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We ride along with West Virginia’s Natural Resources Police.
The weather forecast calls for thunderstorms in the afternoon, but this morning it’s just sunny and windy. The breeze pushes the water on the Kanawha River into hundreds of little waves, each peak reflecting the late morning sun. It’s muggy, and officers Bryan Hill and Chuck Holloran are wearing their dress uniforms, so they’re even hotter than they would be on a normal day, when they haven’t been charged with showing a reporter and photographer around. On any other day they could wear their state-issued pants, polo shirts, and baseball caps instead of these thick brown uniforms that have an inexplicable smell when wet. Their supervisor, Colonel Jerry Jenkins, says it has something to do with the dry-cleaning chemicals used on the uniforms. But the two aren’t fazed by the heat, the bucolic scenery around them, or even by those heavy uniforms. To them this is just another day on the job.
Hill and Holloran are officers with the Natural Resources Police and the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources (DNR)—more commonly known as conservation officers or game and fish wardens. More than 120 officers are scattered across the state, charged with enforcing laws and regulations related to West Virginia’s natural resources. It’s possible that, unless you spend a lot of time in woods or on water, you don’t even know about the officers, but they have a staggeringly long and diverse list of responsibilities. They patrol hunting and fishing areas, check game, and investigate accidents, pollution complaints, and reports of forest fires. They assist with stocking programs, fish and game surveys, and hunting and water safety classes.
Today Hill and Holloran are on the river for basic patrol duty, checking for fishing licenses, scanning for boaters who might be inebriated or in need of assistance, and generally keeping an eye on things. They’ve also been given another, grimmer task: A swimmer drowned two days earlier, a few miles upstream from the state capitol, and so far search crews have been unable to recover the body. It’s been raining all week and the water is murky, so it doesn’t seem promising, but Holloran and Hill are hoping to find him. “This county has miles and miles of navigable water, and most days we’re the only law enforcement out here,” Hill says.
We get in the DNR boat in Kanawha County and start heading upstream toward downtown Charleston. It’s a Tuesday morning so it’s slow on the water, and we travel quickly at first. “If this were a Friday night there’d be boats everywhere,” Holloran says. “We could spend the whole night checking boats and not get to half of them.”
As we get closer to town, Hill spots a bass boat near the shore. Holloran steers the boat that way and eases up next to it, and Hill steps out toward the front to address its three passengers. His tone is friendly. “Doing any good?” he asks them. They aren’t. They haven’t caught anything yet. “Got your license handy?” One by one they pull out their fishing licenses and then show Hill their fire extinguisher—according to boating laws every vessel needs one—and lifejackets—every person on board needs one. They talk a little bit about the weather, and one of the men asks Hill for intel on fishing conditions elsewhere on the river—are they the only people who aren’t catching anything? “You’re the only people we’ve see out here,” he says, laughing. The whole thing is polite and cordial, just like, I’m told, most encounters with natural resources officers are—a big part of their job involves educating the community about hunting and fishing regulations, so they make it a point to be friendly during every encounter.
West Virginia has had game wardens since 1897 when Governor William McCorkle realized the state needed someone to enforce its first game law, which had been created a decade earlier and made it illegal to kill game between February 14 and September 15 and to kill certain types of birds no matter the time of year. Laws requiring hunting and fishing licenses soon followed, as well as laws making it illegal to kill or wound deer between January and September or to kill a tame deer that wore a collar or bell around its neck. That last law has since been revised—it’s now illegal to keep a deer as a pet here. At first there was just one conservation officer to cover the entire state, but one became many as West Virginians increasingly recognized the need to protect the state’s abundant natural resources. “We’re the officers off the pavement,” Jenkins says.
You can think of natural resources officers as state troopers with an extra layer of expertise. Technically, they’re vested with full police powers. They can and do enforce all the same laws that police do, plus an extra set of laws and regulations that relate to nature. Often, especially in rural counties that have small police forces, they take on an even wider array of responsibility, stepping in to assist other law enforcement officers. They have to know how to do a lot. “There’s a rumor that we’re the only ones who can arrest the president,” Hill says, laughing. Holloran chimes in: “I don’t think that’s true,” he says. “But I like the sound of it.”
