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

the rope around my waist with my legs bent. Then, straining against Will, the boat, and the current, I straightened my legs. When I had stood all the way up, I squatted quickly, catching up the slack I'd created before the river could take it back. After a few minutes of grunting and sweating, I had dragged Will far enough from the falls that he could swim the boat safely over to shore. I swam back in.

While we had been intent on retrieving our raft, the whole Ruck-a-Chucky rapids had stopped working for whitewater boating. One group had hung up in the first rapid where we'd struck a rock but washed through. Water poured through the craft's interior and its passengers clung to surrounding rocks as their guides tried frantically to rescue them. With that rapid blocked other parties couldn't get through at all. Meanwhile, I thought, somewhere deep in the control rooms of dams and electric grids, men and women were sitting in front of angled panels on which little LEDs blinked on in orderly branched schematics and blue computer monitors showed nothing was wrong. They were probably listening to Rush Limbaugh and on their desks cups of coffee were turning cool in mugs with inscriptions like "Western Power Administration Conference 1997" and "World's Greatest Dad." Could they have any idea what the flip of a switch could do to us here? Probably not. The world was not founded upon such empathy and imagination.

Although it is counterintuitive, a rapid can be far more dangerous at low flows than at higher ones. At low water, rocks you'd normally wash over stick out and try to grab you. The water runs through them like mouthwash through the gaps of your teeth, straining out boats and the boaters who fall out of them, to be pinned underwater and drowned.

We hiked up to warn the guides for the parties stuck upstream that it had become too dangerous to run Ruck-a-Chucky under these conditions. Luckily, they had managed to pull all of their clients from the river. At this bend in the canyon our radios began working again. An old jeep road ran up the canyon wall above the rapids. We radioed Will's seasonal helpers, who had picked up our truck and driven it around to wait for us, to make arrangements with the outfitters' van drivers—also waiting there—to evacuate their clients by van on this road. Then, with our seasonals stuck directing traffic and darkness coming, Will and I decided to try to run the rest of the river. We set out, lining the boat over the falls like the old days. Then we got in.

A quarter mile downstream from the main rapids we hung up in another drop. Once firmly lodged, our boat became an obstacle to the current, which then flowed over and through it. We were up to our waists in foam. We clung to the boat, trying not to get washed out. I started laughing, giggling. Will looked at me questioningly, then his sunburned face broke into a grin. I fought my way upstream through the froth to where the boat's stern protruded from the water. Once there I began to jump up and down on it like an ape. The boat groaned; a dull scraping noise resounded through it; we felt it budge and then hold fast again. I jumped some more; Will caught an oar in the current and we were off, with me still laughing and jumping like a madman and Will chuckling as he pulled on the oars.

It was evening. Downstream from the Ruck-a-Chucky rapids we floated through a series of long, deep pools. In a canyon it grows dark from the bottom up, and close in now, the water and the cliffs on either side of us were wrapped in indigo. Framed in this dark V, a portion of the canyon wall upstream was still lit brilliant orange by the last rays of the setting sun. Then the sky dimmed, the pool beneath us went inky, and the first star reflected off it. The call of a canyon wren echoed down the cliffs.

This river and its canyon were no longer totally wild, nor were they entirely manmade. Rather, like much of the rest of the world, they had become some mixture of the two. No part of the world could now be said to be entirely untouched or unaltered by human enterprise; radioisotopes had been found in Arctic lichens, ice shelves were falling off the Antarctic cap, and it now looked as if the weather itself could no longer be considered entirely "natural." Citing these facts, some university intellectuals had concluded that there really wasn't any "nature" or "wilderness" anymore. Further, considering what we were now learning about the aboriginal use of fire to manipulate ecosystems, the fact that some so-called hunter-gatherer cultures actually cultivated wild plants, and the possibility that prehistoric hunters may have had something to do with the disappearance of some Ice Age animals, maybe there never had been such purity—at least as far back as human culture existed. Therefore, said some intellectuals, any moral claim you could make for saving what was left of wild, unregulated nature was based upon a faulty premise or, worse yet, pure sentimentalism.

Under the powerful influence of postmodernism's cultural and moral relativism and an almost excretory, childlike pride in human creations—our bioengineered crops and animals, brainlike computers, and the Internet—some of these thinkers had gone so far as to say that we ought to finish the job of domesticating the earth and yoking all of it to productive purposes. One writer even claimed that the planet's physical and biological self-regulation is now being replaced by electric grids and communications networks that, with the intimate involvement of human beings, will become the earth's new nervous system.

We rangers have a fair amount of time to read and I'd been aware of these ideas for a while. They are merely a more fashionable version