Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  To do this, you pulled over to the riverbank, lashed your oars lengthwise to your rowing frame, tightened your gear lashings, and snugged your helmet and lifejacket again, just for good measure. Then, using your canoe paddles, you took the boat out into midstream and over a drop just upstream of the main event. You then crossed a quiet pool, which gave you enough time to wonder why you were there as you positioned yourself for entry into the Tunnel Chute. Once you dropped into the chute itself, you sat down in the floor of your boat, wedged yourself in as well as you could, and hung on for dear life. Somewhere between a few seconds and an eternity later, what would happen had happened. It was so violent a ride it was really beyond anyone's control. However, most everything and everyone washed through it; it didn't trap people, just occasionally broke their arms and legs. Once I was knocked out of my boat at the top of it and had to swim it. The sheer speed and limb-tearing power of the froth—not water, but a blend of water and air too light to float in yet too wet to breathe—were horrifying. I remembered to roll into a tight ball. Collisions with a couple of boulders left bruises on my thighs and back that lasted for weeks. When it was over, I surfaced facing upstream in the echoing green tunnel with bubbles from the waterfall rising languorously around me. The first thing I saw was the white wall I had just come down in the brightness outside the mouth of the tunnel. For a couple of minutes I couldn't seem to get enough air. I was like a starving man at a banquet.

  Beyond the Tunnel Chute we ran the Three Queens, Kanaka Falls, and Cache Rock Rapids, then several smaller, unnamed ones. Better that they remain unnamed, I thought. Even the well-known rapids for which whitewater guidebooks give step-by-step instructions are periodically rearranged by floodwaters, and then they become mysterious again for a few wonderful months of the following spring. It isn't good for the world to become too well known, we whitewater rangers think. Said Lao Tzu:

  The way you can go

  isn't the real way.

  The name you can say

  Isn't the real name.

  Heaven and earth

  Begin in the unnamed.

  By now we'd allowed the commercial rafts to gain a good mile or two on us, and they'd long since passed from view around the Middle Fork's stately bends. As we floated deeper into the canyon, the effect was the opposite of climbing a mountain. On a mountaintop the whole world is laid out beneath you, but in the bottom of the Middle Fork the whole world is gone; there's just moving water, green and brown canyon walls, and sky. The river remained unmarked by those ahead of us and for all you could see we could have been the first ever to run it, or the last two men on earth. The late Tang dynasty poet Chia Tao was born twelve hundred years before the invention of Hypalon, the strong, flexible fabric out of which our craft was made, yet he understood how a river is always new to each one who runs it:

  Passing on the river, a boat leaves no trace on the waves.

  By the first week of August it was hot in the Central Valley. All visible snow was gone from the high peaks up-canyon and white towers of thunderhead rose above them most afternoons. By the time the Middle Fork's waters bore us through the gorge, they had already kept air conditioners humming somewhere in the great civilization down-canyon, to the west. Before that those waters had been snow on the mountains, and before that clouds, and before that part of an ocean around Hawaii or the Gulf of Alaska. The winds that would bring them back around the cycle, or not, and the snowfields that would shrink and disappear over the next hundred years, or not, would now do so or not according to the aggregate actions of bankers and oilmen in Houston, Almaty, and Bahrain, and of politicians and motorists in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Paris, and Beijing.

  From this bewildering world to these fabled canyons of the Gold Rush continued to come a small stream of those whose fantasy was to go into the mountains and live like nineteenth-century miners. In a way they were no different from us rangers, for we too had sought our own version of the simple life here on the edges of civilization—if not, it turned out, beyond its reach—or from the whitewater guides who sought their own simple peace in the exigency of the right command at the right moment. "Paddle hard, forward, now!" we heard them yell at their clients, who had paid good money to be yelled at—their own version of simplicity—as they entered the bigger rapids.

