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

In the beginning you just have a job. You work seasonally. Most of the rangers you see in national or state parks are seasonals—in national parks, even a lot of the rangers with guns are. These men and women have put themselves through law enforcement academies and emergency medical technician courses at their own expense and on their own time. Seasonals jump out of helicopters into forest fires and rappel down cliffs to save stranded climbers. Most of them have no retirement plans or medical benefits. But the good ones are so highly sought after that they can have their pick of the most glorious forms of employment on earth: they rock climb for the government in the Grand Tetons and Yosemite Valley, scuba dive on government time in the Everglades and Channel Islands, and go whitewater rafting and kayaking in the Grand Canyon on government per diem.

They—we, for I was one of them before I went to the American River—keep their packs, climbing gear, sleeping bags, wetsuits, and milk crates full of dehydrated food in a van or a pickup with a cargo shell at the park's migrant-worker housing. In the summer they work as wilderness rangers or fight fires in the mountains. In the winter they migrate to the desert or the beaches, or work ski patrol and avalanche control at ski areas.

But after a few years of this, you realize you aren't getting anywhere and have no job security, and you start looking for a permanent job. Before, as a senior seasonal, you could have your choice of assignments. Now, as a junior permanent, you're back at the bottom of the heap. So you gladly take what you can get. Then, to get back to the kind of places that were the whole point of rangering in the first place, you begin to make calculated moves instead of moves of the heart. That's when the trouble begins.

Edward Abbey, writing of his experiences at Arches National Monument in the early 1960s in that greatest of all ranger books, Desert Solitaire, eschewed permanent employment. The poet Gary Snyder, who at once formed and echoed the environmental ethic of a generation, worked for the National Park Service on seasonal trail crews in the Sierra and as a seasonal fire lookout in the North Cascades. Under Snyder's influence, Jack Kerouac later took a Cascade lookout job too. Neither man probably ever considered going permanent. As I write this, Snyder is an old man and Kerouac is long dead, but you can still see their North Cascades from Sourdough Mountain. Abbey is dead, but the Arches National Monument he loved lives on. By 1986, however, Ron O'Leary, Steve MacGaff, Doug Bell, Sherm Jeffries, Dave Finch, and I were all permanent rangers on a temporary river. For most of us, our career prospects ended when we went there. The Auburn Dam site wasn't the kind of place that looked good on a resume. The department preferred to think of its rangers chatting with families in neat little picnic grounds or giving wildflower walks. Most of us were never promoted again. What we did there mattered only to us, and to the river.

I never saw the career development plan Bell gave to MacGaff. But one day the following winter I heard the table saw running up in the metal-roofed workshop at the top of our compound. Stepping in through the big sliding doors out of the rain, I saw a fire crackling in the oil-drum woodstove. In the middle of the room Bell was cutting pieces of plywood. Some were already assembled nearby. He was making birdhouses, but they were much larger than normal. I asked him what he was up to.

"Duck houses," he said, "for my career development plan."

A few months later I was walking the shoreline of one of the ponds on the headwaters of Knickerbocker Creek when I came upon several of Bell's boxes nailed to pine trees. By then I knew what they were: nest boxes to encourage wood ducks—the most exquisitely gaudy waterfowl ever seen in the American River country, with their lemon yellow, cinnamon, white, and shimmering green and blue feathers and multicolored cloisonné bills—to settle and raise their young at our ponds. I didn't get too close for fear of disturbing the occupants, but later when I asked him, Bell told me that a couple of duck families had accepted his invitation.

In a way I wish that had been my project, for it was all about birds instead of laws and lawbreakers. Bell also ran the boat-in campground at Lake Clementine, and he later became a prolific builder of hiking and riding trails. The trails and the nest boxes were Bell's signature: Faced with all the malevolence of humankind and their dam, he still genuinely liked people, but he much preferred to deal directly with the land and its creatures.

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