‘River Boots’
Retired Pa. fish warden spins yarns in book
In the dark of night at the edge of an isolated waterway, a young adult illegally spotlighted frogs, taking potshots at them with a rifle. Robert Lynn Steiner, a waterways conservation officer with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, quietly approached in the darkness. When another shot cracked, Steiner realized he had inadvertently stepped between the shooter and a big bullfrog.
“I felt threatened, but it was by my own stupidity,” he said. “Another time, I took a knife off a guy who was shooting deer at night. It wasn’t dead yet, and he was going to cut its throat. I don’t think he saw me coming and the knife came up awfully close to me.”
Brushes with death were rare during his 27-year career with the agency. Before retiring in 1999, his jobs as a fish culturist, law enforcement officer and assistant district supervisor were more often workaday routine punctuated by moments of bizarre comic relief in wide open spaces.
“There is no job like it in the world,” he writes in a new book, “River Boots: A Fish Warden’s Tales of Pennsylvania Fish and Game Law Enforcement” (independently published, $14.95), a 253-page memoir that was “35 years in the making” and released in February.
Despite its subtitle, there are no charts, graphs or statistics from the semi-autonomous commission’s 156-year history. “River Boots” reads like a night of slightly misremembered stories shared by outdoorsmen over beers and a campfire. Most of the occupational hazards Steiner faced were caused by misinformed bureaucrats, miscreant scofflaws or his own miscalculations, he said. All are explained over a wilderness backdrop in the understated, well-timed, wisecracking parlance of the best hunting and fishing essays.
“I admit in the beginning of the book that it’s a collection of recollections from the 30year career of a guy who can’t remember what he had for breakfast today,” said the author. “It’s comic relief to get a chuckle from people who can appreciate the lighter side of getting outside and loving every minute of it.”
He grew up in Jeannette, a miniature city in Westmoreland County within an easy drive of Loyalhanna Creek and hundreds of acres of unposted farms and woodlands. Hunting and fishing after school became a way of life. Hearing a game warden’s presentation at a local sportsmen’s club set the hook on a future career, and while in sixth grade he sent a letter to the fish commission’s Somerset office asking what it takes to become a warden. He got an answer: a laundry list of requirements that he took seriously.
After discharge from a recommended stint in the military and reaching the minimum age of employment, he was hired at the commission’s Erie County fish hatchery. After two years and passing the waterways patrolman test, he was promoted to the job of his boyhood dreams.
In 1993, Steiner was selected the Fish and Boat Commission’s Officer of the Year. He sharpened his outdoors writing chops and photo skills through 50 years of newspaper columns and magazine articles.
Western Pennsylvania anglers and hunters who read “River Boots” will recognize familiar places like Pymatuning Reservoir, Two Mile Run County Park, Sugar Creek and Sandy Creek, where Steiner patrolled as a warden or managed law enforcement officers under his command. And for those who recall his signature at the bottom of their citations, he hopes there are no hard feelings.
“I think most of the people I wrote up realized I was just doing my job,” he said. “Later as a supervisor, I had to talk to some [officers] who maybe were a little too ...” he hesitated, “overwrought too often, or build some confidence in a few who were too lenient. In the book, I wanted to make it entertaining where you could laugh with the wardens and laugh at the wardens.”
Few readers are likely to laugh about the time Steiner fell through the ice on Oil Creek and nearly died. But it’s easy to crack a smile when he unwinds yarns about the leaky river boots issued to waterways patrolmen, busting a marijuana party for littering, extracting a live beaver from the Kahle Lake outflow, mistaking a burned stump for a black bear and patiently listening to scores of bad excuses from conservation outlaws.
“River Boots” is available in print at Amazon.com and digitally via Kindle eBooks.