Nature Noir (11 page)

No, she said, she hadn't been hurt down there and she didn't want to see any doctor. I asked her if she had washed her clothes and underwear. Yes, she had, she said, because they were all dusty.

When the caseworker from the Women's Shelter arrived at the ranger station, I asked her to chaperone us into the little utility room where the copier, the fridge, and stationery supplies were kept. Closing the door, I asked Mary to remove her blouse, leaving her bra on, and face the other way. She did. I saw some small bruises and scabby scratches on her back. I took some Polaroids of them, then told her she could get dressed. Leaving the social worker with her, I went to get her purse. When I came back, she and the social worker were waiting in the anteroom, talking quietly with MacGaff's Girl Friday. I gave Mary Murphy her purse and my business card with the Women's Shelter's phone number written on it in ballpoint pen. I told her I was sorry about what had happened and to call me if she needed anything. She thanked me, I thanked the social worker, and the two of them went out the front door together. Outside they got in separate cars and left.

The next day I checked the hospital. There was no record of a female assault victim matching Mary Murphy's description since the previous Wednesday evening. But on the fifth a man had come in so badly beaten up that an emergency-room nurse had called the sheriff, and a deputy had been sent over to take a report. I went to the Sheriff's Department and got a copy. The victim was Richard Samuel Marks, his address the North Fork of the American River. In the narrative the deputy stated that although he questioned Marks for some time, the injured man refused to say who had attacked him and why.

I had three days off, and I tried to forget the canyons, the vertiginous bridge, the dark slatey cliffs, the bullet-riddled cars, and the dust. On my first day back, I went to Yankee Jims Bridge looking for Ricky Marks, Jerry Prentice, or any witness to the alleged rape or the beating that followed. I especially hoped to find Rattlesnake Jim, the gold buyer, whom I'd seen several times that summer hanging around the North and Middle Forks in his white van. He wasn't there and neither was Marks, but I did see another miner waist-deep in the water next to a dredge just upstream of the bridge. When he saw me walking down to the riverbank toward him, he emerged from the water and shut the noisy machine off. I asked him if he'd seen Ricky or Rattlesnake Jim. He told me the North Fork was about the last place I'd find either of them, because they were both scared to death of Mary Murphy's boyfriend. I said I could understand why Ricky would be scared, but what did Rattlesnake Jim have to fear from the boyfriend?

"Didn't you hear?" answered the wet-suited man, pulling off his diving gloves and lighting a cigarette. And then he related how, when Rattlesnake had driven that woman home to Dutch Flat, her boyfriend had kidnapped the gold dealer and forced him to lead his bunch of vigilantes back down to where Ricky was sleeping. Rattlesnake Jim had been held at gunpoint and forced to watch while Ricky was beaten within an inch of his life.

By the time the last pieces fell into place the following day I had a queasy feeling every time I looked at the manila folder on my desk with the witness and victim statements and photographs accumulating inside it. After a few years as a ranger, you can tell when it's going to rain from the smell of the air and which way the wind's blowing, and that morning I must have felt the wind blowing in a certain sick direction, because purely on a whim I picked up the phone and called the Colfax Police Department. When the chief answered, I asked him if he knew a miner by the name of Ricky Marks.

"Well, funny you should mention Ricky, because he's sitting right here. He's a real mess, and believe it or not, he's come to seek police protection."

I asked the chief to hold him there until I arrived.

The police station was a nondescript old two-story stucco building on the main street of Colfax, a rough little town nestled in a valley in the pine and red-dirt hills along Interstate 80. Across the street from the station were the rusty tracks of the switching yards, a padlocked Southern Pacific Railroad passenger station, an abandoned freight station, and a four-story wooden hotel with all of its windows broken out. These had been the town's vitality before the lumber mills, mines, fruit-packing outfits, and railroad had consolidated their operations elsewhere. A few doors down from the Colfax police was the Station House Saloon, where the waves of men laid off by these companies had mumbled over their beer and fought with each other for decades, and where Ricky Marks had received the first of his beatings that summer.
^*

When I came in, he was seated on a gray metal chair with his back against the pale wall next to one of the policemen's desks. He was a wiry man of thirty-six in jeans and a T-shirt. His hands were callused and his nails broken and blackened, and he had the ropy arms of someone who moved stones in the river for a living. His face, beyond the regions covered by his thick red beard and hair, was a mess of purple and greenish yellow bruises, black sutures, and crusty dried blood. His eyes were swollen nearly shut.

I introduced myself. He told me he knew who I was. I said I guessed I was becoming famous. He said he was sorry about the shack, but he knew he couldn't stay there anyway because his life was in danger. He and Jerry planned to go up there and disassemble the dredge before winter. I told him to remember to stop by our office and pick up his gun and machete.

I sat down with my notepad, and he told me a story that was pretty much the same as those I had heard from Mary Murphy and the other witnesses, differing in only a few key details, such as the consensual nature of the central act. According to Marks, after the run to the liquor store they'd all gone skinny-dipping in the river, and the woman hadn't objected to kissing and having her breasts fondled, not only by him but by his partner, Jerry, and by Kenny, another miner who had happened along and helped them drink the rest of the wine. Later, when he had driven up the road with her, he said, she had agreed enthusiastically, if drunkenly, to his suggestion of oral sex. They had gotten out of the car and started making out and ripping their clothes off, but they were both so drunk they fell down and finished the act with her lying naked in the gravel. Thinking back on it now, he didn't blame her for yelling like that when Rattlesnake Jim appeared around the turn—the gold buyer knew everybody in this country, and considering how crazy her boyfriend turned out to be, he could see how she might have been worried about the news getting back to him. Maybe they had all had a little too much to drink, but it sure was fun until it turned bad. And then it was bad, real bad.

