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

he thought—and he and Parker started running and didn't stop until they were back at the Confluence.

"What did you do then?" asked Bell.

Well, said Geary, they got into their car and drove up the bridge to find the assholes and give them a piece of their minds. But the chicken's owners were gone when they got there, so they went to town to call the sheriff, and then back down to the river to the spot where the dispatcher told them to meet the ranger.

Bell finished his notes. He said he was sorry about what had happened, and that we'd keep our eyes out for anyone walking onto the bridge with either rocks or a chicken. Then he excused himself and left. On the single-page report he wrote back at the ranger station, the last sentence was "No further action." What could you do? "One of them had a bright-colored jacket" isn't much to solve a crime on, and like almost every other problem he had along the river, this kind of thing would keep happening until the reservoir filled.

A few months later it was my turn to go to the bridge. It was early morning, and the sun rising over the mountains on the eastern skyline was painting the west wall of the North Fork canyon in gold and long shadows. I'd picked up some coffee from the pastry shop in town and I was carrying the paper cup from the Jeep into the ranger station when the dispatcher called my number.

"One seven nine, Northern."

"Northern, one seven nine," I answered into the microphone clipped to my epaulet.

"We have a report of a jumper at the Foresthill Bridge, can you respond?"

I pushed the mike button again. "I'm en route."

The quickest way to the bridge took me up out of the canyon and along the rim through Auburn. Siren yelping, I left the gas stations and fast-food joints at the north end of town and rolled down the long straightaway to the bridge. When I got there, I could see a red pickup parked in the opposite lane toward the far end of the span. I crossed the bridge going about eighty, made a quick U-turn, and pulled up behind it. The truck was blocking traffic, with the driver's door open. To my right, three people stood peering over the railing. One of them, a blond, muscular man in his thirties—a construction worker, or maybe a mill hand from Foresthill—left the railing to meet me.

"I reported it," he said as I got out of my Jeep. "We were coming across the bridge when we saw the truck. We saw him get out and step over the concrete wall, then up on the railing. Then he jumped off. He didn't even stop to think."

I peered into the abandoned truck. It had matted gray fake-fur seat covers. The keys were still in the ignition and the radio was on—a country station, playing a slow ballad with steel guitars. An open can of Budweiser, still dewy, sat in the drink holder by the gearshift.

The blond guy looked in over my shoulder. "When I got here just seconds after he jumped, the radio was playing like it is now. But it was a sad song, even sadder than this one—I think that's what made him do it right then."

"Could be," I said. "Some of those country songs are pretty sad." I got in to move the truck out of the way of the traffic now stacking up behind my Jeep. He had been shorter than I was. I moved the seat back and turned the key in the ignition. The interior smelled like beer, cigarettes, and the stale sweat of someone who no longer existed.

As the Foresthill Bridge neared completion in the summer of 1973, all over the country—in airports, at displays of televisions in department stores, in bars, any place where a TV was on—people sat riveted to the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate as the idea of loyalty was turned on its head. Back in 1959, when the bill to authorize Auburn Dam was introduced in Congress, loyalty to flag and president had been the gold standard of patriotism. But those who clung to it now were cast as villains, like Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, who tried to shield himself and his boss from culpability by responding more than a hundred times during questioning that he couldn't remember. The hearings revealed that in addition to burgling the Democratic Party offices, Haldeman and his associates had ordered a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was a government employee with a high security clearance who had turned over secret documents detailing the government's dirty dealings to the New York Times. Nixon's men had pried open his psychiatrist's file cabinets in hopes of finding something to discredit him.

This, then, was how much attitudes changed during the construction of the Auburn Dam. Had Ellsberg done what he had in the 1950s, he might well have been put to death for treason. But in the 1970s he became a hero to many Americans, and it was his persecutors in the government who went to prison. So it was in this climate of sympathy toward acts of conscience, as the House Judiciary Committee moved toward impeachment of the president in early 1974, that an Auburn Dam whistleblower emerged from the ranks of the Bureau of Reclamation.

George C. Rouse was no wild-haired environmentalist. A small, sharp-faced man with glasses and a pocketful of mechanical pencils, he was passionately dedicated to his work as an engineer for the Bureau. As a young man he'd worked on the Hoover Dam and when the Auburn Dam came down the pipe, he was attached to the Bureau's design shops at the Denver Service Center. He soon found himself at odds with his superiors over the dam on the American. Politically, of course, he believed in Auburn and dams in general.