Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  I never saw O'Leary's plan either. But when I asked him for advice on what to put on mine, he recited the following phrase from memory: "I will meet or exceed the standards of performance for my class." Later, when I asked Finch about that phrase, he smiled and said, "That means 'maintain the status quo.'"

  And that O'Leary did admirably. Day in and day out for decades he went to Mineral Bar, Yankee Jims, Ruck-a-Chucky, Upper Lake Clementine, and Cherokee Bar, where he patiently collected crumpled dollar bills and unfulfilled promises from the drifters and miners with the greatest courtesy. He did all of the accounting for camp fees and made up the bank deposits, and when once he was audited, not a penny was missing. He was our pistol instructor and a really competent shooter. For some reason he was fated always to be the one who picked up the paper on those Saturday afternoon fights between drunken young men on the river beaches. These were the most hopeless sorts of investigations, for there were endless numbers of involved parties and witnesses whose slurred statements all had to be written down. O'Leary knew that the district attorney would never prosecute anyone, for there were no clear perpetrators or victims in these things, just winners and losers cut from the same belligerent cloth. Yet he was as diligent in reporting on them as he was in his other work. He was respected both by citizens and by fellow officers, and senior cops from other departments always greeted him first when we worked a scene together, for he was possessed of that amiable reticence seasoned cops admire in others.

  But what he had been through in those canyons by the time I met him had taught O'Leary that the government cared not a stitch for this river—he was right about that—and he had decided not to get himself killed for it. And so he maintained a compassionate truce with the lost and hopeless, the minor misdemeanant and the drunk, and unless forced by circumstances beyond his control, he didn't go out of his way to pry into their activities, providing they behaved themselves and paid their camping fees once in a while.

  But I was young and brash and I had no real understanding of what O'Leary and the others had been through before my arrival. I thought that what was now forming in my mind was original—the idea of making a real park out of this hopeless dam site, whipping it into shape with diligent enforcement of park regulations and driving off the scary people so that birdwatchers, kayakers, and families would feel safe coming to it. Now, of course, I know all of the rangers had started with that notion.

  And so I set out to violate O'Leary's truce. Because I hated begging camp fees from armed men, I began systematically seeking out and seizing every pistol, rifle, shotgun, knife, dagger, brass knuckles, or club I could get my hands on. In the next ten years I confiscated 125 weapons in criminal cases. To store them, I put up evidence cabinets and, eventually, a property room.

  Because I didn't want to be seated in a truck while my partner negotiated with an armed man for camp fees, I put down on my career development plan that I wanted to become a defensive tactics instructor, and that winter I went off to school for training. For the next several years I stood over my fellow rangers in long practice sessions on wrestling mats until their wrists and knees ached, drilling them on how to take away a gun from an armed man, what to do if he tried to grab their gun, and how to search and handcuff him safely. They must have thought I was a prick. I guess I was. But they were good-natured about it and trained hard, and we began to look like we knew what we were doing. Meanwhile, MacGaff worked his accounting magic on the Bureau to replace two of the old Ramchargers. When the new Jeeps came in, I found a welder who built racing cars down in Sacramento, and we put together the first of a whole string of very businesslike new patrol rigs, with all the trimmings.

  For the rest of that summer and the next I went back to Cherokee Bar alone, over and over. With a shotgun in my arms and my heart in my throat I tiptoed down the riverbank through the brush, seeking out the miners illegal camps and dredging operations. I arrested them on their various warrants—a lot of them seemed to have had previous problems with the law. I towed their vehicles away.

  One day it was Sherm Jeffries who went to Cherokee Bar to collect camp fees, and when he arrived at that troublesome campsite, he got bitten by the Great Dane. When he recovered, he and I went back there together. The dogs came out to meet us as usual, followed this time by several miners. We faced each other and words of unhappiness were exchanged. Between us, the Dane started growling and lunged at my crotch. Without thinking, I hit it hard on the nose with my aluminum ticket book. The animal drew back, whimpering. I wrote the owner another ticket for dog-off-leash. Within a week he filed a grievance with Internal Affairs. It was eventually dismissed. After that my life was threatened several times. One of the Cherokee Bar miners told me he'd been a sniper in Vietnam and one day soon he was going to do what he did best—to me. But in the end, Cherokee Bar began to turn around.

