One summer evening Finch got dispatched to investigate shots fired in the campground at Upper Lake Clementine. O'Leary and I responded to back him up. Finch got there first. At the bottom of Upper Lake Clementine Road in those days, what we called a campground was nothing but some tracks in the sand through a jungle of willow and giant bamboolike arundo, ending on a beach where people set up their tents. We had a campground host living in a camper at the entrance to keep an eye on things.
When Finch got there the host, a man I will call Bob, told him that a particular group had been shooting a large-caliber revolver in the campground for over an hour. Bob gave Finch his detailed notes with descriptions of the people and their vehicles. Then, just as Finch made ready to leave, a brown pickup truck drove by, headed out of the campground.
"That's one of the trucks!" exclaimed Bob.
Finch gave chase, hit the siren, and stopped the truck on the road out of the canyon. He had no idea at that point where the gun was. Approaching cautiously, he found that the truck's single occupant was a woman. She looked nervous. Finch questioned her about the gunfire.
"What gunfire?" she asked. When someone says that about a .44 magnum going off repeatedly in a campground, you know you're close to the suspect.
But before Finch could go any further with his investigation, a man drove up on a motorcycle. He had an open beer clamped between his thighs. He demanded to know what Finch was doing with his wife. The man fit the description of one of the shooters. He was conspicuously drunk, so Finch detained him for drunk driving.
O'Leary and I arrived. We got a brief account from Finch of what had transpired so far. No sooner had Finch finished than another pickup truck drove toward us. It too matched one of the vehicles Bob had described, and when it pulled up alongside us we found its driver as drunk as the first two. O'Leary and I detained him as well. Like shooting, drunk driving is dangerous in a campground, where it's possible to back your car right over someone in a sleeping bag in the dark.
By now things were getting a little hard to keep track of. It was easier for three officers to carry out one arrest than it was for us to arrest three unpredictable drunks at the same time. Then, as O'Leary was walking the second of the drunks to Finch's Jeep, a fourth member of the party appeared on foot.
"What are you assholes doing? Leave him alone!" she slurred, making a beeline for O'Leary, as the latter attempted to pour his prisoner into the Jeep's back seat.
Finch stepped into her path. She shoved him. He stood fast. Behind him O'Leary was still struggling with his man, who wasn't following directions. I was over with the first woman Finch had stopped, trying to keep her out of the fray.
The other woman kept on shoving Finch and screaming, "You fucking assholes, you fucking assholes!"
"It's time for you to leave," Finch told her in a voice that was loud but surprisingly calm. "Walk away and stop interfering, or I'll have to arrest you," he said.
"Fuck you, you fuckers! Leave him alone!" the woman answered at the top of her lungs, pawing at Finch to get at O'Leary.
Finch had had enough.
"That's it," he said, grabbing one of her wrists as he reached for his handcuffs. But she wasn't going for it, and the fight was on. Now she was trying to bite him. O'Leary closed the door on his prisoner and turned to help Finch. I told the first woman to remain in her pickup and went to help Finch, too.
By now it had grown quite dark, and distracted by the scuffle, none of us saw the woman I'd left in the first pickup get out and sneak around the other side of Finch's Jeep, where she opened the back door we had mistakenly left unlocked and let both prisoners out. O'Leary and Finch and I were struggling to handcuff the screaming woman when we looked up and saw both men out of the car, staggering around in their handcuffs, yelling about police brutality. Having worked the second woman into her cuffs, O'Leary and I left her kicking at Finch and went to corral the men. Another struggle ensued. We dragged them back to the car.
Eventually we had all four drunks in the back seats of our vehicles. We were sticky with sweat and covered in dust. The combination made mud. We radioed for a brace of tow trucks. In the impound search we found the gun, a loaded .44 magnum revolver, under the driver's seat of the first pickup Finch had stopped. Why hadn't it been pulled in the melee? Just luck, we guessed.
After Finch departed from the union, his quest for diversions diversified. He became an avid collector of old ranger badges and uniform insignia.
One day I came into the office at the lower end of our compound and found him at his desk. Spread out in front of him and across a typing table to his left were old photographs and hand-tinted postcards.
"What's all this? New hobby?" I asked him.
"I've been looking for old photos of rangers—the first rangers. I got these from a guy at a badge collector show."
"Who's this guy with the beard, standing in front of the tree?"
"That's Galen Clark, the first Guardian of Yosemite," answered Finch.
I picked up the photo.
"Pretty wooly-looking—a real frontiersman, with the beard, that rifle, and the mountain man costume. Early national park ranger, huh?" I asked.
"Nope, state—state park ranger. The first. His actual title was Guardian of Yosemite. Yosemite Valley was deeded by ol' Abraham Lincoln to the state of California as a public park in 1864."
"I thought the army took care of Yosemite."
"That's true," replied Finch, "but they didn't get there until 1891. Our guy Galen was there first. From what I can tell, he was the first ranger in the United States, and he was a state ranger, just like us."
