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

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Our American River canyons were the inverse of Yellowstone: they were preserved only by stays of execution. Our work in them was frequently dangerous, and we rangers depended intimately upon one another for safety. For years we spent more of our waking lives with each other than with our wives. Yet we communicated our feelings to each other in only the most indirect ways—by casual inference, in pointed jokes, and with innuendo—and the thing most unsaid between us was the daily agony of risking our skins for nothing. In the face of this, to preserve our mental health, each of us learned to cultivate interests outside our jobs.

I had my writing, a wife, and eventually two children.

O'Leary had a wife, a little boy, and a beautiful home he'd built with his own hands. He and Bell were co-owners of a salmon boat they kept trailered in our truck shed. A picture of O'Leary at the helm, motoring across a coastal inlet against a fog bank with a full catch, hung on our office wall. He seldom beamed like that at work.

Bell was a hunter, passionate about pheasant and turkey season and his nervous, amber-eyed vizsla bird dogs. On summer evenings he played softball with a team sponsored by a local cabinet shop. He had a wife, a son, and a daughter who dreamed of becoming a ballerina.

Sherm Jeffries had his wife, two daughters, his church, his fly-fishing.

MacGaff had courted his wife in the mountains and each summer they'd go camping at the place where they met. He kept a garden and made his own beer. But more than anything, his accounts kept the ship of his life on an even keel, and he trimmed and balanced them the way a sailor trims sail. Each day he knew the exact balance of our park budget, the exact number of days until his retirement, and the precise amount accruing to him in his pension plan. He could quote to the nearest quarter-hour his vacation hours. He maintained himself in a state of robust good health not as an end in itself, we all suspected, but as a way to hoard a mountain of unused sick leave for which the department would have to pay him when he retired.

Below the dam's waterline each of us was left to work out his salvation in his own way, and one of MacGaff's ways was to keep an inventory of everything he might be able to salvage from the place before it went underwater. At one location where the Bureau had burned a former resident's house, MacGaff would note a tumbledown chimney. Later the bricks would disappear, and a few weeks after that they'd reappear in a decorative path and a little brick wall around a flowerbed at his home. Elsewhere in our canyons he'd come upon a pile of large planks, the remains of a former resident's barn. Sometime later they'd disappear. Sometime after that, raised beds in his garden where he grew strawberries would be surrounded by neat plank boxes. MacGaff kept notes on these sorts of resources in a notebook in the breast pocket of his uniform. It was legendary. One ranger claimed to have inspected it one night when MacGaff went home, leaving his uniform shirt draped over a chair. According to that ranger, it contained entries like "firewood: large fallen oak limb, Windy Point, approx ¼ cord."

And so it did not escape notice when MacGaff began taking a five-gallon plastic bucket with him when he drove away from our station each morning. Each evening when he returned, he'd carry the bucket—now obviously heavy—from his government Jimmy to his own pickup. The next morning the empty bucket went back in his Jimmy before he went on patrol. Eventually it was learned that MacGaff had graveled his whole driveway, one bucket at a time, from an abandoned gravel quarry five hundred feet beneath the dam's waterline.

Finch had his union work. In 1979 state park rangers were the lowest-paid law enforcement officers in California and, fed up with low wages and capricious discipline from desk-jockey superiors, Finch decided to organize. Gathering around him a cadre of dedicated colleagues—O'Leary was the first, and the union treasurer—Finch negotiated pay parity with other cops, recourse in the face of unfair discipline, bulletproof vests, better guns, and new patrol wagons before the old ones fell apart underneath us. Then, in a final flourish, he got us sixty dollars a month physical fitness pay if we could pass an annual exercise test. But eventually the state park rangers' union was gobbled up by a larger union of state employees and Finch resigned his presidency in disgust. Now he had only his job in our doomed canyons, and his fortieth birthday was coming up, too.

For the first time since I'd known him, Finch seemed sullen, preoccupied.

One day in the kitchen I asked him, "What's eating you, Dave?"

"I don't know," he answered. "The ol' midlife crisis, I guess."

The boundaries of parks and wildernesses are really just lines on a map. In practice they are permeable to air pollution, tree diseases, and the peregrinations of eagles and mountain lions, feral cats that hunt songbirds, and domestic dogs that chase deer. Most of all, park boundaries are permeable to human behavior, because people bring their problems with them when they come. Those who commit crimes in a park are generally the same who transgress against their fellow citizens elsewhere. And since the 1960s, with population and social problems growing outside their parks, rangers increasingly spend their time defending not trees and animals but the experience of their visitors—their peace and quiet and safety—from other visitors.

One summer evening Finch got dispatched to investigate shots fired in the campground at Upper Lake Clementine. O'Leary and I responded to back him up. Finch got there first. At the bottom of Upper Lake Clementine Road in those days, what we called a campground was nothing but some tracks in the sand through a