  In my first eight months in the beautiful desolation of the once and future Auburn Reservoir, I made twenty-nine arrests. Bell made one, O'Leary three, MacGaff six, Finch—who was spending much of his time at the union office down in Sacramento working for the betterment of all rangers—ten.

  At least fifteen cars had their windows broken and their contents stolen that year in our canyons. I suspect there were many more, but the reporting rate was miserable. There were eight assaults and batteries, two rapes, a grand theft, a wife beaten by a husband, one arson, ten drunk-in-public arrests, twelve cases of vandalism—mostly shot-up signs. The operators of ten motor vehicles were arrested for drunk driving. We apprehended fourteen people on arrest warrants for offenses they'd committed elsewhere; of those, twelve were misdemeanors, two felonies. We recovered nine stolen cars and investigated the deaths of four people in accidents or suicides. Twice that year we were involved in high-speed car chases.

  We know these things because of what Finch put down on his career development plan. His project involved entering selected data about every incident we rangers handled into a computer database program. From 1986 on he distributed an annual digest of statistics on how people had behaved on the condemned ground of the Auburn Dam site—and the news wasn't good. Of course, this was before Microsoft Access and Filemaker became the industry standards in database programs, and the name of the software into which Finch entered every event reported by the permanent rangers on that temporary river was one most people wouldn't recognize today.

  It was a program called Paradox.

  4 / Occurrence at Yankee Jims Bridge

  AT SOME POINT in the last five million years as it flowed southwest out of the Sierra Nevada, the American River fell in with a line of secret cracks in the earth called the Gillis Hill Fault. A river always takes the easiest way to where it is going and, like some people, will exploit any weakness in its surroundings to get there. So just east of what is today the town of Colfax, the North Fork insinuated itself into the promising cleft of the fault and began running along it. But as it cut downward the river seems to have slid sideways, for the rocks along the fault dip east, at a right angle to its channel. Eventually the North Fork no longer ran along the fault but ran parallel to it. And as is also true of people, rivers sometimes keep doing things long after the reasons for doing them are gone. So for many years—hundreds of thousands, perhaps even a million or more—the river has continued to flow that way.

  From the time of the Gold Rush, the five miles of the North Fork along the Gillis Hill Fault were known to be rich in gold, and that reputation persisted even after the North Fork canyon was to be inundated by the Auburn Dam. By the time of my first patrol of it in June 1986, that part of the river had long been one of my fellow rangers more troublesome responsibilities. True to form, during that first reconnaissance I caught sight of a squatter's shack along the canyon wall and a gold dredge below it in the river. Back at the ranger station I found no permit for a mining camp there, so in July, Doug Bell and I hiked back up the river to investigate. And in this simple way began a dark chain of events that continued into the fall of that year.
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  To hike to that part of the North Fork, Bell and I would start from the bridge where the road between Colfax and the ghost town of Yankee Jims crossed the river. Completed in 1884, the Colfax—Yankee Jims Road consisted of a crooked shelf barely wide enough for one car, chipped into the slatey shale wall of a tributary called Bunch Canyon with the typical economy of roads built with hand tools and intended for use only by horse-drawn vehicles. Leaving the outskirts of Colfax on it, you passed a couple of abandoned shacks and a collection of junked cars riddled with bullet holes. Beyond these you came to an occupied cabin separated from the road by a tall board fence, on which the resident had painted in large white letters: HAVE A FUCKED DAY!, TRESPASSERS WILL BE EXECUTED, and I SHOOT FIRST AND ASK QUESTIONS LATER. Beyond that outpost you passed several abandoned mine shafts and our shot-up boundary sign, and eventually you reached the bottom of the canyon and Yankee Jims Bridge. Completed in 1930, the bridge's creaky deck depended from two rusty cables about seventy-five feet above the rocky breach full of rushing water, and however tentatively you drove onto it, the whole structure bucked and swayed underneath you in the most unsettling way. In all, Yankee Jims was a forbidding place for a ranger in those days.

