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

water can quickly erode even the high-grade steel-reinforced concrete of which dams are made. Unless the tunnels are constantly inspected and air bubbles are properly mixed into the water to provide a cushion, the water can literally eat a dam's interior, he said. The Chinese sage Lao Tzu was born 2,400 years before anyone thought of capturing rivers behind towering dams, but he nevertheless seems to have understood what would happen to them without constant attention:

Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered.

As we reached the powerplant's outflow one guided party was just paddling away on it: four sky-blue rafts full of matching yellow helmets, orange lifejackets, blue wetsuits, and nervously excited whoops. In recognition of the income the guide industry brought to the motels, restaurants, and private campgrounds of Placer and El Dorado Counties, the powerplant's operators had agreed to provide reliable flows in the river on weekends. Their releases usually tapered off by midafternoon, when boaters were well downstream. The commercial rafters liked to get on the river early, so they could give their clients time to lounge on hot rocks during lunch and still stay on the crest of the release as it ran down the canyon. We could move more quickly, so we generally started later and often passed them at lunchtime.

In the quiet after their departure we slid our boat into the water. It came alive, dancing and tugging at the bowline in my hand. I tied the line to a willow branch and jumped in. The weight of my feet on the inflated floor caused cold water to well up through the lacing at its perimeter and run over the tops of my wetsuit booties, chilling my feet. The water also cooled the air in the raft's inflation chambers, and I felt the boat go flaccid around me. Will came aboard with a barrel pump, and we connected it to the valves on the various chambers, topping off each one until the boat was firm again. I went ashore and began passing him our dry bags, and he lashed them down with a handful of bright nylon cam straps.

If a whitewater boat is the domain of wilderness romantics without real jobs, it is an awfully serious, businesslike one. Everything must be tied down securely so it won't be lost if the boat is swamped, capsized, folded in half, or flung through the air by the powerful hydraulics of the rapids. No ropes or straps shall be left in a tangle where they might snag a leg, arm, or neck during a capsizing. Will and I attended to our work as if it mattered. We checked our guns, made of stainless steel so they wouldn't rust, then secured the gun belts in two waterproof steel boxes on either side of the oarsman's seat. We pulled our life vests and the chin straps of our helmets tight. I clicked the release on the diver's knife attached to my flotation vest to make sure I could get it out. Should the boat flip over and you become tangled in lines or pinned between the boat and an underwater rock, the knife was for cutting your way out—right through the boat, if necessary. Finally I checked the carabiners on the throw bags full of line for rescuing a swimmer if someone went overboard.

The first part of the river was not, strictly speaking, a river at all, but a groove blasted into ledges of slate from the outlet of the power plant back to the river's original channel, now dry below the dam. Yet its banks had grown over with alders and were now littered with river rocks and drift sand from high water, so it looked like a wild place. The boat collided with a series of standing waves, cutting off the wave crests into our laps. The water was cold enough that it caused us to suck in our breath. That involuntary response could get you in trouble if you fell in.

We entered the river's original channel, passed some abandoned placer mines, and came to a narrow jeep road bulldozed down to the river through the alders. This road had been the center of a property-line dispute between the man with the bulldozer and the man who claimed to own the land. The argument had been settled with guns, or so went the word on the river.

Our first major obstacle was a rapid called Tunnel Chute, a feature as manufactured as our put-in. Here, over eons, the river had cut a sharp oxbow until it passed close by itself a mile downstream, with only a tall fin of rock between the two channels. As the Bureau would later do at the dam site, nineteenth-century miners figured that if they could shortcut the river through that fin, they could dry out the oxbow and plunder its bed for gold. They accomplished this job with blasting powder, mules, and hand tools, and today the river runs in a tunnel through a couple of hundred feet of rock. But the shortcut made the river's pitch steeper, and no matter what you try to do to them, rivers adjust themselves according to their own laws. In response to the short-circuiting of its slope, the Middle Fork began scouring its bed on the upstream side of the tunnel until it excavated a ledge of bedrock. So blocked, the river went back to its old ways in the oxbow. In response, the miners blasted a channel through the bedrock ledge to drop the river back into the tunnel. This channel was about eighteen feet wide and fell away at a steepness roughly equivalent to that of the front steps of a public building. Through it thundered the river's entire one thousand cubic feet of water each second. The miners had never intended anyone to go through it in a boat.

To do this, you pulled