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

River country pledges allegiance to the Pacific Northwest, that nation of Douglas fir, thimbleberry, black bear, salmon, and rain, which stretches from here to southeast Alaska.

By late September, the first thing to change is the wind. Absent for most of the summer, it begins to blow again. One day thin clouds streak the sky, then lower to form a thick, featureless blanket. A little rain falls on a warm night, and when the weather clears the days are still warm but people begin to feel like putting up firewood. By October the nights grow chill and the black oaks on the ridges are tinged with yellow and orange. By November the rains come in earnest. In the woods, the carpet of moss covering rocks and tree trunks that has been brittle and apparently lifeless for months becomes vibrant green again. Bug-eyed orange salamanders and newts make jerky slow-motion patrols across the forest floor. Ferns tremble with drips from the trees. Mushrooms come up. Water falls in diamond ribbons from moss- and fern-covered cliffs and skeins together into creeks, seeking the river. And the roads we rangers travel, which for months have hemorrhaged clouds of soil behind every car, turn to mud.

Steve MacGaff, our supervising ranger, was about forty when I met him, a slight, taciturn northeasterner with a boyish face and a small mustache. He had been left in charge of the American River canyons when the Auburn Dam effort stumbled and the Bureau of Reclamation cut the budget for patrolling the lands it intended to flood. The superintendent, chief ranger, and most of the rest of the staff had been transferred, and by 1983 MacGaff had been left to handle forty-two thousand acres with three rangers, a maintenance man, and a couple of seasonal assistants in the summer. By the time I arrived he'd managed to beg back one more part-time and one full-time ranger, but he spent the rest of his career with responsibilities far greater than men and women of his rank usually had. He was much loved by his subordinates, because he was highly competent at his own work and mostly left us to do what we pleased with ours. In practice we functioned as a sort of consensus paramilitary. The downside of this was that certain things didn't get done at all. But since no one at headquarters had the slightest interest in the land that had been intended to go underwater or us, our omissions went as unnoticed as our accomplishments.

MacGaff was ideally suited for running the place on the Bureau's shoestring. He had a talent for bookkeeping, but more than that, he was by nature a fearsomely parsimonious man. Ranger Ron O'Leary, an avid theorist of the effects of race and national origin on character and personality, said that MacGaff, whom he sometimes referred to as "the Scotsman," was genetically predisposed to his almost pathological thrift by his ancestry. And because no one else volunteered to handle the mountain of paperwork the department required to requisition the smallest thing, MacGaff exercised a virtual stranglehold on our acquisition of supplies and equipment.

Most of the things MacGaff ordered came from State Stores or Prison Industries, and their cheapness was proportional to the disappointment you experienced as soon as you used them. These goods were the kind you might imagine getting under the command economies of communist countries at the time: tires that blew out on our rough roads, truck batteries that didn't have the power to run all of our radios and emergency lights (we were constantly jump-starting each other), steel lockers for our gear that, once loaded, turned from rectangles to parallelograms so their doors would neither open nor close, and the like.

Our raingear was no exception: a two-piece set consisting of a rubbery yellow parka with a hood and a pair of voluminous bib overalls like those used on fishing boats, but of poorer quality. At one of the frequent motor vehicle accidents on our rain-slick canyon roads, they made me immediately identifiable to ambulance attendants, witnesses, and volunteer firefighters from town—as a commercial fisherman who had somehow lost his way to the sea. There was no shoulder insignia on this rain suit, or any place to pin a badge. Worn together, the parka and overalls had the advantage of putting a double layer of protection between the drenching rain and your gun belt, with its pistol, handcuffs, and portable radio. At the same time, should you need any of these things, you would have to undress to get to them, and for a law enforcement officer this constituted something between a constant annoyance and a potentially lethal situation.

These rain suits are among my first recollections of the American River canyons. When I arrived in May of 1986, they hung on a gray Prison Industries coatrack just inside the old kitchen where we dressed each morning. They were covered with orange smears of mud from the floods of February, when the cofferdam had collapsed and the river had very nearly taken Sacramento.

Sacramento was founded in the winter of 1848–49. From the very beginning, the city existed in fundamental denial of the nature of its site. Local Indians knew that the riparian woods around the junction of the American and Sacramento Rivers flooded regularly. No doubt had the city's founders bothered to look, they might have seen little collections of driftwood caught in the lower branches of trees in what is now Sacramento's downtown. But after the discovery of gold up the American's South Fork the previous year, Sacramento's boosters knew spring would bring thousands of gold seekers to California by sea. Arriving at Yerba Buena—now San Francisco—they could be expected to come up the Sacramento River and debark at the mouth of the American, where they'd provision themselves and head upstream to the mines. One of the city's founders had stockpiled supplies to sell at inflated prices, and so that winter he and his associates surveyed the floodplain into