Published: April 28, 2008 01:16 am            

Hanging up the badge

Mike Pike retires as a state game warden

After a quarter century of work in the field, Palestine resident Mike Pike has hung up his badge, trading law enforcement for retirement.

As a game warden for Texas Parks and Wildlife, work in the field was just that — outdoors, in fields, forest and on the water.

The chance to experience a different type of law prompted him to attend the rigorous seven-month-long game warden academy in Austin, after six years as a police officer in Mexia, he said.

“I had a good friend who was a game warden,” Pike said. “It was a different aspect of law enforcement, you know.”

When holidays drew boaters to the water, or hunters into the field, Pike went, too, watching for boaters who’d had too much to drink or hunters without licenses or tags.

“In hunting season, you’ve got the hunting part and you still spend a lot of time on the water because a lot of people are hunting on the rivers,” he said. “You’ve got the duck hunters on the lakes and in the last 15 years, it’s been really water-oriented. Game wardening has switched over from land to water, almost double the time you spend.”

As the number of people on Texas’ rivers and lakes has swelled, so has the need for game wardens to be there to promote water safety.

“Life jackets, boat registration — it’s checking the same things you would check if you were on the streets,” Pike said. “You find a lot of minor-in-possessions, drugs, boating while intoxicated, just like you do with driving while intoxicated on the streets.”

When patrolling on the water, he enjoyed being able to promote safety with children by rewarding them for following the rules.

“We give out little badges for the kids that are a small resemblance of our badges for wearing their life jackets and stuff like that, to get the kids in practice for doing that, you know, and the parents too, wearing life jackets,” Pike said.

The number of drownings which have occurred over the years on lakes such as Lake Palestine and Cedar Creek Reservoir, underscore the importance of water safety, he said.

“It doesn’t hurt anybody (to wear a life jacket),” Pike said. “We’re in (boating) season now. It’s not fun to drag for the people and the kids.”

On land, hunting seasons brought visits to deer camps to check with hunters for licenses and appropriate tags.

“In general over the years it really hasn’t been bad,” he said. “The people are pretty responsive to you coming into their camps, checking the licenses and the game that they’d killed. You’ve got your bad apples but you find those in any aspect of law enforcement. Generally, people were pretty nice.”

While plenty of people still hunt, the overall numbers have declined as access to land open for hunting has shrunk and the cost has gone up.

“I think it’s really slowed down some. It’s still a big sport,” he said. “But the price of hunting, the price of leases — I really think it’s in a decline.”

Had he remained in traditional law enforcement, he would have missed out on the contact with the land owners.

“You have the contact with the land owners, who actually supply the game,” Pike said. “The game is on their property and even though it’s a state resource, they take pretty good care of it. Now it’s such a money-oriented sport, a lot of it’s gotten away from the average guy going out hunting.”

In addition to his usual duties in the field, Pike also had to be ready to respond to natural disasters around the state — tornadoes, hurricanes and floods — when their boats and off-road equipment was needed to access damaged areas, or to areas in need of extra law enforcement.

“I’ve worked on the border, the Gulf Coast, the Panhandle,” he said. “You go to the Gulf Coast and work shrimp boats, you go to the border and work security, you go to the hurricane relief-type things in Jasper and Newton and down in through there. Years ago, we used to go down in the Rio Grande Valley and work with the whitewing hunters.

“Tornadoes come in and tear things up, hurricanes, floods — you’re gone. We have the equipment, we got the boats, the four-wheel drives to get into these places that a lot of law enforcement agencies don’t have and so they send for us.”

Now that he’s retired, trips in the field happen on his Goldwing touring motorcycle or his personal pickup truck, not the state’s dark green truck. Pike and his wife, Denise, a registered nurse for Dr. Robert Blackwell, have driven the motorcycle on previous vacations in the Colorado Rockies, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone National Park and the South Dakota Black Hills, and plan to do more of the same.

There’s also more time to be grandpa to daughter Michelle and husband Jacob Davis’ two children.

“It’s been fun,” Pike said. “The whole career’s been fun. I wouldn’t change anything. It’s an interesting career and you know, there’s not many of us. You cover a lot of area when you work. It’s been a good career and it’s been nice to my family.”

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Beth Foley may be contacted via e-mail at bfoley@palestineherald.com

        

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