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

sheer mass of its materials. In contrast, a dam like the one the Bureau now proposed for Auburn derives its strength not from sheer mass, but rather from its elegantly engineered shape. An arched dam transfers forces outward into the walls of a canyon in the same way the arched ceilings of Gothic cathedrals transfer their weight outward and down into the cathedrals' walls and flying buttresses.

Because of this, an arched dam's strength ultimately depends on the strength of the rocks into which it's built. Unfortunately, the rocks of the Auburn Dam site were not the best. They were a jumbled mess of amphibolite and chlorite schists, metavolcanics, slick green serpentinite, and talc zones, all extensively faulted and intruded by mafic dikes, quartz, and calcite veins and sloping crazily to the north. Several generations of graduate theses in geology could have been done on them, and indeed, over the following decades, they became some of the most-studied rocks in the world.

But flush with three decades of accolades and swelling budgets since Hoover and Grand Coulee, the Bureau's engineers thought they could repair the flawed rocks. Two years after the thin-arch design was announced, the Bureau finished blasting the first seven thousand feet of tunnels under the massive crescent-shaped engravure they were cutting into the canyon walls. From inside the tunnels and from the surface above, they drilled nearly fourteen miles of core samples, and using these, they made elaborate charts of the extent of the weaknesses. Then they excavated the worst sections of rock and filled the resulting cavities with over two hundred thousand cubic yards of concrete. Not surprisingly, the engineers referred to what they were doing as "dental work," and in dam construction, it wasn't unusual. What was exceptional was the extent of it. At Auburn, it might have been better described as dental reconstructive surgery—like several root canals and a whole suite of crowns.

Regrettably, the site's problems were deeper than the teeth. In fact, the canyon's jaws, indeed its whole body, were a Frankenstein's monster assembled out of bits of older stuff grave-robbed from dead landscapes elsewhere and sutured together at ragged, partially healed scars. And while dam geology concerns itself more with description than narrative, the dam's engineers and geologists had no idea at the time how the rocks they were working on had been formed, and no idea of the nature of the motions even then underway beneath them. From the first surveys of the dam site in the 1920s through the decision to build a thin-arch dam, the American River country had always been thought of—if warped, twisted, uplifted out of the sea, upended, and its rocks remanufactured by heat and pressure—as, in some sense of the word, still a place. But in fact the Sierra foothills were a whole collection of places, plucked from a world map that, reconstructed backward at fifty-million-year intervals, looks at first distorted and then entirely unrecognizable.

By 1982, Les Dellasandro was a supervising deputy at the old sheriff's jail next to the county courthouse in Auburn. On his days off he tended a few cattle he kept on the ranch of a fellow deputy over in El Dorado County. In a town where horse trailers vastly outnumbered European cars, that didn't make him unusual. He was tall and blond, with a well-trimmed mustache, and he had a kind of natural gravitas that demanded respect but didn't invite easy friendship. "He's a cold fish," a retired Auburn businessman once told me. "I never liked him much."

Les's wife's nose had been broken a long time ago, either before or just after she met him, and she had a scar on her arm. Karen told people she'd gotten these injuries in an accident, which may well have been true. But in the days after her disappearance witnesses told police that they'd seen Les ridicule her for these flaws in her appearance, calling her names like "Scar Arm." One neighbor told investigators she could always tell when Les was home, because, she said, you could hear the shouting from his house. A fellow deputy told detectives that he and his wife had been seeing the Dellasandros socially, and on a double date at the county fair the previous summer, they'd witnessed Les Dellasandro excoriating his wife, saying she was dressed like a prostitute. The deputy said the incident had made them so uncomfortable they'd stopped seeing the Dellasandros. Another coworker of Les's phoned the police when he heard Karen was missing, telling them he feared for her safety because he believed Les was fully capable of hurting her. But we've all probably heard something similar about some unfortunate couple in our acquaintance, and to be fair, these accounts don't add up to a murder or, for some married people, even a divorce.

From a light aircraft like the one later used to search for Karen's grave, you see a certain visual unity to the west side of the northern Sierra. Beneath you, Placer and El Dorado Counties are a rolling sheet of hills that rise so gradually toward the Sierra crest some fifty miles east—at an overall slope of only two or three degrees—that the landscape appears, if bumpy, almost level. This hilly surface has been cut by deep river canyons into a series of discrete ramps, the even tops of which, lined up by eye as you look north or south, reveal their origin as a whole. But this uniformity is recent, the result of an icing of lava, mudflows, and ash from a period of volcanic eruptions between about thirty and ten million years ago. The swirled marble cake beneath this icing, exposed in the walls of the river canyons, is anything but uniform.

Three hundred million years ago there was no California, and the rocks under my chair legs as I write this were being deposited on an ocean floor off a coast somewhere in what is now Nevada, as layers of silt, sand, and a gentle, steady