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

last moments, and by then it will be too late. The story refers of course to people's capacity to adjust to increments of strangeness and danger in their environment without taking action to stop it. That may be true of us, but I doubt very much that frogs are that stupid.

I like to mix my own intravenous drugs, making sure that the white powder of the antibiotic is entirely dispersed into the fluid in the clear bag. Once mixed, the plastic bag of fluid is clear and pale yellow, almost exactly the color of urine. I unroll the clear tubing of the infusion set, close the valve, pull the seals on the IV bag and the tubing, and stab the bag with the spike on the end of the tubing. I hang the bag over me from a chrome IV pole on wheels next to the bed. I pinch the clear drip chamber to fill it and then open the valve on the line to purge the air in it. You don't want to get large air bubbles in your brain or lungs. I assemble the other things: syringes, vials of heparin and saline, alcohol swabs, a needle for taking my blood samples. I clean the valve on the end of the tube that goes into my chest and from there to the portal of my heart. I clean it really well, and then I push ten milliliters of normal saline into myself with a syringe. Then I connect the line and open the valve to start the drip. I set the drip at about one per second. I like infusing myself because it reminds me of the satisfactions of competency, of the roaring propwash of a helicopter, of a well-packaged, desperately injured patient on his way into it with me holding the clear bag over him. But now it's more nebulous. I'm not really dying, and I'm not sure day to day if I'm saving myself.

But the feeling in my hands has returned, and I wonderingly run my hands along my nakedness, my chest around the tube that goes right through it into the big veins returning to my heart, my upper arms, the tops of my thigh, which had been numb, too. I imagine the branches of my nervous system, from the trunk of my spine to the tiny rootlets that define the limits of my skin. The sensation of my skin has supplied me with an illusion of a distinct edge, a definable limit between myself and the world. But it's a false autonomy. I know a woman in these mountains who startled and dropped a dish at the exact moment her husband died in a motorcycle crash, miles away. I know a man who carries the canyons of the American River inside himself, in his blood, in his brain.

So many of the things that happened to me as a ranger in the American River canyon I remember well, as my brain gets better. But this one is obscure to me. It was a nothing call that amounted to nothing.

Early June of 1998 was wet. The Douglas firs on the north slopes were festooned with bright beads of water at the time when the crimson Indian pinks were already blooming. Ticks are very sensitive to dryness. Their bodies desiccate easily, and in dry weather they hide deep in mossy crevices on the bark of trees, or in the leaf litter, or in woodrat nests. Damp weather, however, makes them more active, and they come out and stand around on the tips of branches and blades of grass by trails, like hitchhikers at a freeway on-ramp.

June 14, 1998. The dispatch log says that at 1606 hours—six minutes after four—that Sunday afternoon I was on a traffic stop on Lake Clementine Road. What I remember next was hearing a sheriff's deputy radio to his dispatcher that he was pursuing someone on foot down by the river at the Confluence. Someone had done something, but what? Exposed himself to a woman? Threatened someone in a drunken argument? The dispatch log doesn't say, just that it took me seven minutes to get there.

When I arrived at the Confluence, we spent some time chasing this guy through the weeds grown tall in the late rains until we lost him. Then we picked the burrs off our uniforms and left. No one cut any paper. I stayed late at the ranger station catching up on reports and got home around midnight.

The following morning, the first of my days off, I slept late. When I got up I found myself absentmindedly scratching an itch just below my beltline. There was something—a pimple, a little bump. When I finally looked at it, I found a tick—brick red and small, the kind I now recognize as Ixodes pacificus, embedded in my skin. I knew enough to pull it out with a pair of tweezers and save it in my refrigerator. I made arrangements to see a doctor, without really thinking anything would happen.

Old Doctor Parsons had an appointment available on Thursday. Like me, he wanted to be a writer, but at the time he was further along in this delusion than I was. His office was a small pale-green building in a stand of ponderosa pine a couple of miles north of Placerville, across the highway from a house with several washing machines and a logging truck in the yard, and about half a mile south of a Scotch and steak roadhouse called the Hanging Tree—one of those places with the chandeliers made of wagon wheels suspended from the smoke-darkened pine ceiling and Freddy Fender and George Jones on the jukebox in the bar. Over the time I knew him, his waiting room became increasingly empty, with a fish tank bubbling in the silence. Eventually he let his secretary go. He was a portly, bald man in his late sixties, and by the time I came in with my tick bite he