Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  Will would then disappear, remove some of our gear from the boat to be carried around, and push the unmanned boat out into the current above the falls. Within a couple of minutes the underside of the boat's bow would appear at the brink, hesitate for an instant as if in fear, and plunge over the falls. At the bottom, the self-bailing boat—it had an inflatable floor with little scuppers around its perimeter for water to drain out—would bob from the froth and follow the main current through a boulder garden upstream of me, hidden by the rocks. Suddenly the craft would reappear where it now had to pass between my boulder and the canyon wall, a space only inches wider than the boat itself. My job was to leap into it as it passed underneath me, paddle feverishly to bring it under control, and maneuver it into a quiet inlet between the towering boulders to my right, where we'd reload the gear Will was carrying around. If I missed this cove I could look forward to running the next rapid alone with a single paddle and no oars.

  But on this day we never got that far. I set up, signaled Will, and waited as usual. He disappeared, the minutes passed—and no boat. Eventually he reappeared at the top of the falls, and I heard his whistle above the roar and saw him signaling me to come back upstream. The only way back was to jump into the rapids and swim for shore. I did so.

  Once I rejoined Will at the top of the falls, I saw our boat hung up sideways on a boulder at the brink. There was no reaching it.

  It didn't seem dignified to abandon our vessel to be salvaged by some lucky river rat downstream when the water came back up. State and federal budgets being what they were, we might never get another. And of course we'd become famous in a way a ranger doesn't want to—like two rangers I knew whose handcuffed suspect somehow slipped his cuffs, climbed into the front seat of their patrol car, and drove away. The pursuit that ensued involved several other rangers and a number of sheriff's cars.

  So we decided on a belayed swim. Was it really a good plan? Only if we survived it. I tied one end of our rescue rope to the D-ring on the back of Will's rescue vest. As a last resort, if he got pinned by the current and I was unable to pull him back, he could release his belt, but he'd be unlikely to survive the falls if he did. In order for it all to work I just had to be a really great belayer and he had to be a really great swimmer. Ranger work brings out the best in people.

  Holding a loop I'd tied in the other end of the rope, I swam out to a flat-topped boulder in the pool upstream of the falls and set up my belay on top, where a prominence gave me a good foothold. When I was ready, I pulled up slack and Will let the current and the taut rope pendulum him out into midstream. Then he began to float toward the falls, as I paid out a little rope at a time. When he got close to the boat on the verge of the falls, I felt the current begin to tug him harder. Will signaled for more rope. I wasn't sure whether his wife would appreciate it if I gave it to him. But I wanted our raft back, so I did.

  A yard or two more and Will caught hold of the raft. He signaled urgently. I started pulling him and the boat back upstream. To do this I stood facing him downstream and leaned backward against the rope around my waist with my legs bent. Then, straining against Will, the boat, and the current, I straightened my legs. When I had stood all the way up, I squatted quickly, catching up the slack I'd created before the river could take it back. After a few minutes of grunting and sweating, I had dragged Will far enough from the falls that he could swim the boat safely over to shore. I swam back in.

  While we had been intent on retrieving our raft, the whole Ruck-a-Chucky rapids had stopped working for whitewater boating. One group had hung up in the first rapid where we'd struck a rock but washed through. Water poured through the craft's interior and its passengers clung to surrounding rocks as their guides tried frantically to rescue them. With that rapid blocked other parties couldn't get through at all. Meanwhile, I thought, somewhere deep in the control rooms of dams and electric grids, men and women were sitting in front of angled panels on which little LEDs blinked on in orderly branched schematics and blue computer monitors showed nothing was wrong. They were probably listening to Rush Limbaugh and on their desks cups of coffee were turning cool in mugs with inscriptions like "Western Power Administration Conference 1997" and "World's Greatest Dad." Could they have any idea what the flip of a switch could do to us here? Probably not. The world was not founded upon such empathy and imagination.

