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

up roadblocks where they stopped every pickup truck-load of all-terrain vehicles coming into the area and writing whole books of tickets for offenses such as expired registration and no spark-arresting muffler.

This particular morning, two sheriff's cars came driving down the road. The deputies were looking for three all-terrain vehicles that had just been stolen in town. The rangers volunteered to check the canyon bottom. As so often happened, while looking for one thing, they found another. Down at the river they heard yells for help, and looking across the water, they saw a stranded climber hanging from a cliff on the other side. Dave Finch and his partner drove to the bridge downstream, crossed the river, and made their way up to rescue the stranded man. Later that night one of the sheriff's deputies, a young reserve by the name of Tim Ruggles, was killed when a patrol car driven by his partner skidded off the road and hit an oak tree as they were responding to back up another unit on a theft call.

The next morning the rangers were back at Mammoth Bar, running off-road vehicle license checks on the radio and eating doughnuts and cinnamon twists from Hilda's Pastries in Auburn off napkins on the hoods of their trucks. And again the comfort of their routine was disrupted, when a man named John Carta and several associates towed a trailer onto the middle of the Foresthill Bridge. On the trailer were a specially constructed ramp and a motorcycle. Carta's accomplices set up flares to stop traffic, deployed the ramp, the motorcycle, and two men with video cameras, and situated a getaway car at a trailhead in the canyon bottom. Carta donned a parachute, snugged the harness, mounted the motorcycle, and accelerated up the ramp and over the bridge railing into thin air.

Airborne, Carta pushed away from the motorcycle and pulled the ripcord. His main canopy opened with a crack and a jerk, and he drifted sideways, passing over the live oaks and gray pines as the motorcycle tumbled away from him. It landed on the canyon bottom with a distant metallic crash, a tinkle of flying parts, and a spray of oil and gasoline. The sound drifted up to Carta, mixed with the whisper of the river, as he rode his canopy and a happy wave of adrenaline, tugging the control lines toward a safe landing on the slope below him.

Someone reported the jump to the Sheriff's Department, the sheriff's dispatcher called State Parks, and two rangers were rolled from Mammoth Bar. Arriving at the big bridge at twenty minutes before noon, one of them recorded the identification numbers from the twisted wreck of the 1983 Yamaha at the bottom of the canyon. The other checked the surrounding area for clues and soon found the trailer and its ramp stashed nearby on Lake Clementine Road. The trailer was registered to Carta. Within a few hours one of the cameramen sold his tape to a television station, and there was no doubt who the daredevil was.

***

That Monday, on the sixteenth floor of the Resources Building, a serpentinite-green monolith in Sacramento housing the headquarters of the State Department of Water Resources, a meteorologist by the name of Bill Mork pulled the morning weather charts off the old wet-process plotter and with growing concern showed them to a fellow forecaster, Curt Schmutte.

There was something jarringly familiar to both men about the pattern, and Schmutte went looking for the old weather maps from the Christmas storm of 1964—a storm so warm it rained at ten thousand feet above sea level in the Sierra, causing flooding that killed twenty-four people—and the Christmas storm of 1955, which flooded a hundred thousand acres and killed sixty-four. When Schmutte returned, the two men spread the old weather maps out next to the new ones, and after they finished looking at them, Mork picked up the phone and called the National Weather Service's lead forecaster in Redwood City. Comparing notes, the state and federal men agreed: There was something to worry about.

By Tuesday there were high, thin clouds over the American River canyons. The upper-level charts from the National Weather Service showed that a mass of high pressure that had been blocking storms from entering California since February 5 had split into two pieces. A strong westerly flow of warm, moist air off the tropical Pacific had broken through the high in two branches. One branch took a meandering route around the northern remnant of the blocking high through the Gulf of Alaska, where it was chilled, and then flowed south again. The southern branch was charging east toward California through the breech between the two masses of high pressure. Colliding, the two branches formed a deadly pattern, because warm, moist air, when suddenly cooled, can no longer hold its moisture and drops it quickly as rain. The storm would hit the ramp of the Sierra Nevada at an almost perfect right angle, lifting it more quickly than if the storm had struck the mountains at an oblique. The quick push upward into colder regions of the higher atmosphere would increase the storm's violence, as moisture was suddenly wrung out of it over the mountains.

That morning the two rangers who'd written up Carta's jump hiked back up under the Foresthill Bridge to check on his smashed motorcycle. The county sheriff had taken an interest in Carta and planned to remove the motorcycle as evidence. But the rangers found it gone, and when he learned of this later in the day, the sheriff was angry. There had now been at least eleven suicides from the bridge, he told a reporter from the Auburn Journal, and all sorts of people were making a hobby out of leaping from it on hang gliders and parachutes. He had no intention of allowing the bridge to become a destination for every crazy person who wished to risk his life, or end it. But, of course, this had already happened.

The storm