Nature Noir by Jordan Smith (best summer reads of all time txt) 📕

we made our way higher the forests grew sparse. Between patches of meadow and bare rock, the few remaining pines had been shaped by a hundred or two hard winters, the exposed grain of old lightning and avalanche wounds on their trunks weathered amber in the sun, their undulant canopies following the curves of the glacier-polished granite outcrops against which they'd huddled for protection from the wind. With a variety of tiny and efficient cook stoves available to backpackers and climbers, the Park Service prohibited campfires in these high forests so no one would use these works of art as fuel. But we came upon a campsite, and in it two men were chopping the heart out of one of these trees for an already overfed campfire. Greeting them with as much friendliness as we could, my friend and I tried to explain how long that tree had taken to grow. The two men sneered, told us to mind our own business, and went back to what they were doing. And as I watched them finish vandalizing that beautiful tree, I remember I wanted, more than anything, a ranger uniform and a citation book.

Less than three years later I had both, and I thought I knew what I was doing. I was a summer wilderness ranger for the Forest Service in what is now the Jedediah Smith Wilderness in Idaho and Wyoming. Unarmed and entirely untrained for police work, one day I happened to walk into a campsite full of people who didn't think much of my uniform or the government I represented. When the yelling and shoving were over I was physically intact, but the idea that people could always be dissuaded from breaking the law by a lecture or a small piece of pink paper with no immediate consequences was slowly dying in me. The following autumn, one of the rangers I worked with—a young woman who must have weighed all of 110 pounds—was threatened with an ax by drunken hunters in the Palisades Range. Still, I hadn't gotten into rangering to be a policeman, and it was another two and a half years before I summoned the gumption to enroll in my first law enforcement academy. When I got out, I took a job patrolling the high country of Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Parks. I felt strange and self-conscious at first wearing the gun and handcuffs, but I told myself they were mainly symbolic and I had no intention of using them on anyone.

One summer evening a couple of months later, an unarmed ranger on foot patrol in the mountains near where I was stationed found two men who had made an illegal campfire in the sparse whitebark pine forests at tree line, just as I had in Yosemite six years earlier. They'd been drinking, and when he confronted them one of them knocked him down, put both hands around his neck, and began to strangle him. Somehow the young ranger rolled out from under his assailant and called dispatch on his portable radio as he ran down a dark trail away from them. The dispatcher called me at my trailer in Silver City, and after talking with the ranger on the radio I sent someone to pick him up at the trailhead and telephoned one of my superiors at headquarters. I was the only law enforcement ranger in that part of the mountains that night, and when the district ranger heard what had happened, he arranged for a helicopter and another armed ranger to be sent up in the morning. The helicopter landed in the sagebrush on the floor of Mineral King Valley at first light, I boarded, and we flew east into the mountains. The rising sun was just gilding the highest peaks when we spotted the tent and the smoking remains of the campfire from the air. There was no sign of life; apparently our suspects were still sleeping. Our pilot set down on a patch of meadow several hundred yards downhill from the camp, and Ranger Roger Pattee and I crept up toward it through the rocks. When we got to the tent, we each chambered a round in our shotguns—which makes a loud, very serious-sounding metallic noise—and ordered the sleepy men out of the tent in their underwear. I was so green that once they were on the ground in front of us, I couldn't remember how to put on the handcuffs. But I managed. The victim subsequently identified his assailant, and within an hour and a half the two men were facing a federal magistrate, who was as unhappy about being dragged out of bed on a Sunday morning as they were.

In another three years I was working in the Guadalupe Dunes along the central coast of California, and by then I had arrested all kinds of people. I had learned a couple of things about human nature that wouldn't startle you much if you took a moment to think about them: When regular people leave the city limits, their behavior doesn't change much, and habitual criminals are seldom rehabilitated by pretty scenery. Still, I believed there was one big distinction between me and your run-of-the-mill cop. I wasn't just slowing the inevitable decline of western civilization by arresting the guilty and carting off the wounded. I had been given a sacred charge: America's crown jewels, those special places legislatures had agreed were too good to ruin.

Driving through the rain and salt spray on those beaches in the winter of 1985, I felt terribly homesick for the mountains. But by that time jobs in the mountains had become difficult to get. With a new administration in Washington, the early 1980s saw much budget-cutting in parks. Park agencies were under pressure to fill what few openings they had with ethnic minorities and women, to correct their previous and very unfair practice of hiring exclusively white male rangers. That adjustment was long overdue, but its effect on my career wasn't good. And