  Although it is counterintuitive, a rapid can be far more dangerous at low flows than at higher ones. At low water, rocks you'd normally wash over stick out and try to grab you. The water runs through them like mouthwash through the gaps of your teeth, straining out boats and the boaters who fall out of them, to be pinned underwater and drowned.

  We hiked up to warn the guides for the parties stuck upstream that it had become too dangerous to run Ruck-a-Chucky under these conditions. Luckily, they had managed to pull all of their clients from the river. At this bend in the canyon our radios began working again. An old jeep road ran up the canyon wall above the rapids. We radioed Will's seasonal helpers, who had picked up our truck and driven it around to wait for us, to make arrangements with the outfitters' van drivers—also waiting there—to evacuate their clients by van on this road. Then, with our seasonals stuck directing traffic and darkness coming, Will and I decided to try to run the rest of the river. We set out, lining the boat over the falls like the old days. Then we got in.

  A quarter mile downstream from the main rapids we hung up in another drop. Once firmly lodged, our boat became an obstacle to the current, which then flowed over and through it. We were up to our waists in foam. We clung to the boat, trying not to get washed out. I started laughing, giggling. Will looked at me questioningly, then his sunburned face broke into a grin. I fought my way upstream through the froth to where the boat's stern protruded from the water. Once there I began to jump up and down on it like an ape. The boat groaned; a dull scraping noise resounded through it; we felt it budge and then hold fast again. I jumped some more; Will caught an oar in the current and we were off, with me still laughing and jumping like a madman and Will chuckling as he pulled on the oars.

  It was evening. Downstream from the Ruck-a-Chucky rapids we floated through a series of long, deep pools. In a canyon it grows dark from the bottom up, and close in now, the water and the cliffs on either side of us were wrapped in indigo. Framed in this dark V, a portion of the canyon wall upstream was still lit brilliant orange by the last rays of the setting sun. Then the sky dimmed, the pool beneath us went inky, and the first star reflected off it. The call of a canyon wren echoed down the cliffs.

  This river and its canyon were no longer totally wild, nor were they entirely manmade. Rather, like much of the rest of the world, they had become some mixture of the two. No part of the world could now be said to be entirely untouched or unaltered by human enterprise; radioisotopes had been found in Arctic lichens, ice shelves were falling off the Antarctic cap, and it now looked as if the weather itself could no longer be considered entirely "natural." Citing these facts, some university intellectuals had concluded that there really wasn't any "nature" or "wilderness" anymore. Further, considering what we were now learning about the aboriginal use of fire to manipulate ecosystems, the fact that some so-called hunter-gatherer cultures actually cultivated wild plants, and the possibility that prehistoric hunters may have had something to do with the disappearance of some Ice Age animals, maybe there never had been such purity—at least as far back as human culture existed. Therefore, said some intellectuals, any moral claim you could make for saving what was left of wild, unregulated nature was based upon a faulty premise or, worse yet, pure sentimentalism.

  Under the powerful influence of postmodernism's cultural and moral relativism and an almost excretory, childlike pride in human creations—our bioengineered crops and animals, brainlike computers, and the Internet—some of these thinkers had gone so far as to say that we ought to finish the job of domesticating the earth and yoking all of it to productive purposes. One writer even claimed that th
e planet's physical and biological self-regulation is now being replaced by electric grids and communications networks that, with the intimate involvement of human beings, will become the earth's new nervous system.

  We rangers have a fair amount of time to read and I'd been aware of these ideas for a while. They are merely a more fashionable version of traditional human-centered technological optimism. But seen from a boat on a regulated river that night, the claims of these postmodernists looked faulty. However poorly managed that day, the job of metering a single river to generate power without killing any whitewater rafters was far simpler than managing the climate that provided the river's water. If dams had many beneficial effects for civilization—our late-summer whitewater rafting season being one of them—they also had many unintentional outcomes. Coastal beaches were now deprived of their sand, for centuries replenished by rivers wearing down mountains. Some of the beaches would now grow rocky—and that change might have an effect on, say, the economy of a beach town or the nesting of plovers, and that change still another effect. In California, a wild salmon fishery so robust that even after the Gold Rush people were still pitchforking fish out of Central Valley streams had been nearly done away with by dams. We humans were reductionists, and neither our brains nor our most powerful computers can begin to account for the complex web of interrelationships in a global ecosystem.

