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

joy. In purgatory you still have a chance; the final judgment on you and everything else has not yet been rendered. So if people are doing something wrong, refuse to cooperate; if the music's too sad, for God's sake change the station or turn the radio off. Stop before the bridge. Get out. Walk down the road. Sniff the air, and if it smells good, breathe deep.

I idled down the road to the bridge. Here he got out and stepped over the kneewall between the roadway and the pedestrian walkway, then up onto the railing. For a brief instant he balanced between life and death. Far below him, the river was a set of whispering curves, its rapids seemingly motionless at this distance, like white paint on green glass. There were bright tufts of willow along its banks, and then the rocks and pines of the canyon walls higher up. But then it was too late because he'd already stepped into the lake of air, and there was the irrevocable quickness with which the wind increased in his ears and the battered earth came up to embrace him.

7 / A Natural Death

THERE IS A SORT of memory that does not refer to a particular day, yet it is not without precision, and accumulates from just being in a place for a period of years. Each time the American River floods big and brown with snowmelt and rain, I remember better the way huge drift logs turn ponderous circles in eddies, and where the river is carrying away land at the outside of turns, and where it builds beaches at the inside of them. Later, on warm spring days after the rains are past, I remember how little pink trumpets of bilobed clarkia and yellow daisies of eriophyllum float, as if mounted on some transparent medium, a certain number of inches, according to their species, above the steep hillsides; and how for 10 or 12 feet above that colorful surface there is a layer of air that hums and sparkles in the sun, composed substantially of insects seeking nectar.

I know where a tiny patch of a St. John's wort, called gold-wire for the shine of its filamentous stamens, grows tucked up under the chemise brush at the top of a red clay bank on a turn in the old Doc Gordon Road above Lake Clementine; it took me ten years to find it. Sometimes in summer one of the thunderstorms that boil up against the Sierra Nevada every afternoon reaches out as far as the foothills to the west, and a sweet damp smell rises from the dust just before the first drops of rain. The novelty of rain is one of the few things I liked about hot summers in the canyons, a season I mostly detested when I worked as a ranger in them. To be fair, however, the things I disliked about that time—the merciless sun that old forests would have shaded me from; the dust on my face, my uniform, and rescue equipment; the spiny star thistle that gets to flesh through thick jeans, wild oats that lodged in my socks, and the other disagreeable European annuals that overwhelmed the perennial meadows of the low Sierra—I eventually came to see as the marks of 140 years of bad treatment of this land. So over time I learned to forgive this place for its bad manners and prickliness, for these are the inevitable outcomes of servitude, in land as in people.

Aside from memorizing these natural phenomena that repeat themselves annually until the idle gaze comprehends them, I was content to let hours of work steal by without straining to save the details for posterity. I was a poor keeper of our required patrol logs. The quieter days were as seamless and unaccountable as water slipping by in the river, until time was apprehended by the duty to record something, such as the report, late in the day on April 23, 1994, that a woman named Barbara Schoener was missing up the Middle Fork.

The only thing I recall about that day before the call came in is an observation I made of the weather. At midmorning I steered my green Jeep into the entrance of the gravel road up the Middle Fork to the old limestone quarry. Turning off the engine, I looked east up the canyon where Barbara Schoener was at that moment, although I didn't know it. The sky was deep blue around harmless-looking puffy white clouds, the air was clear and cool, and the sun warmed my left elbow, out the open window. The riffles in the river whispered and sparkled in the eastern light.

Weather will be a deciding factor in any search, in the survival of the lost or injured, or if there is nothing left to do for them, in the difficulty and discomfort of recovering their remains. In this case, morning made a false promise. By nightfall the clouds gathered into a dark sheet and set upon the searchers, soaking them to the skin with a cold, steady rain.

What you do to investigate a death is a little like being a theater director. Unavoidably detained on the way to rehearsals, you arrive to find the final scene already played out and the actors and props spread around the stage in disordered repose. In your mind's eye, you send them back to their starting positions, marked in the theater with pieces of tape on the stage and in the woods by footprints, the victim's personal effects, and an unclaimed automobile at the trailhead. Then you set them in motion on the stage of your imagination, over and over, until you get it right. Later, when the report is written and the usefulness of thinking about it is long over, it's hard to forget this omniscient vision you've made of the victim's fated progress toward a bad end you know about, and she doesn't.

So it is that I see Barbara Schoener driving north