Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (romantic books to read .TXT) 📗

than that. Most of the time during construction the entire river would flow through the tunnel, but the Bureau knew that every few winters the river's flow would exceed the tunnel's capacity and the water would back up behind the cofferdam and flood the bridge over which ran the only all-weather road to the town of Foresthill, upstream. When the big dam was finished it would inundate the old bridge anyway, so by the fall of 1973 the Bureau finished a new Foresthill Bridge, which soared across the North Fork canyon 730 feet above the river.

With these preliminaries completed by 1975, the Bureau turned its attention to constructing the Auburn Dam itself. But that year the dam ran into major technical problems—these I will go into later—and by February 1986 the cofferdam and diversion tunnel still stood guard over the dam's unfinished foundations, and no water lapped at the tops of the two four-hundred-foot pillars supporting New Foresthill Bridge.

The civil engineers who had studied floods on the American and Sacramento Rivers for over a hundred years before I got there kept beautiful records. I pored over some of them when I began writing this book—nineteenth-century soundings of river bottoms dangerously choked with mining debris from the mountains, meticulous notes on the flood of 1896 made in an engineer's even hand on college-ruled paper, the ribbon-textured typescript of a report on the Central Valley flood of 1907. These and many other records I found neatly stored in document files in agency libraries. There was an awareness of posterity in the care with which they had been conserved.

In contrast, the records of our lives as rangers under the waterline of the Auburn Dam were less carefully kept. They consisted of criminal investigations, accident and coroner's reports, daily patrol logs, correspondence, bookkeeping, attendance reports, dispatch logs, crime scene photographs, tape recordings of interviews with suspects, and piles of manila envelopes and plastic bags containing criminal evidence. When I began going through them in 2001, they were archived in a decaying midden of sagging cardboard boxes, covered with dust and mouse droppings and stacked haphazardly in an unheated warehouse at our ranger station, surrounded by piles of cast-off things for which there could be no conceivable use: bits of long-gone patrol trucks, shotgun racks, pieces of light bars, dial telephones, ancient sirens in tangles of wire. Inside the boxes were more droppings and mouse nests made of our shredded reports. Bundles of each ranger's citations by year scattered like dry leaves when I picked them up; the rubber bands holding them together had disintegrated to sticky crumbs.

Perhaps by the time you read this, they will have been discarded. More likely, they will be decaying in the same location, because a decision to throw them out would be indicative of a culture of housekeeping we never had. Instead, we scattered our effects—papers, bits of trucks, old holsters and radio batteries, locks without keys—in piles behind us in the cobwebby sheds and offices of our compound, living like squatters or transients, day by day, month to month, year to year. I don't suppose it ever occurred to us that later someone would be interested in the grand social science experiment in which we had all participated without knowing it, which answered the question: How do people behave in a condemned landscape?

The boxes from 1986 contained my work, but not until May. However, by virtue of the other rangers' patrol logs and reports, accounts of witnesses, newspaper reports, video taken by television stations, weather maps, river flow records, and my knowledge of the habitual ways in which the rangers rattled in and out of the American River canyons, I am able to reconstruct what happened during the floods of 1986.

In the first days of February it had been raining and snowing hard in the Sierra. On Sunday, February 2, a bolt of lightning hit a tree on the north end of Auburn and from there passed through two houses. In one, it blew off a wall a patch of Sheetrock the size of a door, which flew across the room and struck a thirteen-year-old girl in the face. She was not seriously injured.

On Monday, February 4, a cell of high pressure off the coast provided a break in the weather. Two of the rangers who later became my partners were dispatched into the canyon under the Foresthill Bridge after a report that someone had either committed suicide or jumped from the bridge with a parachute. On arrival, they found nothing. At about nine the next morning one of them set fire to a pile of tree limbs downhill from our office and stood contentedly in the radiant heat, shovel in hand, as he did with each winter's burn pile. That evening, a twenty-three-year-old woman by the name of Karla Jean Eichelberger drove her car to the east side of the Foresthill Bridge. Evidently her fear of heights got the better of her, because just before seven o'clock that evening she shot herself in the head with a .38 caliber revolver. She was found later that night.

On Saturday, February 8, as was their routine on winter weekend mornings, the rangers gathered at the top of the dirt road down to Mammoth Bar. Mammoth was a quarter-mile-long beach on the Middle Fork, about a mile upstream from the Confluence. In the laissez-faire regime of the Bureau prior to the rangers' arrival in 1977, it had become popular with off-road motorcyclists, and the canyon wall above it was now covered with the red gouges of hill climbs, which bled muddy water into the river whenever it rained hard. Under the relentless logic of "It'll all be underwater sometime soon anyway," State Parks could not summon the political will to close it. In fact, over the following years it was expanded. Helpless to defend their ground against this onslaught of off-road vehicles, the rangers exacted increments of revenge in a multitude of small cuts, setting