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

year Folsom Lake hit bottom, John Doolittle had been elected to represent Norm Shumway's old district in Congress, replacing Shumway as the big, multipurpose Auburn Dam's principal booster. Doolittle's Fourth Congressional District was a huge chunk of sparsely populated, mountainous, northeastern California. It contained no ground at risk from the American River's floods; however, its southwestern corner happened to include three of the fastest-growing towns in California: Roseville, Rocklin, and Lincoln. By 2002 Lincoln's population increased by 28 percent in a single year, making it the state's most rapidly growing city.

John Doolittle's reelection campaigns were driven by large drafts of development money, and the water it took to sustain the kind of growth developers wanted was, if adequate for now, not limitless. So by 1995 Doolittle was vowing to use a key committee assignment and the new Republican majority in Congress to kill any solution for flood control on the American River that didn't store water and make power for his suburbs. Then January 1997 saw a storm come off the Pacific whose peak rainfalls on some portions of the northern Sierra topped even those of 1986. In the storm's aftermath, with Sacramento's congressional delegation pushing for flood control and Doolittle holding out for a multipurpose dam, the American River was rarely absent from the news. Each day we went to work in its canyons with a curse of futility hanging over us. And futility is the most debilitating thing there is for someone in a dangerous job.

A couple of months after the melee at Upper Lake Clementine I found Finch in the old mess hall where we dressed each morning, stripped down to his undershirt and green uniform jeans. On the floor in front of him was a little box about a foot high, made out of wood scraps from the maintenance shop. Finch was stepping up onto it and then back down again to the bouncy beat of a pop ditty from a couple of years before playing on a portable stereo:

Here's a little song I wrote.

You might want to sing it note for note.

Don't worry, be happy.

In every life we have some trouble,

But when you worry you make it double.

Don't worry, be happy.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Training for our new physical fitness pay," he panted. "Sixty bucks a month if you can do this for a few minutes and keep your heart rate low enough when they take your pulse afterward."

"Seems worth it. Nice music."

"Yup. Helps me keep the pace. Sixty dollars a month—it helps."

"Sure." I nodded in agreement.

—ain't got no cash, ain't got no style.

Ain't got no gal to make you smile.

Don't worry, be happy.

Cause when you worry your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down.

So don't worry, be happy.

Don't worry, be happy now.

The song ended. Finch picked up a towel draped over the file cabinet next to the stereo. Wiping his face, he put two fingers of one hand on his neck while looking at his wristwatch. After a minute he removed them, shook his head, rewound the tape, pushed the play button, and went back to stepping up and down.

For over a quarter century—longer than anyone else—Finch would work under the waterline of the Auburn Dam. His secret, he later told me, was to keep himself busy. He went from union organizing to badge collecting, to collecting historic photos, to researching the history of rangers, to exercising with that therapeutic little song, all the while clinging to the fundamental virtue of the original idea: a ranger guarding his park and its visitors as well as he could, no matter what the politicians above him said or did.

***

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Finch's research led him to the idea of celebrating the 125th anniversary of Galen Clark's appointment as guardian of Yosemite. He promoted this notion until our agency adopted it, followed by the California Legislature. In 1991 yearlong observances of the 125th anniversary of the California rangers culminated in a conference at the state's oldest remaining nature park, Big Basin Redwoods—Yosemite having long since become a federal park.

Drawing on his interest in badge collecting, Finch designed a special commemorative badge for the occasion and got it approved by the department. He and O'Leary distributed the badges to rangers statewide, packaging and mailing them from our old mess hall.

In 1995, Finch self-published a history of California's state park rangers in a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. We all bought one. Along with the anniversary celebration, the book helped us see ourselves as part of something larger and lasting. Still, none of us who worked with Finch ever let on how proud of him we were.

It wasn't our way.

9 / Crossing the Mekong

FOR A LONG TIME the best highway maps available in California have been those published by the California Automobile Association. They are finely drawn things that presume a greater level of interest on the part of the highway traveler in wandering off the main roads than other maps do. They are known for their accuracy in mountain recreation areas. Where other maps often show generalized green blobs for parks and national forests, the auto club's depict with precision each campground, ranger outpost, secondary road, and body of water.

In the late eighties when I first worked at Auburn State Recreation Area, the Automobile Association's map of the Sacramento Valley and Sierra foothills showed a large lake filling our canyons of the North and Middle Forks of the American River, although of course no such lake existed. Theirs was not the only map that did. A Rand McNally map distributed through filling stations also showed a twenty-five-mile-long Y-shaped blue feature labeled "Auburn Reservoir" in the middle of our canyons. And the gold-mining equipment shop in Auburn still sold Metsker's Placer County map in a slipcover proclaiming THE SPORTSMEN'S GUIDE ... NEW UP TO DATE ... PEOPLE WOULD BE LOST WITHOUT US. It, too, showed our canyons full of water. Not surprisingly, people often came