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

so it was in this climate of diminished expectations that I looked favorably on a position offered that winter by the California Department of Parks and Recreation: a patrol ranger job on the American River.

I had heard something about a large dam that for some time had threatened the American, but I wasn't planning on staying there anyway. It would only be a way station for me; I planned to transfer again within a year. So I applied for the job, my transfer was granted, and I reported for duty.

That a delegation of armed rangers was sent in to protect a piece of ground that could not be protected from the very government that employed them was an accident of history I will explain later. What I hadn't expected was how beautiful those canyons were. Or how I would come to both love and despise them, even fear them. There I witnessed some of the strangest incidents I've ever been involved in. What I will now relate of these events is entirely true, and in most cases taken from rangers' actual reports. Only the names and personal details of some of the rangers and other characters have been changed. In the case of the rangers who appear in these stories—and there were others who came and went over the years and whose names and stories could not be accommodated in a book of this length—that is appropriate. In their own way each of them did a good job under the toughest conditions imaginable, yet they never wanted to be known as heroes, and now they deserve their peace and quiet.

1 / A Day in the Park

IT WAS MIDSUMMER, a couple of years into my time in the foothills. A white haze filled the canyon of the North Fork of the American River, flattening its depth and dimensions. The heat was somnolent, the still air scented with the volatile spice of the brush fields.

The sides of the canyon were almost too steep to walk on and covered in thick stands of live oak, bay laurel, buckeye, and brush, the average color of which was gray-green. A sparse overstory of ghostly foothill pines cast patches of partial shade, their scabby gray trunks standing out from the canyon walls at precarious angles. At the bottom of the canyon a ribbon of blue water made its way southwest, bending back and forth across a broad gray bed of cobbles and sand. Half a mile downstream it entered a small, narrow reservoir, which followed the bends in the canyon for a couple more miles to where it spilled uselessly over a small dam. In the other direction, white anvilheads of cloud climbed over the high country, thirty miles east. There was a faint rumble of thunder. A few turkey vultures floated in intersecting circles along the canyon rim, savoring the hot air for the inevitable attrition of heat, drought, and violence.

***

A narrow dirt road descended the eastern wall of the canyon, winding in and out of the tributary ridges and gullies. Down it, a green Jeep station wagon with a police car's bar of red and blue lights and a couple of whip antennas bounced toward the river. A plume of dust boiled up behind the vehicle, then spread and settled into the surrounding woods.

Alone at the wheel of the Jeep was my sometime partner, Dave Finch. Today, as on every other day, the road meted out its daily increment of punishment to the Jeep's suspension and motor mounts and to Finch's lower spine and kidneys. From his right the two-way radio emitted the usual scratchy chorus of rangers and dispatchers outlining the progress of the repetitively mundane and gripping dramas of a summer weekend afternoon all the way down the river into the Central Valley. And as Finch fell deeper into the remove of the canyon, the voices on the radio became unintelligible bursts of static.

Three hundred feet above the river, Finch crossed an invisible line bisecting the canyon wall at a perfect level. It had been two and a half decades since Congress approved a dam that would flood this canyon. For over a decade the partially built project had been at a standstill, stalemated by politics, budgets, and the complexities of the very rocks under its footings. Yet it had never officially been called off. So everything below that line—the gray pines and olive-drab oaks, the wooly sunflowers on the road's cut-bank, the river, and even the little reservoir—could be seen only as temporary.

Finch came to the bottom of the road, and there he stopped and sat looking at the river, tanned elbow out the open window of the idling Jeep. In front of him, on the cobble beach that sloped away to the lake and the river that flowed into it, dozens of cars were parked haphazardly—economy cars, older pickups, works in progress with bald tires, spots of primer, and temporary registration stickers in their windows. Beyond them a small crowd of people lined the water's edge. Children splashed and squealed. Rough, tanned men—sheet-metal workers, drywall installers, meat cutters, heavy-equipment operators, electrician's apprentices, carpenters, unemployed truck drivers, occupants of trailer houses in the hills and cheap apartments in little foothill towns—stood along the beach with beers in their hands. Women—grocery clerks, dental hygienists, auto-part store delivery drivers with little butterflies tattooed on their breasts and little roses on their thighs—stood waist-deep in the water in bright-colored bikini tops and cut-off jeans, or lay on towels smoothing suntan oil on their skin, or hovered over their children, puffing on cigarettes and gesturing animatedly to each other. Big dogs—pit bulls, rottweilers, and retrievers—barked at each other on the beach and made forays into the water for balls and sticks. The rhythmic bass of competing car stereos and the squeals of the children and the barking of the dogs echoed off the far canyon wall.

Somewhere in front of Finch an engine revved. He paid no attention to it. Then there was a