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

jungle of willow and giant bamboolike arundo, ending on a beach where people set up their tents. We had a campground host living in a camper at the entrance to keep an eye on things.

When Finch got there the host, a man I will call Bob, told him that a particular group had been shooting a large-caliber revolver in the campground for over an hour. Bob gave Finch his detailed notes with descriptions of the people and their vehicles. Then, just as Finch made ready to leave, a brown pickup truck drove by, headed out of the campground.

"That's one of the trucks!" exclaimed Bob.

Finch gave chase, hit the siren, and stopped the truck on the road out of the canyon. He had no idea at that point where the gun was. Approaching cautiously, he found that the truck's single occupant was a woman. She looked nervous. Finch questioned her about the gunfire.

"What gunfire?" she asked. When someone says that about a .44 magnum going off repeatedly in a campground, you know you're close to the suspect.

But before Finch could go any further with his investigation, a man drove up on a motorcycle. He had an open beer clamped between his thighs. He demanded to know what Finch was doing with his wife. The man fit the description of one of the shooters. He was conspicuously drunk, so Finch detained him for drunk driving.

O'Leary and I arrived. We got a brief account from Finch of what had transpired so far. No sooner had Finch finished than another pickup truck drove toward us. It too matched one of the vehicles Bob had described, and when it pulled up alongside us we found its driver as drunk as the first two. O'Leary and I detained him as well. Like shooting, drunk driving is dangerous in a campground, where it's possible to back your car right over someone in a sleeping bag in the dark.

By now things were getting a little hard to keep track of. It was easier for three officers to carry out one arrest than it was for us to arrest three unpredictable drunks at the same time. Then, as O'Leary was walking the second of the drunks to Finch's Jeep, a fourth member of the party appeared on foot.

"What are you assholes doing? Leave him alone!" she slurred, making a beeline for O'Leary, as the latter attempted to pour his prisoner into the Jeep's back seat.

Finch stepped into her path. She shoved him. He stood fast. Behind him O'Leary was still struggling with his man, who wasn't following directions. I was over with the first woman Finch had stopped, trying to keep her out of the fray.

The other woman kept on shoving Finch and screaming, "You fucking assholes, you fucking assholes!"

"It's time for you to leave," Finch told her in a voice that was loud but surprisingly calm. "Walk away and stop interfering, or I'll have to arrest you," he said.

"Fuck you, you fuckers! Leave him alone!" the woman answered at the top of her lungs, pawing at Finch to get at O'Leary.

Finch had had enough.

"That's it," he said, grabbing one of her wrists as he reached for his handcuffs. But she wasn't going for it, and the fight was on. Now she was trying to bite him. O'Leary closed the door on his prisoner and turned to help Finch. I told the first woman to remain in her pickup and went to help Finch, too.

By now it had grown quite dark, and distracted by the scuffle, none of us saw the woman I'd left in the first pickup get out and sneak around the other side of Finch's Jeep, where she opened the back door we had mistakenly left unlocked and let both prisoners out. O'Leary and Finch and I were struggling to handcuff the screaming woman when we looked up and saw both men out of the car, staggering around in their handcuffs, yelling about police brutality. Having worked the second woman into her cuffs, O'Leary and I left her kicking at Finch and went to corral the men. Another struggle ensued. We dragged them back to the car.

Eventually we had all four drunks in the back seats of our vehicles. We were sticky with sweat and covered in dust. The combination made mud. We radioed for a brace of tow trucks. In the impound search we found the gun, a loaded .44 magnum revolver, under the driver's seat of the first pickup Finch had stopped. Why hadn't it been pulled in the melee? Just luck, we guessed.

After Finch departed from the union, his quest for diversions diversified. He became an avid collector of old ranger badges and uniform insignia.

One day I came into the office at the lower end of our compound and found him at his desk. Spread out in front of him and across a typing table to his left were old photographs and hand-tinted postcards.

"What's all this? New hobby?" I asked him.

"I've been looking for old photos of rangers—the first rangers. I got these from a guy at a badge collector show."

"Who's this guy with the beard, standing in front of the tree?"

"That's Galen Clark, the first Guardian of Yosemite," answered Finch.

I picked up the photo.

"Pretty wooly-looking—a real frontiersman, with the beard, that rifle, and the mountain man costume. Early national park ranger, huh?" I asked.

"Nope, state—state park ranger. The first. His actual title was Guardian of Yosemite. Yosemite Valley was deeded by ol' Abraham Lincoln to the state of California as a public park in 1864."

"I thought the army took care of Yosemite."

"That's true," replied Finch, "but they didn't get there until 1891. Our guy Galen was there first. From what I can tell, he was the first ranger in the United States, and he was a state ranger, just like us."

The actual mechanics of defending Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks did not emerge fully formed. In 1866, when Galen Clark was appointed by the California Legislature to be