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

Bureau reservoirs were usually handed over to federal or state park agencies to operate as recreational lakes upon their completion, and at Auburn the agency chosen for that job in a decade-old contract had been California State Parks. So in 1976 the Bureau renegotiated the contract with the state to bring rangers in earlier. Between 1977 and 1982 a park superintendent, a chief ranger, two supervising rangers, seven police-trained patrol rangers, a clerk dispatcher, a couple of maintenance men, and several seasonal helpers were sent into these canyons. To bring the area under their authority, in 1979 the place was designated a State Recreation Area.

What ensued was undoubtedly one of the strangest stories in the history of the century-old park movement. The laws and authorities given to state park rangers in California had been crafted to preserve cherished landscapes in perpetuity, but they now applied to a pair of river canyons the government intended to put underwater. Not surprisingly, the rangers found it difficult to convince violators, the judges who heard their criminal cases, indeed even their own upper management, why preservationist anti-mining laws should be enforced there. To complete the rangers misery, by the early 1980s, the new Reagan administration and Congress began drastic cuts to domestic spending. In 1982 the Bureau slashed the budget for Auburn State Recreation Area—federally funded by contract—and the superintendent, chief ranger, several rangers, and administrative staff were transferred out. At the same time the price of gold had really skyrocketed, peaking at $850 an ounce—twenty-five times what it had been when the dam was begun. The social and environmental effects of the resulting gold rush overwhelmed the remaining rangers, and in the winter of 1982–83, seeing no way to fulfill their legal obligations, they closed the river indefinitely to mining and camping.

The hue and cry that followed was deafening. State Parks Sacramento headquarters was soon deluged with petitions carrying over three thousand miners signatures, asking for a reversal. At a hearing before the State Park Commission in 1983, miners aired their grievances. Among them was the assertion that State Parks, not gold dredgers, was responsible for polluting the American River—by failing to provide outhouses and forcing miners to use the river-banks for a latrine.

Whatever the merits of this and the miners other arguments, State Parks was not known for political heroism. The agency's director immediately rescinded the closure, proclaiming that the miners camps and dredges could remain on the river while under study—a study that is apparently unfinished over twenty years later, because results have never been presented. (Some of the dredges are still there.) By 1984 the only curb on mining was a rule that no one could camp more than thirty days at a stretch in any state park, which in practice made it hard to set up and run larger mining operations. Still, you had to find the miners' camps to enforce it. To further placate the miners, State Parks director appointed a sort of outhouse czar from headquarters, and under his direction Auburn State Recreation Area—which otherwise lacked the most rudimentary facilities—received a diaspora of privies. Some were installed in places so remote they had to be flown in by helicopter; unused, they were soon overgrown with wild grape and blackberry vines. Some were installed too close to the river and were carried away by floods; for several years the remains of one could be seen perched in a tree near Lake Clementine. Some were used for target practice. Others disappeared entirely, and no one knew exactly what had happened to them.

The canyon was a thousand feet deep, and so narrow at the bottom I felt as if I could reach across the river and touch the opposite wall. Thirty feet below us, the North Fork sluiced through its tight channel of water-polished blue-gray bedrock. The noonday sun seared through the breaks in the trees. Sweat trickled down the inside of my bulletproof vest and made a dark line down Bell's uniform shirt—he preferred to go without the insufferably hot body armor.

A mile up, our path degenerated into multiple trails meandering through a steep forest of live oak and buckeye. We forded another creek and eventually came to yet another fork in the trail. Cut branches had been piled on one side to discourage casual exploration. We pushed them aside and made our way up that side of the fork. The shack was so well concealed that we didn't see it until we were twenty feet away. There was no flat ground in this canyon, and like those of Gold Rush miners, this shelter had been constructed on a bench cut into the canyon wall, supported on the outside by a rock retaining wall. We approached cautiously and I rapped on the plywood door. There was no answer. We let ourselves in.

The shelter's frame was fashioned from peeled fir poles and a few incongruously expensive redwood four-by-fours, and it was sheathed in clear plastic and small pieces of good plywood that seemed to have been salvaged from another building. A roof consisting of a canvas tarpaulin stretched over a row of sapling poles sloped back to meet the cut in the canyon wall that formed the interior wall on the uphill side. The interior was heated by a woodstove made out of an oil drum and furnished with a kitchen counter, two bed platforms, and a couple of rude tables.

Bell was peering at the four-by-fours and at the odd-sized pieces of plywood with a curious expression. He walked back outside and I followed. At the far end of the ledge the miners had dug a pit toilet, a hole in the earth covered with a sheet of plywood, at the center of which stood a semi-conical fiberglass outhouse pedestal with a white enameled-steel toilet seat.

"Hey—this place is made out of our outhouses!" Bell chuckled.

"No!"

"No question about it. Look!" he said, pointing to the nice