Holloran has been a natural resources officer for two years and worked as a city police officer for 14 years before that. He made the switch when the stress of his last police job started to get to him—he loves law enforcement but couldn’t spend many more years seeing the sort of terrible things cops see. “Now it’s almost like I’m working for the animals,” he says. Hill has been a natural resources officer in West Virginia for a little over a year now but worked for the DNR in Kentucky for several years before that. He got a criminal justice degree in college thinking he’d go on to law school, but when the time came he realized just how little he wanted to be an attorney. “I’ve always hunted and fished and been outside a lot,” he says, so he applied to the DNR. “By the time I got the job, I knew there was nothing else I wanted to do.”
At this point, Hill and Holloran seem almost nervous that they’re boring me. They’re quick to say that a muggy Tuesday with a forecast of rain is an especially quiet day on the water—if this were a sunny Saturday the river would be full of people and much more excitement. It turns out that Hill and Holloran are bad at predicting which days are the most action packed.
After stopping the unlucky fishermen, we’re traveling farther upriver. Hill scans the shore with binoculars and sees a young man with a fishing pole take off running at the sight of the DNR boat. He sounds almost surprised when he tells Holloran what happened, but neither of them hesitates. Holloran quickly steers the boat to shore. Hill hops off and scrambles up the incline to the road in pursuit. “The nice thing about Bryan is that he runs marathons,” Holloran says. “He’ll at least be able to outrun him.” A few minutes later Hill returns with the perpetrator, a contrite young man who was fishing without a license and wanted to avoid a fine. Hill writes him a ticket, and as we leave the shore the officers are in buoyant spirits from the thrill of the chase.
The adrenaline high only lasts for a quarter mile or so, though, as the boat drives closer to the part of the river where the drowning was reported. Holloran and Hill start scanning the river more intently, and Holloran pulls out a pair of binoculars. There’s less talking now. The officers are keenly focused on the task at hand, and if they’re nervous they don’t show it—unlike their reporter tagalong. Watching them now feels a little like watching a boxer shove on his gloves or a jockey hop onto his horse—they’re in their element, poised and ready to fulfill their purpose. We’ve been talking all day about why they do this job, why it matters, why they care—but now I’m watching them do something that explains all of that. “I hope we can do this for his family,” Holloran says. “I’d like to help give them some sort of closure.”
After another few moments of this Holloran thinks he sees something—it turns out to be the drowning victim’s body. I was so shocked that for 15 minutes I didn’t take notes and instead sat dumbly in the corner of the boat with my notebook in my lap. I’d known all morning we were out there to look for a drowning victim, of course, but it took me several long minutes to connect that abstract idea with the reality of seeing a body in front of me.
Hill and Holloran didn’t have that luxury. They had work to do: inspect the scene, call Metro 911 to report the finding and request assistance, transport the body back to shore, discuss police reports and jurisdiction, and eventually pass the case to the county sheriff’s office. By the time the officers get the boat back to dock, it’s mid afternoon. “That’s how it goes,” Hill says. “One minute you’ll just be patrolling, and the next minute you get a call and you have to jump into action.”
A day later I read a local newspaper’s story about the recovery. The officer’s role in the story had been relegated to one quick line that didn’t even name them as law enforcement officers—it just stated, “some Division of Natural Resources workers found his body.” I shouldn’t have been surprised. I’d read perfunctory lines like that in newspaper stories all the time and have probably even written some myself. But behind that quick line in a news article is the story of two men out on the water all day doing good work and dealing with life and death.
This story was originally published in the September 2015 issue of Wonderful West Virginia magazine. To subscribe, visit wonderfulwv.com.
Written by Shay Maunz
Photographed by Ron Gaskins
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