  The river turned south. The Hornblende Mountains loomed on our left, steep green battlements of pine and Douglas fir. The river was quiet in this section, a sinuous path of silver reflecting the afternoon sun between bright green ranks of willow and alder at the water's edge. Helmets off, wetsuits off, wearing only shorts, we spelled each other on the oars, dabbed our noses and ears with sunscreen, and ran an easy series of riffles between long blue-green pools. We passed African Bar in contented silence, pulling our shifts at the oars.

  Around another bend, Otter Creek entered the Middle Fork from our left at such a sharp downstream angle that the ridge between it and the main canyon had eroded to a cleaver. The ridge top was so sharp it appeared not wide enough to walk on, its sides near-vertical jungles of hardwoods. It rose steeply to an old jeep road on Cock Robin Point, sixteen hundred feet above us, and it was from there that our man had apparently made his way down with his horse and mule. You had to admire his fearlessness, or pity his foolishness, as the case may be. His camp lay on a delta of sand that Otter Creek had deposited around its junction with the Middle Fork. Nothing moved there as we approached, and there was no smoke. We rowed in and pulled our boat up on the beach. In front of us, nailed to a post made of a rough branch, was a hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard: THIS IS A MINING CLAIM. DON'T THROW YOUR GARBAGE ALL OVER OR ELSE.

  We crossed the beach to the edge of the forest where a tent stood in the shade of an overhanging bay laurel. A rock fire ring had been constructed next to it. The ashes were cold to the touch. Around it were a couple of cheap pots and a few dishes, a gold pan, an aluminum sluice box, and a five-gallon bucket partially full of black sand and water—the last stage of the refining process by which placer miners recover gold dust.

  Hoof prints could be seen everywhere, but there was no sign of hay and not a kernel of grain. There wasn't much for a horse or mule to eat in the surrounding woods but thorny buckbrush, wilted redbud, and the less spiny leaves on the tips of scrub oaks. The animals had trampled and torn at every inch of the adjoining canyon wall in their search for nutrition.

  Inspecting the tent, I soon found a rent in one side big enough to walk through at a crouch. Peering through the shredded fabric I found the interior in a shambles: a disheveled sleeping bag, clothes, scraps of paper, and various personal items were scattered about, and over them had been spread a white dust like flour, the contents of several bags of macaroni, and some kind of dried goo—tomato sauce or beans. It looked like there'd been a fight.

  Will and I split up to search for survivors. I went up Otter Creek, Will downstream along the river.

  Otter Creek's canyon was as deep as the main one but far narrower. Its walls were even more precipitous than the Middle Fork's and its bottom so close and junglelike that the only practical way up it was to wade in the creek. The moment I left the beach and entered the shallow water, the world was reduced to a colonnade of gray alder trunks, their canopies obliterating even the narrow strip of sky visible between the canyon walls. The aloneness was intense. The creek sparkled like quicksilver in the dim light, and on either bank great tropical leaves of Indian rhubarb grew from corms that clung to the mossy rocks like the gnarled fingers of an old man's hand. There was no other world. After a quarter mile of wading I had found no trace of the miner or his animals, so I started back.

  Back at the camp there was no sign of Will. I climbed through the hole in the tent to search for clues to what had happened among the disordered contents. I came upon a notebook, densely inscribed in a small hand. It was like a shopping list, or perhaps a journal from the manic phase of a bipolar life:

  Get topographic maps ... set up solar battery charger ... learn tanni
ng for hides ... latigo for saddle ... ammo ... needles and thread ... buttons ... get some books on minerals to read ... get fish hooks ... what kind of fish?

  I leafed though it. More of the same. Near the back I came across a single observation, no doubt reflecting the miner's impression of the way into the canyon:

  Trails not for the faint of heart.

