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

"If you can walk, come down to my lights here on the road! Come to my lights!" I called over and over.

As I did so, it dawned on me that Barbara Schoener was gone. It was just a feeling, after all those years of searches, that I was talking to myself, that there was no one to hear me when I called to her. But still I called again and again, sending my amplified voice washing out over the cold boiling surface of the river, surrounding the dark trees and thickets of manzanita, filling up secret hollows.

Beyond Maine Bar, Quarry Road becomes two Jeep tracks across the sand and round gray cobbles of the gravel bars. I stopped to put the Jeep in low range and got out into the rain to listen and have a look around. Across the side of the canyon, several hundred feet above me, I saw the twinkling flashlights of other searchers through the mist of rain. I got back in the Jeep and bounced and scraped upstream across the boulders to the end of the road, watching the pools of my spotlights move across the feathery limbs of fir trees up the side of the canyon and straining to listen, through the roar of the rapids and the whine of the gearbox, for a cry in the darkness.

When MacGaff, O'Leary, Finch, and their fellow park rangers arrived in the American River canyons in January 1977, a team of park planners from State Parks' Sacramento headquarters was already there; their assignment, to prepare a plan for the development of recreational facilities on the Bureau's land. Finished in 1978, the General Plan for Auburn State Recreation Area featured a visitors' center, a lakeside snack bar, campgrounds for boaters, and a huge boat-launching ramp. The launch ramp was actually constructed, a steep cut in the canyon wall the size of a freeway that ended abruptly in thin air, hundreds of feet above the river. But the rest of the park's facilities were on hold until the dam's seismic problems were worked out. They wouldn't have done the rangers much good anyway, because like the launch ramp, these facilities were all about a reservoir that didn't exist.

With nothing to guide them, as time went by, the rangers managed the place according to the manifold desires of its most vocal users. Chief among these were the well-heeled residents of mini-ranches and horse properties in the foothills, where an annual hundred-mile endurance horse race over the crest of the Sierra had long been, for those on the social register, the equivalent of the symphony and opera in San Francisco. The Western States Trail on which this race was held ran right through Auburn State Recreation area, and the horse people soon saw the reservoir site as their private domain. Since State Parks lacked a clear vision for the place, the planning of a bewildering array of bridle trails through previously impenetrable (to human beings, anyway) thickets along the canyon walls was mostly done on the spot with pickup truck loads of shovels and mattocks delivered to volunteer equestrian trail crews by field staff—when, indeed, a ranger was even involved.

By the time Barbara Schoener was reported missing, no complete map of these trails existed in the hands of rangers or anyone else. In the search we used a sketch map that someone from the stables at Auburn Lake Trails had drawn. It showed only a portion of the south wall of the Middle Fork, but the maze of paths on it looked like a plate of spaghetti tipped by a careless elbow onto a restaurant floor. Some searchers got lost immediately, and the two of them I found wandering in the rain became the only people I would save that night.

However, if uncertainty about the dam's changing fortunes created in State Parks offices an atmosphere lacking in the sense of permanence that people who manage public lands ought to feel, the land in question lacked the capacity to equivocate. In the two and a half decades since the Bureau began acquiring it from its previous owners, it had begun to go seriously wild again. And no one at State Parks or the Bureau was studying this process.

Meanwhile, by the 1980s a long-awaited economic boom had taken hold in the foothills, based on residential construction, service industry, and the computer industry's arrival in western Placer County. Now the postwar land rush from cities into the dense grids of suburbs close to Sacramento leapfrogged outward into dispersed, low-density subdivisions of old ranches in the hills, where new residents could establish a relationship with nature, of the nice-view-from-the-deck kind.

In 1970 there were just over 20 million people in California. The population of El Dorado County, where Barbara Schoener lived, was around 44,000, which wasn't much, considering that at 1,711 square miles, Placer County's southern neighbor was just a little smaller than Delaware. By 1994 the state's population had grown to 31.4 million, just over one and a half times what it was in 1970. In the same period El Dorado County's more than tripled, to 146,400 souls. Most of them settled in the low-elevation western hills, where they would be spared the serious snow shoveling common in the high country and the commute to jobs in greater Sacramento was reasonable. And so, from the late eighties on, these counties along the foothill front of the Sierra Nevada were among the fastest-growing in the state.

Today, if you drive up into these foothills and allow yourself to wander, you will end up on dusty roads off other unmarked roads, which are in turn off other roads. At the end of each of them sits a relatively new house with no economic relationship, as a ranch house or a miner's cabin would have had, to the land around it. Everything that gets up there, from the next quart of milk to the next stick of lumber for a fence, arrives in