  In the end much of what is seemingly known and tamed is in fact unknown, and untamed. Even with our interventions, and now because of them, the world continues to be mysterious and accidental. There are surprises in its most compromised corners, where water is eating dams, lichens establish themselves on concrete, willows take root, and we can almost get killed in wilderness sport because someone turned off the river. It may well turn out to be a more dangerous world for all our efforts to domesticate it. We have always been the beneficiaries of nature's largesse and we take all of this for granted, as adolescents do their parents' roof over their heads, and now we want the car keys. But I, one ranger, do not.

  This evening on the river was an achingly beautiful one, and not because of anything I or my species had done; I did not make the uplifting of mountains, the endless wearing-down of them by water, or the adagio of the canyon wren, nor do I want to. I, one ranger, want only for the unregulated wild that has always provided for us to outlive me and all my progeny. While it may be true that human effects are everywhere, it is a matter of degree, and we are now at a critical juncture in history when we must take great pains to ensure the survival of those landscapes and species that have not already been massively manipulated. Open land that has already been damaged, like these American River canyons, may have to be restored to membership in the unregulated wild by, for example, the removal of invasive exotic species and the reintroduction of fire to the ecosystem.

  For me, the bedrock of reality is my affection for wild nature, and I take exception to the idea that nature is nothing more than a cultural construction. I do not care if some professor in some rabbit warren of a concrete university office building calls my thinking inexact and sentimental. Sentiment—call it love—for the wild is ultimately why Will and I became rangers. Sentiment is why any of us bother to raise children, who sometimes don't appreciate what we do; why we care tenderly for elderly parents after age has deprived them of the memory of our names. It is why we try to salvage the juvenile delinquent, the alcoholic, the drug addict. Without it we are not human. Perhaps these professors will say that Will and I lack critical coolness, giving our working lives to protecting something they say doesn't even exist anymore. In defense, I can only say that to favor a principle—wild, self-willed nature—with the manifest ability to create your species and support you since time immemorial, over a pipe dream of a manufactured and regulated world with no such demonstrated ability, is the most practical thing there is.

  11 / Eight Mile Curve

  IN THE PREDAWN DARK of a June morning in 1998, a white pickup truck with government license plates pulled onto the dirt shoulder of the Auburn—Foresthill road at a place the locals called Eight Mile Curve, within the boundaries of the land the Bureau of Reclamation had condemned for the long-awaited Auburn Dam. An unmarked government sedan was already parked there when the pickup arrived, and inside it the dark bulk of a person could be made out in the brief flash of headlights of a passing car. Someone got out and unlocked a gate. Both vehicles drove onto a dirt track inside it. The gate was relocked, and the vehicles moved off into the woods.

  They had been coming there on and off for months. Sometimes what looked like a civilian vehicle met them there, or a windowless white van with government plates and no markings. But the routine was the same. In a meadow just beyond the locked gate and out of view of the road, the vehicles would stop. Four or five men would get out, greet each other quietly, and begin unloading various gear: white plastic suits and respirators, rolls of red hazard tape like the kind you see at disaster scenes, folding tables, plastic basins marked with warning stickers, bottles of chemicals with hazard markings, and plastic cases like large tackle boxes containing racks of test tubes.

  Using waist-high metal stakes, the men would cordon off an area of the clearing with the red disaster tape. Inside it they'd set up the tables, cover them with sheets of disposable plastic, and arrange lab equipment along them. The van would be backed up to the cordoned-off area and its back doors opened to reveal a mobile laboratory inside, equipped with an exhaust hood for handling lethal substances.

