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

The American's South Fork, an easier run that soon became the most heavily used whitewater river in California, lured people to try the more challenging North and Middle Forks. In 1982 rangers issued the first six permits for guide services to operate in Auburn State Recreation Area. Three years later, fifty-seven companies were offering whitewater trips on our rivers. A 1985 study showed that paddlers spent nineteen thousand person-days annually beneath the waterline of the Auburn Reservoir. Now rangers were called on to handle whitewater raft accidents and rescues. Hostilities flared when the rafters got out of their boats in places the miners saw as their own, or when incensed boaters cut ropes stretched across the river at neck level, which the miners used to tether their dredges. By 1986 Ranger Sherm Jeffries was writing a management plan for whitewater boating on the American, and over the following couple of years some of us rangers enrolled in guide schools and white-water rescue courses. Eventually we got our own raft.

Will Reich had come to work for us in the nineties as a seasonal boatman. He'd previously worked as a guide and was better at running a boat in swift water than any of the rest of us. Eventually he went to our academy and came back as our river patrol ranger.

***

On another patrol that summer, Will and I stopped for lunch downstream at Dardanelles Creek. There we munched our sandwiches reflectively, seated on steep, warm sheets of polished bedrock plunging into a deep pool where our boat bobbed, tied off at the riverbank beneath us. When we finished eating I checked the bowline and splashed some cold water on the chambers so the air expanding in the hot sun wouldn't pop our raft. Then Will and I climbed up the canyon wall, following Dardanelles Creek into a slot canyon so narrow you could touch both sides at the same time. The dark stone was water-polished into sensuous curves. The air was cool. We waded through a series of potholes to the base of a small waterfall.

Two hundred and fifty feet beneath the waterline of the Auburn Dam, we stopped and looked up. Tufts of fern growing from the walls and overhanging branches of trees on either side of the slot above were silhouetted against a thin slice of sky. A thread of water splashed down next to us, throwing cool droplets on our faces. Then, on a little ledge just above head level, we caught sight of a green orb the size and shape of a large cantaloupe, intricately woven from moss. One side featured a small round doorway. It was the nest of a water ouzel, a bird we often saw darting beneath the rapids in search of aquatic invertebrates and fingerling fish. Like the canyon wren the ouzel was a creature of moving water, not reservoir lakeshores. It was the first time I'd ever seen one of their nests, which are usually well hidden.

In the practice of wildlife management there is a theory, called mitigation, for dealing with the loss of wildlife habitat when reservoirs are built. Mitigation means you do what you can to improve habitat on the land surrounding the inundated place, to make up for the loss. The mitigation package for Auburn Dam included the periodic burning of mature brush fields to spur the growth of new, tender shoots, which make good forage for deer.

But there was nothing in the package for water ouzels.

***

When our lunch stop was over, Will and I got back into the boat.

That morning most of the bright-colored flotillas of commercial rafts had been ahead of us, but, rowing vigorously, we'd passed many of them before lunch.

As we set off again, the first odd thing we noticed was a growing line of wet rock above the water's surface.

"Does it look to you like the flow's dropping off?" I asked Will.

"I was thinking the same thing—but it's way too early," he replied, pulling at the oars.

The next series of rapids, known collectively as Ruck-a-Chucky, were still a ways downriver. But for several miles now you could tell the river was up to something—hoarding altitude, its rapids nothing more than fast little riffles between long pools where the water was so sluggish you had to row against an afternoon headwind or you'd float back upstream. At Ruck-a-Chucky, the unstable walls of the canyon had been calving off into the river for tens of thousands of years, forming a natural dam and a series of waterfalls through huge boulders. Ruck-a-Chucky announced its presence at the end of a long reflecting pool where Canyon Creek tumbled down the left canyon wall through dense stands of fir. At the end of this pool the canyon narrowed and bent sharply to the right. From around the bend came an ominous rumble.

I was rowing across this pool when I noticed I had to thread my way through the sandbars or run aground. On a beach to my right I saw a line of wet sand above the present waterline. Will put his helmet back on and took the oars while I strapped on mine. Just ahead of us was what boaters call a "horizon line"—a place where the visible surface of the water ends abruptly, which means there's a waterfall. Will lined the boat up just right and we dropped over the edge as usual. But at the bottom of the falls our bow struck hard against an unfamiliar rock sticking out of the water, stopping us dead for a few seconds, perched at a steep angle. Then the impatient water picked up the boat and lifted us past the obstacle.

"That was different!" I yelled to Will above the foam.

"No question about it—the flow's really decreasing now!" he yelled back. He looked worried.

Will stroked over to the right wall, where we tied up to a boulder to ready ourselves for the process of getting our boat through the main rapid. We'd never learn