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

canyons. And where before the turns of the river were identified with the origins of miners, now they bore the names given to the major rapids by whitewater rafters and kayakers since the 1970s: Chunder, Parallel Parking, Tongue and Groove, Chamberlain Falls, Zig Zag, and Bogus Thunder.

At first it made me a little sad to think the traditional names would be forgotten. But then I thought, if the river is to survive, it must mean something to each generation. Those Gold Rush immigrants to which old California families trace their lineage were only the second wave—the Indians had come here perhaps twelve thousand years before—and immigration continues. Perhaps it is salutary to allow for people to bestow new meaning on these canyons periodically. We rangers had done it: the Bowl, Campsite Number One, Nude Rock, and Pig Farm were ours. Some of us weren't born here—MacGaff and Jeffries were from the East Coast. I was a native but my parents had come from Europe. And so, in this way, new Californians could make this river their own and hold it close to their hearts with the memories of what had happened along it.

One autumn day shortly after the new map came, I arranged to meet some people about a case I'd investigated the previous summer while on boat patrol at Lake Clementine. They were Laotians, new Californians. They pulled up in front of the ranger station in a pale gold sport-utility vehicle so new it still had paper plates. In California your license plates generally come within six weeks, so I knew it had been bought since July. Did he buy it to cheer her up?

From the first moment I saw the man and the woman, I understood. They were the kind of married people who had known each other since they were teenagers. They were in their late forties now, and would be together until they died. He sat in front next to the driver, their American son-in-law—the one who had taken the directions from me on the telephone, because his mother- and father-in-laws' English wasn't all that good. She sat in the back seat.

The three of them got out. I greeted the son-in-law and asked him how he was doing. Well, he said, it had been a tough time. I ushered them through the screen door into the ranger station. I led them to the topographic map mosaic of our canyons on one wall and showed them where we would be going, up on the North Fork. I offered her the use of the ladies' room. While we were waiting for her, I talked to her husband.

He was a slight, handsome, polite man with graying hair cut neatly and combed straight forward toward his face. He wore loose-fitting dress slacks, a button-front shirt with a subdued pattern, and nice shoes. He had worked hard and, I judged, done okay for his family.

"What do you do?" I asked.

He smiled shyly. "Mechanic," he said.

"What kind of cars?" I asked him.

"All kinds," he replied.

"Where do you work?"

"American shop."

His wife, returning from the restroom, added, "He was airplane mechanic."

"Where?" I asked.

"In my country," he replied quietly.

"What kinds of planes?"

"T-28, C-130," he said.

"C-130—isn't that a military plane?"

"Well ... yes,"he said, still smiling.

"Was this during the war?" I asked him.

"Yes, from 1968."

"So when the U.S. pulled out, you had to leave?"

"Yes—after a while Communists came looking for us, for helping Americans. Yes."

"Did you two know each other at that time?" I asked.

She, standing next to him, answered, "Yes, Early was born three months before we left." She smiled faintly at the affectionate joke and then explained it to me. Her husband had named their son Early in the new language he'd picked up from the Americans at the airbase, for being born several weeks after he was expected. When they had to flee she carried Early in her arms. For days they hid in the jungle with the Communists all around them. They found a man with a boat to take them across the Mekong River under cover of darkness. Eventually they came to America. Their kids had grown up solid here.

"I hear from everyone he was a very good boy," I told them.

"Yes—he want to be soldier," she replied. "He always want to help people, since he was little boy. Always help people. We lucky to have him. But he is not lucky—" Her eyes brimmed over, and she turned away.

"Yes, I'm so sorry," I said, and stood there awkwardly for a minute. The husband came over and gently touched her back, and I walked to the screen door, held it open for them, and led the way to where their car waited next to my Jeep in the shade of the tall pines.

Driving ahead, I led them across the Foresthill Bridge and up the divide between the North and Middle Forks. At the beginning of the steep dirt road to Upper Lake Clementine, I pulled over to let them pass me, so my car, not theirs, would be enveloped in dust.

We got to the bottom and stepped out of our vehicles. Down a beach of cobbles in front of us, the North Fork entered the little reservoir of Lake Clementine to our left, no more than a riverlike finger of water itself, distinguishable from the rapid above it only by its flatness. Above the inlet, the rapid was so shallow now that it was hard to imagine how the river had looked, unusually high with late-melting snow, back at the beginning of July.

Along the water the cottonwoods were beginning to turn, and their leaves sparkled as they fluttered in a gentle breeze up the canyon. A child's voice from down the lakeshore echoed off the far canyon wall. A boy fished from the bank. A lone kayaker pulled lazily for shore.

The father stayed up on the beach by the car, the son-in-law with him. The mother walked alone across the cobbles to the river's edge. She couldn't know,