  On the far side of the bridge that morning, I took a 12-gauge shotgun from our truck and slung it over one shoulder. Bell carried only his revolver. Leaving the road on foot, we forded Shirttail Creek, which tumbled into the North Fork from a rocky slot just upstream of the bridge. From there we followed an old miners' trail up the canyon wall, past a series of ledgelike indentations supported by rock retaining walls—the footings of Gold Rush miners' cabins.

  As we started up the canyon, it still mystified me why we tolerated mining. Any such activity was clearly in violation of not one but several state park laws. Since my first look at suction dredging, I had questioned my fellow rangers about it several times. I had received only the most cryptic responses. But the mere mention of mining seemed to incite in them such a mixture of smoldering anger and hopeless resignation that I soon abandoned the subject. It wasn't until a decade and a half later—in the course of research for this book—that I finally learned what had happened to those men.

  In 1965, when the legislation authorizing the Auburn Dam was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, the price of gold was just over thirty-five dollars an ounce. A decade passed, and the project ran into extended delays in construction. Most landowners in the canyons upstream had been bought out or condemned by then. Meanwhile, by 1976, gold prices quadrupled.

  Although large-scale gold extraction was essentially a dead industry in California, unemployed men, men running from child support or the law, and those who were simply square pegs in the round holes of society had never stopped coming to Northern California to prospect. By the 1970s the availability of portable suction dredges and scuba-diving gear made it easier for small operators to recover gold from rivers, and with no one around to tell them to leave, miners equipped with this kind of gear settled in the site of the Auburn Reservoir as squatters. Semi-permanent camps and shacks appeared all over the place. Untended campfires ignited wildfires. Piles of garbage and old cars were dumped down the canyon walls. Guns were pulled in mining-claim disputes. Murder victims began turning up in shallow graves. The Bureau of Reclamation didn't have its own rangers, so as the North and Middle Forks descended into anarchy, the agency tried bringing in federal marshals for occasional sweeps, but that didn't even put a dent in the problem. What was needed was a constant law enforcement presence.

  Bureau reservoirs were usually handed over to federal or state park agencies to operate as recreational lakes upon their completion, and at Auburn the agency chosen for that job in a decade-old contract had been California State Parks. So in 1976 the Bureau renegotiated the contract with the state to bring rangers in earlier. Between 1977 and 1982 a park superintendent, a chief ranger, two supervising rangers, seven police-trained patrol rangers, a clerk dispatcher, a couple of maintenance men, and several seasonal helpers were sent into these canyons. To bring the area under their authority, in 1979 the place was designated a State Recreation Area.

  What ensued was undoubtedly one of the strangest stories in the history of the century-old park movement. The laws and authorities given to state park rangers in California had been crafted to preserve cherished landscapes in perpetuity, but they now applied to a pair of river canyons the government intended to put underwater. Not surprisingly, the rangers found it difficult to convince violators, the judges who heard their criminal cases, indeed even their own upper management, why preservationist anti-mining laws should be enforced there. To complete the rangers misery, by the early 1980s, the new Reagan administration and Congress began drastic cuts to domestic spending. In 1982 the Bureau slashed the budget for Auburn State Recreation Area—federally funded by contract—and the superintendent, chief ranger, several rangers, and administrative staff were transferred out. At the same time the price of gold had really skyrocketed, peaking at $850 an ounce—twenty-five times what it had been when the dam was begun. The social and environmental effects of the resulting gold rush overwhelmed the remaining rangers, and in the winter of 1982–83, seeing no way to fulfill their legal obligations, they closed the river indefinitely to mining and camping.

