Witness to the natural, human world
People once thought highly of Forest Service rangers -- in those days before wilderness became a high-stakes game. When I ventured out into the Eastern Sierra foothills above Carson City, Nev., in 1995 to report on cattle grazing and public lands, I met rangers who had weathered 34 incidents of harassment and violence in less than a year. One had been the target of two bombings and yet he wouldn’t lie low, wouldn’t stop talking, despite the urgings of his supervisors. “To be heard,” he said when I asked him why. “To be listened to.”
Now comes Jordan Fisher Smith, a California state park ranger for 14 years, whose “Nature Noir” offers a moving, evocative account of his efforts to protect the American River and its 42,000-acre watershed despite a federal government intent on drowning it with a dam. “There probably wasn’t a day when I didn’t wonder how I came to choose this hopeless place on which to lavish my attention,” Smith confides early on.
Smith’s narrative gracefully weaves scenes and stories with context, history and reflection, in ways recalling the best of John McPhee. But the voice here is his own, understated and nuanced. “What I will now relate of these events is entirely true -- in most cases taken from rangers’ actual reports,” Smith promises. “Nature Noir” ends up being as much about human nature as Mother Nature. “When regular people leave the city limits,” he discovered, “their behavior doesn’t change much, and habitual criminals are seldom rehabilitated by pretty scenery.”
A gun and a set of handcuffs became part of his daily attire. He learned how to arrest all kinds of people. He found it bracing to deal with a dispute involving a baby thrown into a moving car: “[W]hen you respond to a call like that you are bathed for a few minutes in superhuman certainty.” He took a gun from an illegally armed camper who hadn’t paid his fees, then, deciding he “hated begging camp fees from armed men,” proceeded to seek and seize every weapon he could find.
He couldn’t fix everything, though, not nearly. Judges imposed suspended sentences on those he arrested; a menacing bully terrorized people; a mountain lion devoured a woman jogger; a suicide jumped off Foresthill Bridge; a killer stayed free because a murdered woman’s body couldn’t be found.
As Smith tells these stories, he artfully entwines them with the history of the condemned river canyon. In 1965, flooding led Congress to authorize construction of a large dam upstream at Auburn. The government built a diversion tunnel and a temporary earthen dam, but for tangled reasons -- here Smith knits together discourses on types of dams, the world map 250 million years ago, Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” the war in Vietnam, Watergate and a whistle-blower’s concerns over seismic safety -- the project stalled.
Then in the 1970s, a rough group of gold miners settled as squatters in the site of the unfilled Auburn Reservoir; semi-permanent camps and shacks appeared; untended campfires ignited wildfires; piles of garbage accumulated; guns got pulled; bodies appeared in shallow graves. So armed state rangers were brought in “to protect land that could not be protected from the very government that employed them.”
Major flooding in early 1986 served to revive plans to build Auburn Dam. Smith arrived on the scene soon after: “It was under the shadow of a general certainty among local people that the dam would now be finished that I came to know the canyons it would flood and the rangers who worked in them.”
He came not just to know, of course; he came to care. He came to care for the land, which shifted with the seasons from southwestern desert to northwestern rain forest, the dusty, parched summers bleeding into lush, chilly months thick with mushrooms, moss and salamanders. He came to care for those who lived on this land. He “tried to forget the scared looks on the faces” of those terrorized by the bully. He tried to find the murdered woman’s body. He tried to imagine the suicide’s motives.
And he came to see that however matters played out, “a park ranger is a protector. You protect the land from the people, the people from the land, the people from each other, and the people from themselves
Then one day a small brick-red tick latched onto Smith’s belly, delivering a case of Lyme disease that left him frighteningly numb, weary, blurry-headed and shot through with pain. He waited for months for things to get better, but eventually had to retire, leaving to others the task of protecting a river canyon that still faces condemnation.
Looking back, he concludes, “All you can do is memorize the details and give a good account of them in your report. As time went on, it became clear that this was an important part of my job, too. A ranger is privileged to be intimate with things few other people spend much time with, and your job is to witness and remember.”
In “Nature Noir,” that’s just what Smith has done, with uncommon eloquence.
Barry Siegel is a former staff writer for The Times and author of “Death in White Bear Lake: The True Chronicle of an All-American Town.” He directs the literary journalism program at UC Irvine and won the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing in 2002.
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Noir talk: Jordan Fisher Smith discusses “Nature Noir” at a free lecture at the Central Library in downtown Los Angeles at 7 p.m. March 15. For reservations, call (213) 228-7025.