  Will came back up the beach, having found nothing. Leaving him to have one more look around the camp, I struck out across the beach to the mouth of Otter Creek. Halfway there I came upon an explanation for the torn tent, the mess inside, and the miner's apparent disappearance: a huge pile of fresh bear scat of a surprisingly large diameter. It seemed our intervention was no longer required here: A bear had served our eviction notice. Perhaps it had occurred at night, for bears tend to be nocturnal in the hot summer months. Thankfully there was no blood, but the encounter had no doubt left an impression on our man, for he'd obviously departed in a hurry, leaving his entire camp to the bear.

  We got back into the boat. The remainder of that day's patrol passed without incident. Weeks went by, and the camp remained abandoned. In September Will and a couple of his seasonal aides went in and cleaned the place up, burned what they could, and carried the rest out in their raft. The miner was never heard of again on the American River.

  Our other river, the North Fork, was a natural flow stream, its main channel undammed above Lake Clementine. The rafting and kayaking season began when the North Fork swelled with rain in January and continued as the snow in the high country melted in late spring. Then, as flows on the waters of the North Fork went down, boaters moved to the dam-release Middle Fork for the remainder of the summer.

  The commercial guide industry on the American River had begun in the late 1970s, when young men and women who had been spending a lot of time on the river decided to try to make a living taking other people down it. Few wilderness activities are better suited for a guide business than whitewater rafting, in which novices lack both the equipment and the knowledge to negotiate a river safely yet, when properly outfitted and guided, are usually wildly enthusiastic about the experience. In those days any competent boater who could put together a raft, a few paddles and helmets, and an old school bus to get his or her clients to the river could clear $400 a weekend—not bad for people who'd been living in vans, following the spring melt-off around the mountains of the West.

  The American's South Fork, an easier run that soon became the most heavily used whitewater river in California, lured people to try the more challenging North and Middle Forks. In 1982 rangers issued the first six permits for guide services to operate in Auburn State Recreation Area. Three years later, fifty-seven companies were offering whitewater trips on our rivers. A 1985 study showed that paddlers spent nineteen thousand person-days annually beneath the waterline of the Auburn Reservoir. Now rangers were called on to handle whitewater raft accidents and rescues. Hostilities flared when the rafters got out of their boats in places the miners saw as their own, or when incensed boaters cut ropes stretched across the river at neck level, which the miners used to tether their dredges. By 1986 Ranger Sherm Jeffries was writing a management plan for whitewater boating on the American, and over the following couple of years some of us rangers enrolled in guide schools and white-water rescue courses. Eventually we got our own raft.

  Will Reich had come to work for us in the nineties as a seasonal boatman. He'd previously worked as a guide and was better at running a boat in swift water than any of the rest of us. Eventually he went to our academy and came back as our river patrol ranger.

  ***

  On another patrol that summer, Will and I stopped for lunch downstream at Dardanelles Creek. There we munched our sandwiches reflectively, seated on steep, warm sheets of polished bedrock plunging into a deep pool where our boat bobbed, tied off at the riverbank beneath us. When we finished eating I checked the bowline and splashed some cold water on the chambers so the air expanding in the hot sun wouldn't pop our raft. Then Will and I climbed up the canyon wall, following Dardanelles Creek into a slot canyon so narrow you could touch both sides at the same time. The dark stone was water-polished into sensuous curves. The air was cool. We waded through a series of potholes to the base of a small waterfall.

  Two hundred and fifty feet beneath the waterline of the Auburn Dam, we stopped and looked up. Tufts of fern growing from the walls and overhanging branches of trees on either side of the slot above were silhouetted against a thin slice of sky. A thread of water splashed down next to us, throwing cool droplets on our faces. Then, on a little ledge just above head level, we caught sight of a green orb the size and shape of a large cantaloupe, intricately woven from moss. One side featured a small round doorway. It was the nest of a water ouzel, a bird we often saw darting beneath the rapids in search of aquatic invertebrates and fingerling fish. Like the canyon wren the ouzel was a creature of moving water, not reservoir lakeshores. It was the first time I'd ever seen one of their nests, which are usually well hidden.

