More than 60 years ago, when I was starting a newspaper career as a reporter in Fremont County, I skipped the company picnic. My employer was the Riverton Ranger, but I was living in Lander to cover news from the county seat. I seldom set foot in the home office in Riverton, and I only knew a couple of the other employees. So I decided to pass on the Ranger’s company picnic at Boysen Reservoir that summer when I had been on the job for only a couple of months. My bad.

The company picnic can be a relaxing diversion to the regular routine, one that brings families together for burgers, hot dogs and games and no office talk. The Powell Tribune recently enjoyed such a summer afternoon gathering in Washington Park under the welcome shade of the picnic shelter.

> That would be the picnic shelter with the picnic tables bolted and chained to the concrete pad. My eyes kept coming back to the heavy chains.

I asked Tim Miller, city parks superintendent, if the city bolted the picnic tables down to keep them from being stolen. He said that’s part of the reason, but more to keep the park setting intact.  “People drag them all over the park, and the parks department has to  spend time (and money) to retrieve them. We hated to do it, but they were scattered all over. We had to go find them and put them back.”

It’s not really vandalism, Miller continued, "but it costs everyone to put the park back together again.”

The proactive chaining of picnic tables in place is indeed a fact at parks all over town.

If the scattering of picnic tables is not vandalism, some treatment of our parks certainly crosses that line. The bathrooms have been a target.  In a previous year, night vandals lit the Washington Park bathrooms on fire, setting toilet paper in all the stalls ablaze. Another night, someone filled the toilets with gravel and sticks. That had to take time and effort. And why?

Though the parks department would  like to keep the bathrooms open to park users, experience has led to a system of parks department employees opening the bathrooms in the morning and police shutting them and locking them when they make their nightly rounds.

Here’s another instance of “Why?” At Westside Park, pranksters — and that’s probably a charitable term — once dragged the picnic tables from the shelter area over to the bathroom building so they could stand on them to get up on the roof of the building. They then lifted the picnic tables up on the roof of the building and left them there. 

Not again, as Westside Park picnic tables are among those now secured by chains.