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

over to the riverbank, lashed your oars lengthwise to your rowing frame, tightened your gear lashings, and snugged your helmet and lifejacket again, just for good measure. Then, using your canoe paddles, you took the boat out into midstream and over a drop just upstream of the main event. You then crossed a quiet pool, which gave you enough time to wonder why you were there as you positioned yourself for entry into the Tunnel Chute. Once you dropped into the chute itself, you sat down in the floor of your boat, wedged yourself in as well as you could, and hung on for dear life. Somewhere between a few seconds and an eternity later, what would happen had happened. It was so violent a ride it was really beyond anyone's control. However, most everything and everyone washed through it; it didn't trap people, just occasionally broke their arms and legs. Once I was knocked out of my boat at the top of it and had to swim it. The sheer speed and limb-tearing power of the froth—not water, but a blend of water and air too light to float in yet too wet to breathe—were horrifying. I remembered to roll into a tight ball. Collisions with a couple of boulders left bruises on my thighs and back that lasted for weeks. When it was over, I surfaced facing upstream in the echoing green tunnel with bubbles from the waterfall rising languorously around me. The first thing I saw was the white wall I had just come down in the brightness outside the mouth of the tunnel. For a couple of minutes I couldn't seem to get enough air. I was like a starving man at a banquet.

Beyond the Tunnel Chute we ran the Three Queens, Kanaka Falls, and Cache Rock Rapids, then several smaller, unnamed ones. Better that they remain unnamed, I thought. Even the well-known rapids for which whitewater guidebooks give step-by-step instructions are periodically rearranged by floodwaters, and then they become mysterious again for a few wonderful months of the following spring. It isn't good for the world to become too well known, we whitewater rangers think. Said Lao Tzu:

The way you can go

isn't the real way.

The name you can say

Isn't the real name.

Heaven and earth

Begin in the unnamed.

By now we'd allowed the commercial rafts to gain a good mile or two on us, and they'd long since passed from view around the Middle Fork's stately bends. As we floated deeper into the canyon, the effect was the opposite of climbing a mountain. On a mountaintop the whole world is laid out beneath you, but in the bottom of the Middle Fork the whole world is gone; there's just moving water, green and brown canyon walls, and sky. The river remained unmarked by those ahead of us and for all you could see we could have been the first ever to run it, or the last two men on earth. The late Tang dynasty poet Chia Tao was born twelve hundred years before the invention of Hypalon, the strong, flexible fabric out of which our craft was made, yet he understood how a river is always new to each one who runs it:

Passing on the river, a boat leaves no trace on the waves.

By the first week of August it was hot in the Central Valley. All visible snow was gone from the high peaks up-canyon and white towers of thunderhead rose above them most afternoons. By the time the Middle Fork's waters bore us through the gorge, they had already kept air conditioners humming somewhere in the great civilization down-canyon, to the west. Before that those waters had been snow on the mountains, and before that clouds, and before that part of an ocean around Hawaii or the Gulf of Alaska. The winds that would bring them back around the cycle, or not, and the snowfields that would shrink and disappear over the next hundred years, or not, would now do so or not according to the aggregate actions of bankers and oilmen in Houston, Almaty, and Bahrain, and of politicians and motorists in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Paris, and Beijing.

From this bewildering world to these fabled canyons of the Gold Rush continued to come a small stream of those whose fantasy was to go into the mountains and live like nineteenth-century miners. In a way they were no different from us rangers, for we too had sought our own version of the simple life here on the edges of civilization—if not, it turned out, beyond its reach—or from the whitewater guides who sought their own simple peace in the exigency of the right command at the right moment. "Paddle hard, forward, now!" we heard them yell at their clients, who had paid good money to be yelled at—their own version of simplicity—as they entered the bigger rapids.

The river turned south. The Hornblende Mountains loomed on our left, steep green battlements of pine and Douglas fir. The river was quiet in this section, a sinuous path of silver reflecting the afternoon sun between bright green ranks of willow and alder at the water's edge. Helmets off, wetsuits off, wearing only shorts, we spelled each other on the oars, dabbed our noses and ears with sunscreen, and ran an easy series of riffles between long blue-green pools. We passed African Bar in contented silence, pulling our shifts at the oars.

Around another bend, Otter Creek entered the Middle Fork from our left at such a sharp downstream angle that the ridge between it and the main canyon had eroded to a cleaver. The ridge top was so sharp it appeared not wide enough to walk on, its sides near-vertical jungles of hardwoods. It rose steeply to an old jeep road on Cock Robin Point, sixteen hundred feet above us, and it was from there that our man had apparently made his way down with his horse and mule. You had to admire