The actual mechanics of defending Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks did not emerge fully formed. In 1866, when Galen Clark was appointed by the California Legislature to be Guardian of Yosemite, he was one man living in the midst of a spread-out community of homesteaders, innkeepers, hunters, and sheep-herders making a living off the land he was supposed to be protecting. The lumber for the settlers' habitations and guest accommodations, the grass and hay for their horses, and the wild and domestic meat and vegetables that graced their tables most often came from park territory. As a result, much, maybe most, of the energy expended by Clark and the other first guardians went into controlling the depredations of their fellow residents.
Still, from the very beginning the pattern was familiar. Researching his roots, Finch traveled to Yosemite, where he learned the circumstances of Galen Clark's first known arrest. In 1870, Clark apprehended two men who had cut down a huge pine tree. He took them before a judge in Mariposa, where they were convicted and fined twenty dollars each. Finch also located a report by Clark's successor, James Hutchings, to the California Legislature of 1882.
"Here it is—listen to this," he told me one day from his desk. "'Sometimes we are visited by rough characters from the mountains who, when crazy with liquor, not only become nuisances, but sometimes endanger human life.' Sound familiar?" he asked.
"Some things don't change," I replied.
"Yup," he said, smiling. "Some things never change."
But Clark, Hutchings, and the other solitary guardians could never effectively patrol and protect the hundreds of square miles of the early parks. In 1875 it was reported that four thousand elk had been slaughtered by wildlife poachers in Yellowstone the previous winter, and five years later, an estimated ten thousand annual visitors were under no practical supervision in most of the park. They, their innkeepers, and their guides went around cutting down trees, shooting animals, and chipping souvenirs from the rock formations of Mammoth Hot Springs. In an attempt to remedy the situation, a local mountain man, Harry Yount, was appointed to guard Yellowstone. He resigned after only a year, complaining that the task was hopelessly large for just one man. A series of government investigations of conditions in national parks during the following decade resulted in scathing reports on the failure of civilian authorities to protect them properly. Some stronger force was needed, and into this void, in 1886 at
Yellowstone and in 1891 at Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, were sent detachments of U.S. Army cavalry, whose superiors had long expressed an interest in the job.
The first troops were under orders to evict squatters, capture fugitives, protect natural features and visitors from harm, and control depredations by innkeepers and guides. But their commanders intuitively invented the larger trade of park management in a rough form of what it has become today. They made maps and surveys of plants and wildlife. They constructed trails, roads, and headquarters. They stocked fish, fed herds of elk and buffalo through hard winters, and began closely regulating the activities of hoteliers and other park concessions.
And so, if our pedigree as rangers goes back to the never-uniformed Galen Clark and Harry Yount, we are more recognizably the descendants of these uniformed and intensely bureaucratic turn-of-the-century cavalrymen. From them came the flat-brimmed cavalry hat rangers still wear, and from them the olive-green uniforms, which had supplanted the army blues by the time the Park Service took over from the army during the First World War. This horse-soldier army, the historian Harvey Myerson has remarked, existed on rules and regulations; its lifeblood, the orderly flow of paper forms for every conceivable occasion through successive ranks for approval. Today California state park rangers have no fewer than 142 forms and I spent about a third of my time as a ranger filling them out. Our rules and policies filled four extra-deep three-ring binders. Forms and requisitions went from us to supervising rangers with lieutenant's bars on their collars, and from them to chief rangers with captain's bars, and from them to superintendents with gold oak leaves. Our class-A jackets were festooned with gunmetal buttons and our leathers were supposed to be polished, but like cavalrymen in the hinterlands, they often got dusty. We set our digital watches to military time.
The guns that rangers carry are often thought of by the public as a recent addition, but the need for such martial protection in the face of hair-raising encounters with miscreants goes all the way back to the beginning. In 1916, the first director of the underfunded National Park Service dug into his own pocket to buy each of his rangers a pistol. Today, when the talking, cajoling, and educating are over—and all good rangers prefer these methods to the use of force—the fundamental mode of park protection remains coercive, by force of law and arms. The threats facing today's rangers are more than theoretical. According to a 2002 federal study, rangers are more than ten times as likely to be killed or injured on the job than agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration.
After the failure of the first undermanned civilian authorities, their replacement by the army, and the army's replacement by an armed and uniformed civilian police force, the problem of who would manage the parks, and how, and under what philosophy, has never gone away. Adding to the philosophical stresses within them, by the mid-twentieth century park agencies were placed in charge of an increasing number of "recreation areas"—lands of a profoundly different character from those their founders had in mind. Typical of these areas were crowded coastal beaches and the shorelines of water storage reservoirs. As any ranger who has worked in them can tell you, the atmosphere in these places is less contemplative and more boisterous than that of a nature preserve. At times it is downright lethal.
For decades park professionals have worried that the sort of duties rangers grow used to in a recreation area—controlling crowds, quelling drunken fights, and contending with an urban criminal element—would change the fundamental nature of the ranger's role. What has been less widely discussed are the effects of whole careers spent in manmade recreation area landscapes—lifeguard towers, concrete-block restrooms, parking lots, snack bars, and the muddy bathtub rings from the changing water levels of reservoirs—on the wilderness aesthetic of people in the ranger services: that love of unspoiled nature that once characterized the men and women who gravitated to park work.
