms to me that no one has been inside. Well, sort of let it slip. You know what I do? I offer to go up and assess. He says, sure, you can be the guinea pig. His actual term. Again, no one had been inside. Someone like the person in the museum just didn't want to work.

This isn't a hard job. It's a plum gig. You either sit at that desk in the museum, which rarely has more than five people in it, and that would usually be in summer, and often none, or you stand at the bottom of the Monument and talk to another ranger, or else field questions from visitors.

The rangers rarely go up the Monument. They don't even go up at the start of each day to clear out the trash that people drop. I'll see the same wrappers, the same tissues, for many days in a row. You'd think this would be the first thing you'd do each day, just about, as part of the job.

That's how lazy people are. This can be your job, and you still won't walk up 294 stairs as slowly as you might want to go. People prefer to not move a muscle. Many people, anyway. If they could live their lives without moving a muscle, they would.

I make my way to the top, and there were these little patches on occasion that had drifted in through a ventilation slit in the side (of which there are seven). This snow was so minimal that I could have used my hand to turn it into water. Make it go away, as it were. Which I thought about doing so that I could give a clean report, but didn't, because that wouldn't have been honest. There was a bit more at the top, near one of the benches. I took screenshots to show the guy below.

I get back down, I show him, and I say, "If you give me a shovel and a bucket, I can clear it out for you in ten minutes, and we're good to go." He said no, the policy was to pause at this point, and I asked if policy was to wait until it melted rather than remove this minimal amount of snow, and he said yes, to which I then added that the Monument would then perhaps remain closed until March, and he said yes and that he didn't even know if they had a bucket.

Come on, brother. Of course you have a bucket. We're really this allergic to doing the tiniest amount of work? This isn't some retail job that makes you question whether you want to keep living at the end of every other day (and throughout it). This seems like a pretty nice gig.

I left, and decided immediately--before I had come down the Connecticut gate stairs, which I have also run in the past when the Monument is closed--on a change of plan. Enough with this Monument business until spring because I had wasted enough time and energy as pertain it, and that I would commit to running stairs at City Hall in the cold/weather in the interim, because it is fitness that comes first as to why I run stairs at all, and I was allowing myself to be taken off task in that regard.

Then later I figured I would also call off my 1000 circuits in a year thing, and start over again, for the second time in not many months. I was up to whatever I was up to--like 280 circuits, I believe--when the Monument shut down for a month-and-a-half in the fall, and then was up to 232 since November 15, but this is no way to do this.

I will go back to zero. That's fine. I can handle it. I will simply challenge myself anew with the fresh start. Meanwhile, I will at least keep my fitness respectable, for when I return to running Monument circuits.

But here's something else: They know this Monument is going to be closed every day. The temperature hasn't been above freezing. They never inspected of the Monument in the first place. This is someone lying and trying to get paid by not doing any work, when there's little work to do for starters.

You know what time the Monument's website said that the Monument would be closed yesterday? 12:56. When they knew. That's what they've been doing. They wait until the last minute, when they know it's going to be closed the day before, because then it looks like they went in checked and that was what was happening all along, which, again, is a lie, because no one had been in that Monument since that snow storm until I went into it on Wednesday, when there was only a ranger there because the liar in the museum was doing some track covering.

People are so goddamn lazy. These people are apt to dislike those who aren't.

I should be quite clear that there are a half dozen rangers who are super kind and whom I appreciate a lot. One of them was telling me that he couldn't let me in early because someone else raised a fuss about it, and I would expect it was this guy from the museum.

That other time when I was in there recently, when no staff was present, who do you think it was that eventually popped up? Same guy. What's going on here? Just chilling in some break room and keeping and looking at the monitor screen every now and again to see if anyone has wandered in? Lying about checking the Monument so it stays closed and there's even less to potentially do?

I did end up walking six miles on Wednesday and doing my 100 push-ups. Yesterday I did 150 push-ups and ran 5000 stairs at City Hall. I can't say this went great. I've lost some fitness. I get it back fast, but that's where it stands. I ran the first 3000 two-at-a-time, but the next 2000 just one-at-a-time. That isn't how it should be. Or where I want to be. But one adjusts.