  In the practice of wildlife management there is a theory, called mitigation, for dealing with the loss of wildlife habitat when reservoirs are built. Mitigation means you do what you can to improve habitat on the land surrounding the inundated place, to make up for the loss. The mitigation package for Auburn Dam included the periodic burning of mature brush fields to spur the growth of new, tender shoots, which make good forage for deer.

  But there was nothing in the package for water ouzels.

  ***

  When our lunch stop was over, Will and I got back into the boat.

  That morning most of the bright-colored flotillas of commercial rafts had been ahead of us, but, rowing vigorously, we'd passed many of them before lunch.

  As we set off again, the first odd thing we noticed was a growing line of wet rock above the water's surface.

  "Does it look to you like the flow's dropping off?" I asked Will.

  "I was thinking the same thing—but it's way too early," he replied, pulling at the oars.

  The next series of rapids, known collectively as Ruck-a-Chucky, were still a ways downriver. But for several miles now you could tell the river was up to something—hoarding altitude, its rapids nothing more than fast little riffles between long pools where the water was so sluggish you had to row against an afternoon headwind or you'd float back upstream. At Ruck-a-Chucky, the unstable walls of the canyon had been calving off into the river for tens of thousands of years, forming a natural dam and a series of waterfalls through huge boulders. Ruck-a-Chucky announced its presence at the end of a long reflecting pool where Canyon Creek tumbled down the left canyon wall through dense stands of fir. At the end of this pool the canyon narrowed and bent sharply to the right. From around the bend came an ominous rumble.

  I was rowing across this pool when I noticed I had to thread my way through the sandbars or run aground. On a beach to my right I saw a line of wet sand above the present waterline. Will put his helmet back on and took the oars while I strapped on mine. Just ahead of us was what boaters call a "horizon line"—a place where the visible surface of the water ends abruptly, which means there's a waterfall. Will lined the boat up just right and we dropped over the edge as usual. But at the bottom of the falls our bow struck hard against an unfamiliar rock sticking out of the water, stopping us dead for a few seconds, perched at a steep angle. Then the impatient water picked up the boat and lifted us past the obstacle.

  "That was different!" I yelled to Will above the foam.

  "No question about it—the flow's really decreasing now!" he yelled back. He looked worried.

  Will stroked over to the right wall, where we tied up to a boulder to ready ourselves for the process of getting our boat through the main rapid. We'd never learn exactly what happened at the power plant; perhaps somewhere on the grid a circuit breaker had popped or a turbine bearing had gotten hot, or someone had just thrown the wrong switch by mistake. But for whatever reason, our river had been turned down at the powe
r plant to just over a third of its normal flow. With the water stretched out through miles of canyon, it took a while for the effects of this to reach us, but that was now happening.

  At the main Ruck-a-Chucky rapid, the water ran over, through, and under a pile of house-sized gray-green boulders. This waterfall was only occasionally run by the certifiably insane. The formula here was simple: If you swim, you die.

  Over the years a variety of approaches had been employed to get boats and gear around Ruck-a-Chucky. In 1986, when I first worked on the American, people unloaded their gear and lowered the empty rafts down the rocks next to the falls with ropes. Later State Parks constructed a portage trail and boats were carried around. Finally, we all learned to "ghost boat" the falls.

  Ghost boating was at minimum a two-person operation. It worked like this: I'd hike around the falls with a single paddle in my hand. Below the falls I'd wade into a deep green pool and swim across a narrow channel to the steeply inclined downstream face of a massive boulder in midstream. I'd climb that until I stood on its top, facing upstream, ten or twelve feet above the rapids. In front of me there was only one refuge from the fast water: an eddy on the downstream side of another boulder. I had to leap far enough out into the current to land perfectly in that patch of protected water while holding on to my paddle. When I surfaced I'd grab for the boulder, then climb its downstream face until I stood on top of it, six feet or so off the rapids. Once in position there, I'd blow a whistle clipped to my life vest and tap my helmet with one hand to signal Will, who watched my progress from the top of the falls upstream.