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

set in on Wednesday, and Blue Canyon, in the mountains east of Auburn, got three and a half inches of rain. That evening a rosary was recited for Deputy Tim Ruggles, and the rain beat down on the roof of the funeral home where he was laid out, and on the mourner's umbrellas as they arrived. At ten the next morning Sheriff Nunes attended Ruggles's burial. Ruggles had been twenty-three. The grave was filled, and that afternoon the rain beat down upon the fresh mound of earth under a formless sheet of gray sky, and dusk fell early on Auburn. The town got an inch and a third that day.

By Thursday it was raining as if the world was ending. That day a request for a warrant for the arrest of John Carta made its way from the Auburn offices of Sheriff Nunes, across a wet lawn and a parking lot to the offices of District Attorney Jack Shelley, a big, red-faced man in suspenders. By this time the clay soils of the hills around the American River were saturated and every drop was running off into the river. At two-thirty that afternoon enough water was going down the North Fork alone to fill a container the size of a football field with six feet of water in less than a minute. By Friday that figure doubled; by Saturday it tripled.

By Sunday, aircraft over the Pacific Ocean were reporting jet-stream winds of 210 miles per hour at thirty-five thousand feet, and airline passengers from Hawaii were arriving early at mainland airports. Satellite photos showed the normally spiral patterns of clouds coming in off the ocean straightening out into a sort of gun barrel. The gun was loaded with moisture and pointed right at the American River. That day Blue Canyon got over five inches of rain; on Monday it was eight and a half. Now enough water was going down the North Fork to fill that football-field-sized container with a foot of water in less than a second. By afternoon, every route over the Sierra Nevada was closed by weather; huge landslides covered all four lanes of Interstate 80, both lanes of State Route 50, and the main transcontinental railway tracks. For the next couple of days, the park rangers could do little but watch the water rise behind the cofferdam.

By the time of Tim Ruggles's burial, the tunnel around the foundations of the Auburn Dam had reached capacity. As the water backed up behind the cofferdam, the tunnel went under, and big slick logs began racing in crazy circles around an ugly suck hole in the brown water, like the kind that forms over a bathtub drain, but big enough to swallow a cement truck. By Saturday, February 15, one of the rangers recorded on his patrol log that the water behind the cofferdam had reached the Highway 49 Bridge and was rising toward the bridge deck. Just upstream in the Middle Fork canyon a saturated cliff face supporting the Old Foresthill Road gave way, and the road slid several hundred feet down the canyon wall into the river.

Over the weekend no one had emptied the rain gauge at the Forest Service ranger station in Foresthill. By Monday it registered eleven inches of rain. Before dawn that day the deck of the 49 Bridge went under, and at five-thirty that morning Virgil H. Morehouse of Minden, Nevada, became the last person to try—and the first to fail—to cross it.

With his three children in his two-year-old Buick sedan, Morehouse set out across the flooded bridge from the east side, but the vehicle soon stalled. He tried the doors, but the water pressure from outside would not allow him to open them. He tried to roll down the electric windows, but they weren't responding to their switches.

In a growing panic, Morehouse eventually managed to break a window and, towing his children, wallowed to safety along the flooded bridge deck to the Auburn side, where he was assisted ashore by highway patrol officers who had been closing the road. Within a few hours two of the rangers drove back down Highway 49 to find the bridges at the Confluence completely submerged. Morehouse's Buick was nowhere to be seen. When the waters receded on Tuesday, the car was found sitting right side up in the river bottom about 200 feet downstream of the 49 Bridge. Missing from it was Morehouse's Ruger Single-Six .357, a big hog-leg of a single-action cowboy gun that was by far the most popular handgun in the American River canyons at that time.

During the Gold Rush, makeshift towns had appeared along the gravel bars in the bottoms of the American River canyons, providing a range of services to the thousands of men who were excavating the riverbed for gold. By the 1860s most had been washed away at least once by floods, and eventually all were abandoned. The surviving towns of that era are generally located on higher ground, mostly along smaller tributaries. The town of Auburn is one of these. Now the county seat of Placer County, it was established as a mining camp in the spring of 1848 after the discovery of gold in Auburn Ravine Creek. But by 1986 the creek had been paved over to make room for parking, and it now passed ignobly beneath the center of Auburn's historic district in a storm drain.

As the storm gathered strength, the creek got too big for its conduit. A dozen amateur actors were rehearsing a melodrama at the Opera House Dinner Theater in Auburn's Old Town when the creek burst through the back of the building and the stage exploded into the seating area. From there the water picked up tables and chairs and carried them through the front of the building into the street. Outside, one of the chairs was later found to have been propelled with such force that its leg was embedded in the asphalt. Three actors tried to save the