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

to our ranger station for directions to the lake. "You're close," I would tell them. "It's about fifty feet deep where we're standing."

I still have those maps, along with two or three hundred others. Maybe Finch with his old ranger badges, uniform insignia, and photographs of early rangers reinforced my interest in collecting. But I already had a pretty good hoard, even before I met him. I have the maps I used to find my way around in almost every place I ever worked as a ranger—mountains I climbed, rivers I ran, reaches of tundra and salt-drenched beaches and sea inlets I walked. And others, too, of all the places I traveled when I wasn't working.

My favorite are the topographic maps, the ones with all those sharply drafted lines connecting all the points on a given elevation, which to the trained eye describe mountains, canyons, ridges, and gullies so well you feel as if you could reach out and feel the high and low spots on the paper. I buy those, and all kinds of other maps, wherever I go. I even purchase, speculatively, maps of places I have no time in my schedule to explore while I am there. I keep them all in my office, on two shelves full of those cardboard document files you see in libraries. To me, they are a sort of wealth, of memory and possibility.

I have maps of the Italian Alpi Apuanni, where my second wife and I drank red wine in a little mountain hut with my friend Marco and his Italian rock climber friends and then stumbled by climber's headlamp down several kilometers of steep trail littered with slippery, just-ripened chestnuts that had been falling from the trees, and somehow made it back to his house in a village north of Viareggio late that night. And I have maps of the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, on which I wandered alone with my ice ax and crampons making sharp scraping noises in the vastness for a few days as I tried to make up my mind to divorce my first wife. In a file marked "Sierra" I have maps my immigrant father, his eyes enthusiastically open to the grandness of his new land, used in the early 1960s to navigate us around the high country wearing shoddy work boots and basketball shoes and leading a string of pack animals loaded with army surplus ponchos for tents, water bags from military life rafts, and sometimes my mother's guitar. When I come upon those, I miss my mother terribly.

One day a copy of the long-awaited new topographic trail map of the North and Middle Forks of the American River arrived in my mailbox at the ranger station, crisp and still smelling of printer's ink. I carefully unfolded it and laid it out on the table, admiring the sharpness of the brown topographic lines, the crispness of the blue line representing the river, and all the exact twists and turns of the crosshatched black line representing our boundary. There was no lake on it. And the new map somehow made this place—our strange, sacrificial park, living on borrowed time—less ephemeral, more real.

For years we'd used the U.S. Geological Survey 7.5-minute topographic maps. But it took a great mosaic of them—they wallpapered a whole interior wall of our ranger station—to cover our 48 miles of river in two counties. And although we had drawn our serpentine boundary in pen on the assembly on the wall, when we carried the individual maps in the field they didn't show it, and we rangers needed to know whether we were inside or outside the boundary when we heard chainsaws or rifle shots.

That wasn't the only problem with the Geologic Survey maps. Of course, the shape of the land and the bends in the river hadn't changed since the 1950s when these maps were made. But the ways people got around on the land had changed considerably. After the Bureau had taken possession of our canyons and burned down all the old ranch and mine buildings, many of the dirt roads serving them had been abandoned, washed out, or grown over. As vegetation encroached from both sides, some became footpaths. And a slew of new trails had been built, none of which were on those maps.

Then again, when I compared the new map with the old maps, there were things on the old ones I thought I'd miss. In the 1950s, the governments surveyors collected the names of places on them from local people and still older maps. At that time there were people living around these canyons who had been born only a decade after the Civil War, and only three decades after the Gold Rush had swept away the Nisenan Indian place names, along with most of the Nisenan themselves.

Many of the Gold Rush place names reflected the incredible diversity of the immigrants who came to these canyons in 1849 and, affiliated by ethnicity, religion, or origin, banded together in groups to mine gold. There were African Bar, Mormon Ravine, Kanaka Bar, China Bar, Dutch Flat, French Hill, and Spanish Dry Diggings; Maine Bar, Oregon Bar, Iowa Hill, and Illinois Canyon; New York Bar, Philadelphia Bar, and Hoboken Canyon.

The rolling divides between the canyons bore the names of families that had settled them after the Gold Rush to raise cattle: Holt Homestead, Baker Ranch, and Butcher Ranch, where the Bureau burned the last house in my time. Perhaps most evocative were the place names that remembered misfortune: Murderer's Bar, Slaughter Ravine, Small Hope Mine, Robber's Roost, Sore Finger Point, and Deadhorse Slide. Others offered hope of redemption: Honor Camp, Temperance Ravine, and Salvation Ravine.

All of these old names were missing on the new map, and in their place were some new ones. For example, the name of an Auburn banker, lumber company owner, and avid horseman who had died in 1984 was now strung out along a dotted line representing a main bridle path through the