  Then the men would don their white suits. When they finished they looked like astronauts, their rubber boots carefully sealed with tape to the ankles of their suits, hands sealed in rubber gloves, heads hooded in white, and faces covered by clear masks attached by ribbed hoses to the breathing apparatus on their backs. They could well have been soldiers looking for a missing nuclear warhead or DEA agents about to take down a clandestine drug lab, but they were neither. They were biologists from the state and the county, and for months they had come to this spot in Auburn State Recreation Area to empty traps they'd been setting for rodents.

  The routine this particular June morning was a little different. The men set up their equipment but didn't put on their suits right away. As the first hint of pale gray tinged the eastern sky, they walked away from their vehicles into the woods, carrying dark bundles. Ahead of them the Foresthill Divide fell away steeply into the canyon of the North Fork. They set down their bundles and carefully unrolled them. They were lengths of delicate but sturdy netting, made of gossamer threads. The men began fastening them to trees and shrubs. In the pools of light from their flashlights, the woods were unusually green for June. The grass between the oaks was tall, flexible, and dewy. There were wildflowers everywhere, and the cool air was damp and carried the rich scent of April, not the drying-hay odor of the foothills in a typical June.

  It had been a rainy winter and the rains had continued halfway into June. In the bottom of the North Fork, below where the men were, the college students I had hired to keep an eye on Lake Clementine were spending their days sitting huddled in their trucks, running the heaters to keep warm. Seasonal workers were required to purchase their own uniforms and fearing they would spend too much of their wages, I had hinted that it was warm in the foothills by Memorial Day, so they might well get through a summer without owning the hundred-dollar jackets. But at 7:30 A.M. when they went to work, the lake was gray and misty, and they froze in their shorts and short-sleeved shirts in the drizzling rain. I encouraged them to take refuge in their pickups and to improvise whatever greenish sweaters or jackets they could until the unseasonable weather ended.

  My seasonals were not the only ones who were wet that year. In the early part of 1997 the easterly trade winds that normally push sun-warmed equatorial seawater toward the Asian side of the Pacific, to be replaced along the coasts of North and South America by upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean, had weakened. Warmer-than-normal water temperatures in the eastern Pacific increased evapor
ation and cloud formation, driving great wet storms onto the west coasts of the Americas. In Peru torrential rain flooded villages, destroying homes and killing their occupants. The rainwater pooled in low areas, mosquitoes bred in it, and some areas of the country suffered three times the average number of malaria cases. This phenomenon in the Pacific also had far-reaching effects elsewhere in the world. In Kenya and Somalia heavy rains led to outbreaks of waterborne disease, Rift Valley and dengue fevers. But in other areas the 1997–98 Niño had the opposite effect, causing drought, crop failures, and forest fires. My fellow park rangers on Southern California beaches saw unusual numbers of sea lion pups wash up dead in the surf. They looked like rumpled bags of bones. The failure of the nutrient-rich cold upwelling along the coast had led their mothers' prey—squid and small fish—to leave the sea lions' hunting grounds seeking colder water, so the mothers were starving and had little milk for their pups. But on the American River, whitewater rafting outfitters had a banner year, because all the rain and snow in the mountains kept the North Fork at high flows into the beginning of July.

  ***

  But the men at Eight Mile Curve were not there about El Niño.

  When they finished hanging the nets, they extended like invisible fences through the forest, about nine feet high and almost forty long. As the morning light came to the sky between the silhouettes of the oaks, the men quietly retreated into the shadows to wait. Around them the forest awakened in a profusion of birdsong—the plain calls of towhees, the buzzing recitations of Bewick's wrens, the sweet piping of hermit thrushes and Nashville warblers, the raucous squawks of jays. The birds began to flit through the limbs of the trees and along the ground through the underbrush, seeking bugs, grubs, and caterpillars. Some flew into the nets and were entangled. The men emerged from the shadows, gently extricated the frightened birds, and put them in containers, alive and unhurt.