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

We idled slowly through the campground. Where the road dead-ended I saw two campsites below us, in a dusty basin separated from the river by a windrow of boulders cast up on the riverbank by nineteenth-century miners. In one camp, I saw people.

"Those are the Hallecks, a whole family of them," O'Leary said with no apparent pleasure.

A faded wall tent slumped at one end of the site. From it, a short man, his grubby shirt unbuttoned and his pale belly overhanging the waistline of his grimy cutoffs, made his way toward a short woman in a faded, multicolored muumuu. Her long hair hung forward in greasy strands as she bent over a frying pan on a camp stove. The ground was littered with beer cans. The man was yelling something I couldn't make out, and the woman yelled back, waving a corpulent arm. Continuing toward her, the man threaded his way through four dirty-faced children playing on the ground. They seemed oblivious to the domestic strife. I was reminded—and instantly I was ashamed, for these were people, I thought—of looking down into one of those pits at the zoo, where some poor creatures pace out their irritable lives in whatever is the opposite of a state of nature. This was not nature, I thought. This was not a park. My career had hit bottom.

O'Leary got out with his clipboard and bank bag and walked down a little footpath from the road to the campsite. I stood above at the edge of the embankment to watch. Below me, O'Leary greeted the inhabitants with genuine politeness. He waited patiently while they dug around in their filthy duffels and disheveled tent for the camping fees. When they finally pieced together enough change and counted it into his hands, he produced a little receipt, which he filled out and handed to the man. Then he made his way back up the path. When he arrived at the top, he was wiping his hands on his green jeans.

"Even the money was dirty," he said quietly, opening the door of the Jimmy.

We circulated back through the campground one more time, trying to find someone else to shake down. At one site O'Leary left a warning note for nonpayment. At another, a wisp of smoke rose from a scorched milk carton and some potato peelings sizzling on the coals of an abandoned campfire. A pump from a gold dredge lay in pieces next to the fire ring on a grimy tarpaulin.

"Where are they? Mining?" I asked O'Leary. I retrieved my canteen from the Jimmy and poured water on the hot ashes, stirring them with a stick. The fire sputtered and steamed.

"Cheese Day," O'Leary replied, squinting at me through the acrid smoke. He turned to walk back to the truck.

"Cheese Day? What's that?" I asked, following him. We got in.

"That's where they give out government food up in Colfax and Auburn. You know, Department of Agriculture surplus commodities for indigents and welfare miners—generic cheese, dried milk, generic macaroni, sacks of beans."

"Oh?"

"So if you want to collect fees, don't bother coming here on the morning of the first Thursday of the month," he said, putting the Jimmy in drive. We left the canyon, headed back to our office.

Back in the ranger station's kitchen, O'Leary chewed a takeout taco he had picked up on our way back through Auburn and absorbed himself in a paperback Louis L'Amour cowboy novel. I studied him in silence, munching sandwiches I had brought from home. When he finished, he wiped his beard with a paper napkin, put the book away in one of the kitchen cabinets, and walked outside into the covered alleyway between the kitchen and what had been a walk-in cooler, now used for storage. I heard the raspy click of his cigarette lighter. When he finished his cigarette, we got back into the Jimmy and headed for Cherokee Bar.

Cherokee Bar was on the south side of the Middle Fork, about twelve miles upstream of the dam site and four hundred feet beneath the dam's high-water line. It took about forty minutes to drive there from our office. Given a vehicle with decent ground clearance and traction, you could have reached Cherokee Bar from the gilt-domed state capitol in Sacramento in an hour and a half. But somewhere in between, the normative influence of the capitol and its laws was exhausted. In those days the situation at Cherokee Bar resembled those peculiar 1970s Westerns in which the bad guys all looked like armed rock-and-roll musicians.

We crossed the North Fork canyon into El Dorado County, headed east toward Georgetown, and then turned off the main road onto a smaller one, up a gully into the pines. Three and a half miles out the pavement expired. We lurched into a muddy wash surrounded by a thicket of blackberries and Scotch broom and then emerged onto the canyon rim. A meek little state park boundary sign stood to the left of the road, thoroughly ventilated with bullet holes. A thousand feet below, the rapids of the lower Middle Fork glittered in the afternoon sun. From there the road got better, but the improvement was temporary, and three miles farther we rattled down a last precipitous switchback onto Cherokee Bar.

Cherokee was a large sandbar on the inside of a slow bend in the Middle Fork. In front of us the road petered out into multiple sets of vehicle tracks across an expanse of beach, shimmering with heat. In the distance along the water's edge, thickets of willow and a few cottonwoods and alders formed oases of shade. The only other refuge from the withering sunlight was a narrow strip of overhanging live oaks along the canyon wall. In their shade, to our right, stood an outhouse coated with that chocolate-brown paint park maintenance workers use on everything. The outhouse was riddled with bullet holes. On its far side was a campsite: a couple of old pickup trucks parked next to some