  The hue and cry that followed was deafening. State Parks Sacramento headquarters was soon deluged with petitions carrying over three thousand miners signatures, asking for a reversal. At a hearing before the State Park Commission in 1983, miners aired their grievances. Among them was the assertion that State Parks, not gold dredgers, was responsible for polluting the American River—by failing to provide outhouses and forcing miners to use the river-banks for a latrine.

  Whatever the merits of this and the miners other arguments, State Parks was not known for political heroism. The agency's director immediately rescinded the closure, proclaiming that the miners camps and dredges could remain on the river while under study—a study that is apparently unfinished over twenty years later, because results have never been presented. (Some of the dredges are still there.) By 1984 the only curb on mining was a rule that no one could camp more than thirty days at a stretch in any state park, which in practice made it hard to set up and run larger mining operations. Still, you had to find the miners' camps to enforce it. To further placate the miners, State Parks director appointed a sort of outhouse czar from headquarters, and under his direction Auburn State Recreation Area—which otherwise lacked the most rudimentary facilities—received a diaspora of privies. Some were installed in places so remote they had to be flown in by helicopter; unused, they were soon overgrown with wild grape and blackberry vines. Some were installed too close to the river and were carried away by floods; for several years the remains of one could be seen perched in a tree near Lake Clementine. Some were used for target practice. Others disappeared entirely, and no one knew exactly what had happened to them.

  The canyon was a thousand feet deep, and so narrow at the bottom I felt as if I could reach across the river and touch the opposite wall. Thirty feet below us, the North Fork sluiced through its tight channel of water-polished blue-gray bedrock. The noonday sun seared through the breaks in the trees. Sweat trickled down the inside of my bulletproof vest and made a dark line down Bell's uniform shirt—he preferred to go without the insufferably hot body armor.

  A mile up, our path degenerated into multiple trails meandering through a steep forest of live oak and buckeye. We forded another creek and eventually came to yet another fork in the trail. Cut branches had been piled on one side to discourage casual exploration. We pushed them aside and made our way up that side of the fork. The shack was so well concealed that we didn't see it until we were twenty feet away. There was no flat ground in this canyon, and like those of Gold Rush miners, this shelter had been constructed on a bench cut into the canyon wall, supported on the outside by a rock retaining wall. We approached cautiously and I rapped on the plywood door. There was no answer. We let ourselves in.<
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  The shelter's frame was fashioned from peeled fir poles and a few incongruously expensive redwood four-by-fours, and it was sheathed in clear plastic and small pieces of good plywood that seemed to have been salvaged from another building. A roof consisting of a canvas tarpaulin stretched over a row of sapling poles sloped back to meet the cut in the canyon wall that formed the interior wall on the uphill side. The interior was heated by a woodstove made out of an oil drum and furnished with a kitchen counter, two bed platforms, and a couple of rude tables.

  Bell was peering at the four-by-fours and at the odd-sized pieces of plywood with a curious expression. He walked back outside and I followed. At the far end of the ledge the miners had dug a pit toilet, a hole in the earth covered with a sheet of plywood, at the center of which stood a semi-conical fiberglass outhouse pedestal with a white enameled-steel toilet seat.

  "Hey—this place is made out of our outhouses!" Bell chuckled.

  "No!"

  "No question about it. Look!" he said, pointing to the nice redwood four-by-fours, the plywood, and the fiberglass outhouse pedestal. All state issue.

  Back inside, we inspected the shack's contents. On each of the bed platforms was a grubby foam mattress over which was laid a sleeping bag. Lifting one, I discovered a sheathed machete, and under the other, a loaded 16-gauge shotgun. I unloaded it. Nearby I found a box of .30-.30 rifle shells, but no rifle. Two deerskins with the hair on—no doubt poached with the .30-.30, an ideal deer gun in such country—were rolled up under one of the beds.