Auburn State Recreation Area was one of two main areas under the administration of State Parks' American River District. The other was Folsom Lake, where the district's offices were located. By the time I came to work in the district we had a new superintendent there. Tall, blond, and athletic—he ran during his lunch hour—
Bruce Kranz was a born-again Christian with a growing family. He had started his career as a lifeguard on State Parks' Southern California beaches and, rising quickly through the ranks, worked at two other reservoirs before coming to Folsom. Folsom was basically the same sort of operation as the beaches where Kranz had started out: intensive aquatic recreation close to a major population center—in this case, Sacramento and its suburbs. Kranz was by most accounts a capable administrator of such places but had little ability as a naturalist. Nor had his assignments ever required that of him.
As it happened, Kranz arrived at Folsom right after the floods of 1986 and just in time for a long drought that followed. For the next six years the reservoir outside his office window was perennially drawn down to fill the Bureau's water contracts. It was so bad during those years that Kranz employed a full-time maintenance worker whose job was to go around the lake on a barge, setting out buoys to mark all the rocks emerging from the water so that speedboats wouldn't hit them.
By the summer of 1992 the lake's marina looked like a desert. Every day Kranz had to look at the expanding shoreline, now over half a mile of bare yellow dirt. Dust devils whirled across it, picking up beer cups and bits of paper. At night his rangers pursued kids in four-wheel-drives over it and their headlights flashed in crazy circles over the dusty wastes, as if searching for anything that lived. To make matters worse, the storm of 1986 caused a rewrite of the flood control rules for Folsom and now, at times in the winter too, almost two thirds of the lake's capacity was held empty for flood control space.
During this time Kranz developed an interest in politics. In 1992 he unsuccessfully campaigned for a seat on the board of directors of the Placer County Water Agency. Later he served as chairman of the county's Republican Central Committee. In the latter role he rubbed shoulders with Placer County's archconservative state and federal legislators, among them freshman Congressman John Doolittle, Republican from California's Fourth District, and State Senator Tim Leslie. In such company Kranz soon become an outspoken advocate of the Auburn Dam. Auburn, he pointed out, would store runoff from the mountains that could be used to keep Folsom full for swimming and waterskiing all summer. Furthermore, Auburn would enable the flood control capacity presently held open at Folsom to be moved upstream, so Folsom could be allowed to fill in the winter and spring. But Kranz's motives were not entirely myopic. Like many natives of Southern California, a near-desert that by the end of the nineteenth century was reaching four hundred miles north for its water, Kranz believed that if the state was to continue to grow and prosper, we would need more water. Lots more.
So it was that in 1991, when a discussion was held at a regional meeting of district superintendents on what California State Parks's official position on the Auburn Dam should be, Kranz alone spoke in favor of drowning his own park, Auburn State Recreation Area. Within two years drought gave way to normal rainfall again, but Kranz, who once described himself as "a pro-business guy in a preservationist agency," never changed his opinion. Interviewed in 2003, he still thought a dam on the North Fork was a good idea.
If having our own boss come out in favor of putting us underwater wasn't enough, new legislation to authorize completion of the Auburn Dam continued to appear in Congress. No sooner had Representative Norm Shumway's Auburn Dam Revival Act of 1987 died in a legislature more worried about deficit spending than about floods or federally subsidized water for California agribusiness than another Auburn Dam bill appeared in 1988. This one was a $600 million plan for a flood-control-only dam. It perished without ever leaving committee. But its backers didn't give up easily, and the next year they were back. Again they were defeated.
The new concept—a "dry dam" that didn't store water or generate power but remained empty until a major storm, when its gates would
rumble shut, filling the American River canyons with runoff for a few days or weeks—brought arguments between two factions: those who supported a more expensive all-purpose dam and those asserting that flood control must be secured for Sacramento without triggering the opposition all-purpose dams had among budget conservatives and environmentalists. By 1989 local governments around Sacramento had formed their own flood control agency, and by 1992 this agency, the State Reclamation Board, and the Army Corps of Engineers were all backing the flood-control-only dam.
That year the dam loomed in Congress again in the form of a $638 million flood control project buried in a semiannual omnibus water projects bill. Again environmental groups mobilized, and the bill was defeated in a floor vote in the House by a margin of almost two to one. The following year a federal study found sections of the river in the Auburn Reservoir site eligible for designation as "wild and scenic," which would have protected it. However, no such designation was ever made. Then in 1996 the Auburn Dam was back in Congress in another omnibus water projects bill. Again environmental groups mobilized and again the dam was defeated.
In 1992, the year Folsom Lake hit bottom, John Doolittle had been elected to represent Norm Shumway's old district in Congress, replacing Shumway as the big, multipurpose Auburn Dam's principal booster. Doolittle's Fourth Congressional District was a huge chunk of sparsely populated, mountainous, northeastern California. It contained no ground at risk from the American River's floods; however, its southwestern corner happened to include three of the fastest-growing towns in California: Roseville, Rocklin, and Lincoln. By 2002 Lincoln's population increased by 28 percent in a single year, making it the state's most rapidly growing city.
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