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

was spending most of his time hunched over his computer in his back room, cranking out unpublished polemical short stories and libertarian novels in the tradition of Ayn Rand. His writing schedule gave him little time to keep up on developments in medicine.

Lyme disease is rare in California, he said. We think only about one percent of the ticks in the state might carry it.

I handed him the plastic bag with the tick inside.

If we test it and it comes up positive, he said, it'll just make you nervous. Even if the tick's positive, it's unlikely that you'll get the disease. Let's just forget it, shall we?

Okay, I said.

You're likely to get some local irritation and redness, he said. Ticks are dirty animals. Don't worry about it.

And so I didn't. Within a couple of weeks, a round patch of rash circled the bite. Within a month I began to feel very tired. More tired than I had ever been in my life. Then came diarrhea. My hands began to go numb, then my arms, my lips, my tongue, the roof of my mouth. Then my feet. I began to get shooting pains, like hot needles, in my feet.

One day I went to the pistol range to qualify. The police holsters we used had three different safeties to make it hard for someone to take your gun from you in a wrestling match. I couldn't feel any of the releases with my numb fingertips, so I couldn't get my gun out. I stopped going to work. After several months my sick leave ran out.

I was seeing more doctors. A neurologist performed nerveconductance tests and a spinal tap. Your nerves are damaged and there's protein in your spinal fluid, but I don't know what's wrong, he said. I went home. I fell down a couple of times. My eyes were getting blurry; my ears were ringing. The joints in my fingers and toes were sore and sometimes swollen. I couldn't twist the lid off a jar. I began to go deaf in my left ear. The sound of my young children's laughter cut through me like a knife, rattled my brain. My own speech seemed to reverberate in my face and forehead, each vowel causing excruciating discomfort. My brain felt swollen. I couldn't think. Everything seemed difficult to figure out. I was tired, but I couldn't sleep at night.

I began to lose my memory. I made an appointment with the new chief investigator at headquarters for an interview for a position I had always wanted on the department's investigations team. I never showed up, and it was another week before I knew I hadn't. I missed an appointment with my dentist, and then another. I rescheduled and missed it again. The dentist's secretary told me it might be time to find another dentist. I called up the dentist, a friend, and found myself weeping on the phone. I didn't know myself anymore.

I was tested again. I saw a fifth doctor, a sixth, and then a seventh. I was told I had Lyme disease. I tested positive. One day two years after the bite I drove down to the ranger station, a route I had taken for thirteen years. I was now feeling drugged or drunk most of the time; my brain was full of spirochetes, a doctor told me later, and the inflammatory nature of the body's reaction to them causes swelling in the walls of small arteries, resulting in decreased blood flow to the brain. When I finished my errand at the ranger station, I started home again. But I wasn't sure anymore exactly how to get there. I pulled over to the side of the road and called my wife on my cell phone, then sat there waiting for her to come and get me. I waited for months for things to get better. Eventually I was forced to retire from State Parks, and for two years I wasn't much good for anything. The trail back from that bad place was so long and circuitous that, like many Lyme patients, I cannot say exactly when it began to look like I was going to get better. As I write this, it isn't over yet.

However, as I healed, I made two very pleasant discoveries. One was that my memories of what had happened during all those years in the American River were intact. It was as if they and so many other things I was missing—the names of friends, phone numbers, parts of my vocabulary, and the contents of books I had read—had been locked in a cabinet during my illness, and now I had the key again. The other surprise was that as I was healing, the American River's situation had gotten better, too.

In the final analysis, neither of my present doctors can promise me that the Lyme spirochetes or their cyst form—like a seed—will ever be completely absent from my body. But then, when you think about it, who ever thought that a ranger could spend fourteen years on a piece of land and the two would remain entirely separate? Environmentalists have been saying for years that as the land goes, so will we go. It should be no surprise to learn that rangers may be the first to know how true that really is.

Epilogue

IF FOR DECADES we park rangers risked our skins to make the American River canyons safe for river lovers to visit, it was the river lovers who kept them from going underwater, and who finally brought a symbolic end to the Auburn Dam with the same earth-moving machinery and concrete that had been used to partially build it. Here is how that happened.

In the late 1960s, when the Bureau had begun work on the dam and Placer County's Middle Fork dams had just been completed upstream, a tunnel nearly three miles long was blasted from the dam site on the American River to the next drainage north, Auburn Ravine. Had the Auburn Dam been