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

Guardian of Yosemite, he was one man living in the midst of a spread-out community of homesteaders, innkeepers, hunters, and sheep-herders making a living off the land he was supposed to be protecting. The lumber for the settlers' habitations and guest accommodations, the grass and hay for their horses, and the wild and domestic meat and vegetables that graced their tables most often came from park territory. As a result, much, maybe most, of the energy expended by Clark and the other first guardians went into controlling the depredations of their fellow residents.

Still, from the very beginning the pattern was familiar. Researching his roots, Finch traveled to Yosemite, where he learned the circumstances of Galen Clark's first known arrest. In 1870, Clark apprehended two men who had cut down a huge pine tree. He took them before a judge in Mariposa, where they were convicted and fined twenty dollars each. Finch also located a report by Clark's successor, James Hutchings, to the California Legislature of 1882.

"Here it is—listen to this," he told me one day from his desk. "'Sometimes we are visited by rough characters from the mountains who, when crazy with liquor, not only become nuisances, but sometimes endanger human life.' Sound familiar?" he asked.

"Some things don't change," I replied.

"Yup," he said, smiling. "Some things never change."

But Clark, Hutchings, and the other solitary guardians could never effectively patrol and protect the hundreds of square miles of the early parks. In 1875 it was reported that four thousand elk had been slaughtered by wildlife poachers in Yellowstone the previous winter, and five years later, an estimated ten thousand annual visitors were under no practical supervision in most of the park. They, their innkeepers, and their guides went around cutting down trees, shooting animals, and chipping souvenirs from the rock formations of Mammoth Hot Springs. In an attempt to remedy the situation, a local mountain man, Harry Yount, was appointed to guard Yellowstone. He resigned after only a year, complaining that the task was hopelessly large for just one man. A series of government investigations of conditions in national parks during the following decade resulted in scathing reports on the failure of civilian authorities to protect them properly. Some stronger force was needed, and into this void, in 1886 at Yellowstone and in 1891 at Yosemite and Sequoia National Parks, were sent detachments of U.S. Army cavalry, whose superiors had long expressed an interest in the job.

The first troops were under orders to evict squatters, capture fugitives, protect natural features and visitors from harm, and control depredations by innkeepers and guides. But their commanders intuitively invented the larger trade of park management in a rough form of what it has become today. They made maps and surveys of plants and wildlife. They constructed trails, roads, and headquarters. They stocked fish, fed herds of elk and buffalo through hard winters, and began closely regulating the activities of hoteliers and other park concessions.

And so, if our pedigree as rangers goes back to the never-uniformed Galen Clark and Harry Yount, we are more recognizably the descendants of these uniformed and intensely bureaucratic turn-of-the-century cavalrymen. From them came the flat-brimmed cavalry hat rangers still wear, and from them the olive-green uniforms, which had supplanted the army blues by the time the Park Service took over from the army during the First World War. This horse-soldier army, the historian Harvey Myerson has remarked, existed on rules and regulations; its lifeblood, the orderly flow of paper forms for every conceivable occasion through successive ranks for approval. Today California state park rangers have no fewer than 142 forms and I spent about a third of my time as a ranger filling them out. Our rules and policies filled four extra-deep three-ring binders. Forms and requisitions went from us to supervising rangers with lieutenant's bars on their collars, and from them to chief rangers with captain's bars, and from them to superintendents with gold oak leaves. Our class-A jackets were festooned with gunmetal buttons and our leathers were supposed to be polished, but like cavalrymen in the hinterlands, they often got dusty. We set our digital watches to military time.

The guns that rangers carry are often thought of by the public as a recent addition, but the need for such martial protection in the face of hair-raising encounters with miscreants goes all the way back to the beginning. In 1916, the first director of the underfunded National Park Service dug into his own pocket to buy each of his rangers a pistol. Today, when the talking, cajoling, and educating are over—and all good rangers prefer these methods to the use of force—the fundamental mode of park protection remains coercive, by force of law and arms. The threats facing today's rangers are more than theoretical. According to a 2002 federal study, rangers are more than ten times as likely to be killed or injured on the job than agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

After the failure of the first undermanned civilian authorities, their replacement by the army, and the army's replacement by an armed and uniformed civilian police force, the problem of who would manage the parks, and how, and under what philosophy, has never gone away. Adding to the philosophical stresses within them, by the mid-twentieth century park agencies were placed in charge of an increasing number of "recreation areas"—lands of a profoundly different character from those their founders had in mind. Typical of these areas were crowded coastal beaches and the shorelines of water storage reservoirs. As any ranger who has worked in them can tell you, the atmosphere in these places is less contemplative and more boisterous than that of a nature preserve. At times it is downright lethal.

For decades park professionals have worried that the sort of duties rangers grow used to in a recreation area—controlling crowds, quelling drunken fights, and contending with an urban criminal element—would change the fundamental nature of the ranger's role. What has been less widely discussed are