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

rain of dead marine life in an ever-changing array of forms—some bizarre, some beautiful, most too small for the eye to see. Underlying these sediments was a thick layer of charcoal-gray basalt, which—as any college student knows today, but the dam's designers didn't—was being extruded as molten rock from a seam somewhere out in midocean and moving toward the landmass that would become North America as it was progressively created.

With all of this movement, a map of the world of about 250 million years ago, as I have said, looks nothing like the world map today. By then the earth's landmasses were joined together into a supercontinent known to today's geologists as Pangaea. Pangaea began to break up, and its coast in the middle of what is now Nevada began to jostle against the sheet of sea floor in what is now the Pacific Ocean, and at various times the ocean floor continued to move toward the continent. The continental rocks were lighter, or so the present theory goes, and tended to ride up over the sea floor as the two collided. The pressures were immense, and in the process of this inexorable collision chunks of ocean floor and whole archipelagos of volcanic islands riding landward on it were scraped off and applied in layers to the growing margin of what would become California.

The poorly healed sutures between these additions to the continent formed zones of weakness, and as the jostling between coast and sea floor continued over the eons, strain built up in the rocks and systems of cracks formed between the layers. Today one such system, the Foothill Fault Zone, runs down the western front of the Sierra in two major strands: the Melones Fault Zone, just east of my part of the American River, and the Bear Mountain Fault Zone, to the west. Crossing the North Fork of the American below its junction with the Middle Fork, the various component cracks of the Bear Mountain—the Salt Creek Lineament, the Maidu Fault, the Spenceville-Deadman, and the southern extension of the Wolf Creek—converge like the waist of an hourglass, as if squeezed between the great iceberg of sparkling granite called the Penryn Pluton to the west of the dam site and the mash of old sea floor to the east of it. That, at the risk of oversimplifying it, is what we know—or think we know—of how this country was formed. And we know that the waist of that hourglass of cracks runs right under the site of the Auburn Dam, and that the cracks may be moving, or probably are. But it's an entirely different story from the one the 1969 geologists had learned in school and on which they based their judgments of the potential for earthquakes in the dam site.

In 1966, the year the Bureau established its dam construction office in Auburn, the California Division of Mines and Geology published what some older geologists in the state now refer to affectionately as "the Old Testament."

Bulletin 190 was a compendium—big and richly illustrated with complex diagrams—of what was known about the geology of Northern California. At the time of its publication, the theory of plate tectonics—which has it that the earth is like a pot of boiling milk and the continents and ocean bottoms so much skin on its surface, made at one location, wrinkled by force, and recycled back into the milk at another—had already been well articulated and supported with a growing body of data. The developing theory was the subject of much discussion in academic circles, but many working geologists still considered it controversial.

Bulletin 190 affords us a look at a widely accepted version of California's geology that was contemporaneous with the thin arch, and entirely excludes what we now see as essential to understanding why the rocks underneath the dam were so worrisome. It's a version that devotes over 49 of the bulletin's 507 pages to the infamous San Andreas Fault and its branches, which caused the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco, but makes absolutely no mention of active faults in the foothills of the Sierra.

Strangely, had that document's eminent authors made a survey of local newspapers, they would have known there had been foothill earthquakes severe enough to scare people out of their houses and ring church bells during their own lifetimes. But geology, like any science, is often directed by commerce and human affairs. After 1906 filled the morgues and cleaned out the insurance companies, coastal geology was about earthquakes (and oil), but in the foothills of the Sierra, it had always been about finding gold. Because foothill faults had moved, but not catastrophically—Auburn's brick business district was still standing sixty years after San Francisco's unreinforced masonry buildings crushed hundreds of their inhabitants—little was known about them, and the Bureau considered them inactive. And a widely held belief in what something—or for that matter who someone—is can be a powerful antidote to the observed truth.

The story assembled later by detectives would show that in the months leading up to Karen's disappearance, the Dellasandros' marriage seemed to be coming apart. One witness remembered Karen expressing fear of her husband, saying he'd recently smashed a chair into bits during an argument. Less than three weeks before Karen vanished, the family dog, a German shepherd named Fuzz, got into the garbage. According to Karen's mother, when Les found out he flew into a rage, flinging the dog around and beating it severely with his fists and feet. The following morning Fuzz was in a coma and Karen took him to a vet's office, where the dog died later that day. After Karen's disappearance the police recovered the veterinarian's medical report. It confirmed that the cause of the dog's death—broken bones and internal bleeding—was consistent with a severe beating. But of course such injuries might be found in an animal that had been hit by a car, too. When detectives went to Les's father's place looking for signs of Karen, they found