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

the effects of whole careers spent in manmade recreation area landscapes—lifeguard towers, concrete-block restrooms, parking lots, snack bars, and the muddy bathtub rings from the changing water levels of reservoirs—on the wilderness aesthetic of people in the ranger services: that love of unspoiled nature that once characterized the men and women who gravitated to park work.

Auburn State Recreation Area was one of two main areas under the administration of State Parks' American River District. The other was Folsom Lake, where the district's offices were located. By the time I came to work in the district we had a new superintendent there. Tall, blond, and athletic—he ran during his lunch hour—

Bruce Kranz was a born-again Christian with a growing family. He had started his career as a lifeguard on State Parks' Southern California beaches and, rising quickly through the ranks, worked at two other reservoirs before coming to Folsom. Folsom was basically the same sort of operation as the beaches where Kranz had started out: intensive aquatic recreation close to a major population center—in this case, Sacramento and its suburbs. Kranz was by most accounts a capable administrator of such places but had little ability as a naturalist. Nor had his assignments ever required that of him.

As it happened, Kranz arrived at Folsom right after the floods of 1986 and just in time for a long drought that followed. For the next six years the reservoir outside his office window was perennially drawn down to fill the Bureau's water contracts. It was so bad during those years that Kranz employed a full-time maintenance worker whose job was to go around the lake on a barge, setting out buoys to mark all the rocks emerging from the water so that speedboats wouldn't hit them.

By the summer of 1992 the lake's marina looked like a desert. Every day Kranz had to look at the expanding shoreline, now over half a mile of bare yellow dirt. Dust devils whirled across it, picking up beer cups and bits of paper. At night his rangers pursued kids in four-wheel-drives over it and their headlights flashed in crazy circles over the dusty wastes, as if searching for anything that lived. To make matters worse, the storm of 1986 caused a rewrite of the flood control rules for Folsom and now, at times in the winter too, almost two thirds of the lake's capacity was held empty for flood control space.

During this time Kranz developed an interest in politics. In 1992 he unsuccessfully campaigned for a seat on the board of directors of the Placer County Water Agency. Later he served as chairman of the county's Republican Central Committee. In the latter role he rubbed shoulders with Placer County's archconservative state and federal legislators, among them freshman Congressman John Doolittle, Republican from California's Fourth District, and State Senator Tim Leslie. In such company Kranz soon become an outspoken advocate of the Auburn Dam. Auburn, he pointed out, would store runoff from the mountains that could be used to keep Folsom full for swimming and waterskiing all summer. Furthermore, Auburn would enable the flood control capacity presently held open at Folsom to be moved upstream, so Folsom could be allowed to fill in the winter and spring. But Kranz's motives were not entirely myopic. Like many natives of Southern California, a near-desert that by the end of the nineteenth century was reaching four hundred miles north for its water, Kranz believed that if the state was to continue to grow and prosper, we would need more water. Lots more.

So it was that in 1991, when a discussion was held at a regional meeting of district superintendents on what California State Parks's official position on the Auburn Dam should be, Kranz alone spoke in favor of drowning his own park, Auburn State Recreation Area. Within two years drought gave way to normal rainfall again, but Kranz, who once described himself as "a pro-business guy in a preservationist agency," never changed his opinion. Interviewed in 2003, he still thought a dam on the North Fork was a good idea.

If having our own boss come out in favor of putting us underwater wasn't enough, new legislation to authorize completion of the Auburn Dam continued to appear in Congress. No sooner had Representative Norm Shumway's Auburn Dam Revival Act of 1987 died in a legislature more worried about deficit spending than about floods or federally subsidized water for California agribusiness than another Auburn Dam bill appeared in 1988. This one was a $600 million plan for a flood-control-only dam. It perished without ever leaving committee. But its backers didn't give up easily, and the next year they were back. Again they were defeated.

The new concept—a "dry dam" that didn't store water or generate power but remained empty until a major storm, when its gates would rumble shut, filling the American River canyons with runoff for a few days or weeks—brought arguments between two factions: those who supported a more expensive all-purpose dam and those asserting that flood control must be secured for Sacramento without triggering the opposition all-purpose dams had among budget conservatives and environmentalists. By 1989 local governments around Sacramento had formed their own flood control agency, and by 1992 this agency, the State Reclamation Board, and the Army Corps of Engineers were all backing the flood-control-only dam.

That year the dam loomed in Congress again in the form of a $638 million flood control project buried in a semiannual omnibus water projects bill. Again environmental groups mobilized, and the bill was defeated in a floor vote in the House by a margin of almost two to one. The following year a federal study found sections of the river in the Auburn Reservoir site eligible for designation as "wild and scenic," which would have protected it. However, no such designation was ever made. Then in 1996 the Auburn Dam was back in Congress in another omnibus water projects bill. Again environmental groups mobilized and again the dam was defeated.

In 1992, the