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

lack the feeling of permanence they must have had for the first people who knew them. What has happened to them has rendered these canyons mortal in our eyes, and like the rest of wild nature, they will now continue to exist only at our sufferance. It is my hope that there will be rangers watching over them for a long time to come, or at least until armed men and women are no longer necessary to protect such places.

Acknowledgments

I OWE SO MUCH TO MY EDITOR, Deanne Urmy, who helped me to shape this strange little book from the very beginning. The steadfast support of my agent, Sandra Dijkstra, and her staff too have been a source of great comfort. Manuscript editor Beth Burleigh Fuller brought new energy and a fresh point of view to our work, late in the editing process.

Gary Snyder nudged me toward telling this story when, at a party one night in the early 1990s, he asked me how my work as a ranger was going. I told him that working under the waterline of the Auburn Dam bothered me terribly. "That seems like a good subject for an essay," replied Snyder, and in my suggestible state as an aspiring writer in the presence of a master, I set out to write one. Casey Walker edited that first essay for the Wild Duck Review, and Emerson Blake edited the next one for Orion. I am thankful for their insightful suggestions. My special thanks to Nina Leopold Bradley, daughter of Aldo Leopold, who wrote me when the first essay came out in print, encouraging me to continue.

My thanks to the geologist Richard Hilton and the botanist Joe Medieros for their friendship, encouragement, and assistance, and for the love they've instilled in the students of Sierra College for the mountains for which their school is named. California's state climatologist Bill Mork and hydrologist Maury Roos of the Department of Water Resources gave me invaluable help in their fields. Naturalist and writer David Lukas showed me new wonders on our hikes together in the American River canyons, which I thought I knew well before. So many others enriched various fields of knowledge I needed to understand what I was writing about better: Michael Barbour on Mediterranean vegetation; Jeff Mount on river geomorphology; Mike Lynch on the history of the American River; Lucia Hui, Stan Wright, and Mark Miller on ticks and Lyme disease; Kevin Hansen on mountain lions; and Mike Catino and Tom Aiken on the history of the Auburn Dam. Sharon DiLorenzo helped me find another key witness to that history. Jill Dampier and Nick Willick assisted me in my search for old records. Mark Hewitt, Robin Heid, and Matt Davies taught me about the esoteric sport of parachuting from bridges. I benefited greatly from an unpublished multivolume compendium of the history of the American River by John Plimpton. The work of Norris Hundley, Donald Kelley, Robert Pisani, and Gray Brechin also proved indispensable.

For their encouragement, mentoring, generosity, and friendship, I will always be grateful to Scott Russell Sanders, Wendell Berry, John Hart, Terry Tempest Williams, Barry Lopez, Robert Michael Pyle, Rebecca Solnit, George Sessions, Patianne Rogers, Alison Deming, Louis and Brett Jones, Oakley and Barbara Hall, and Michael Carlisle. I am also deeply thankful to Marion and Olivia Gilliam, Aina Barton, Laurie Lane-Zucker, Jennifer Sahn, and the staff and board of trustees of the Orion Society for their early and longtime support of my work.

To my wife, Susan, and my children, James and Emma, I extend my deep gratitude for their love and wholehearted support.

My father, John Fisher-Smith, learned that my mother was pregnant with me on a backpacking trip in the Grand Canyon. Later he and my mother led my brothers and me into the wilderness, patiently fanning sparks of love for the mountains and canyons into flame. That fire has never gone out, and for that I am deeply thankful. Stephen Studebaker, by turns a schoolteacher in the Navajo Nation, a railroad conductor, and a seasonal park ranger, inspired me to take up rangering. During a climbing trip together in the High Sierra thirty years ago, he wore a park service uniform and got paid, and I didn't, and didn't. To my youthful eyes it looked like a good racket. It turned out to be more like work than I had imagined. Mike Whitfield and John Kraushaar taught me much about my job in the early years. Inspector Brian Dressler and Sensei Rod Sanford of Zen Bai Butoko-kai and the Pacific Institute of Defensive Tactics taught me much of what I know about being a law enforcement officer. To Mike Van Hook, my apologies and my thanks for putting up with me.

Perhaps most of all, my thanks to every ranger I ever worked with, the many more I didn't, and those who follow me. You continue to stand in defense of the sweetest and most hopeful places I know: the world's national, provincial, and state parks and wildernesses.

* Colfax is much improved since 1986 as a result of an upswing in Placer County's economy. The Station House (not its real name) has changed hands and is today as pleasant, decent, and safe an establishment as you might find anywhere. On a recent afternoon there, sipping straight whiskey in the dim light from the front windows, I asked a grizzled fellow customer what he remembered about the place circa 1986. He paused, then answered, "The fights, at least two of them, every Saturday night," and turned back to the beer he was nursing. The Colfax police station is now a sheriff's substation, and as this book went to print the Union Pacific Railway was offering passenger service from a newly renovated station and the long-windowless wooden hotel across the tracks was being renovated for occupancy after decades of decline.

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