"What kind of rifles did her boyfriend and the other men who beat you have?" I asked him.

"Like paratrooper rifles—the army kind. Full auto," the miner answered.

"What does he do for a living? Can you show me the road where he lives?" I inquired.

"Do I look that stupid? What do you think he does for a living? Something with drugs, that's for sure," he replied.

When we finished talking, I left the police station and drove back into the canyon to Yankee Jims to look for Rattlesnake Jim. This time I got lucky; his white van was parked by the bridge. I found him down at the river haggling over a small vial of nuggets with the miner who had told me about his kidnapping. Rattlesnake Jim looked nervous when he saw me.

The gold buyer's story pretty much lined up with everyone else's. He really didn't know whether Mary Murphy had been raped or had gotten scared her boyfriend would find out about Ricky Marks. But there was no question her fear of her boyfriend was justified, he said. That boyfriend was one crazy son of a bitch, or at least whatever he and his buddies were doing down at that old mine, they didn't want anyone to know about it. When Rattlesnake had driven the woman home—and it was way the hell down this dirt road where the old-timers had hydraulic-mined the land into tortured hoodoos and the trees were all twisted—the boyfriend had emerged on the front porch of his cabin and started shooting at Rattlesnake's van before he even knew who it was. Rattlesnake jumped out and threw up his hands, begging for mercy and yelling that Mary was in the van. And then, for all his chivalry, he had been kidnapped and forced to lead the boyfriend and his bunch of vigilantes back to Yankee Jims Bridge, where, with one of the boyfriend's buddies holding a rifle to his head, he had been forced to watch as they shoved Mary into the camp and made her identify Ricky and then beat the poor miner in the face and groin with their rifle butts. And when they finished, they told everyone there to keep quiet or they'd get the same thing. And that was about it, said Rattlesnake Jim.

In the end Finch wrote a five-sentence report about finding and impounding the wrecked Chevrolet, but by ranger custom, as the one who'd first seen the tip of the iceberg—that squatter's shack up the North Fork—I inherited the rest of this sprawling mess. I was left staring at my notes and wondering what kind of a raid team—ten men with assault rifles, tear gas, a helicopter, police dogs—it would take to even question the boyfriend and not get shot down in some mercury-laced wasteland of an abandoned hydraulic mine up in Dutch Flat. Four days later I wrote it all up, cut a copy to a sergeant of detectives I knew at the Sheriff's Department, and set up a meeting between him and Rattlesnake Jim. In the months that followed, Mary Murphy declined to press charges, and I doubt that detective sergeant or anyone else ever got around to seeing the boyfriend. I went on to other things and tried to forget the scared looks on the faces of Ricky Marks and Mary Murphy.

When I was growing up in California, schoolchildren were fed a pretty, triumphal account of the Gold Rush. To hear it told, it had been a rollicking good time. Later I learned that for the land, waters, and native peoples of California, and even for most of its participants, the Gold Rush was a disaster.

By the mid-1850s the American River canyons would have been unrecognizable to anyone who had seen them a few years before. Miners had lifted the river out of its bed and put it into miles of wooden flumes so that open-pit mines could be dug in its bed to recover gold. To get wood for the flumes and waterworks, pit shoring, bridges, and temporary towns along the riverbanks, tall forests of pine on the canyon walls and rims had been clear-cut. As a result of these activities, thousands of tons of topsoil were lost to erosion.

With the invention of water cannons to blast gold out of higher ground away from the river—a process known as hydraulic mining—the Gold Rush became a water rush. Mining and water companies diverted hundreds of streams into ditches cut across the canyon walls to the mines. By 1867 all of the miners' aqueducts in Placer and El Dorado Counties, placed end to end, would have stretched from there to Minneapolis. For three decades, hydraulic miners committed mayhem in the Sierra. When it was over, 255 million cubic yards of mine wastes and mud had gone down the American River alone, the equivalent of 25 million full-sized semi dump-truck loads. Over a century after they closed, the hydraulic mines remain—miles of barrens bleeding mercury into the river, like the one in which Mary Murphy's boyfriend was probably manufacturing methamphetamine. After the hydraulic mines shut down, for several decades one-hundred-foot-long bucket-line dredges churned the material hydraulic miners had washed into the beds of the North and Middle Forks for gold they had missed, while above them the canyon walls were overgrazed by cattle, mined for limestone, cut over for second-growth timber, and burned repeatedly by human-caused fire. To make the area safe for cattle and just on general principle, mountain lions, bears, and coyotes were tracked down and exterminated.

In the early twentieth century the water rush continued, now supplying irrigated agriculture, cities, and hydroelectric power stations. Improvements in technology made it possible to build dams that could inundate whole landscapes, and the water and electricity businesses joined forces with the constituency for flood control in poorly sited cities like Sacramento to build them. And so the Gold Rush led to the Auburn Dam and a tradition of valuing what could be extracted from these canyons more than the canyons themselves. Feminist historians have likened it to valuing a woman more for her sexual favors than for her personhood.

However, most of the human victims of the Gold Rush were men—dissatisfied men; men who left their homes and families in other parts of the world and came to the mountains of California wanting something better. As did people like Ricky Marks and Jerry Prentice in the gold rush of the 1970s and 1980s, the original Gold Rush miners suffered from drunkenness, illness, violence, and poverty more often than they prospered. Historians have estimated that only one in twenty made good. Of the rest, the lucky ones went home empty-handed or found other occupations. The less fortunate contracted cholera, malaria, or other diseases and never went home at all.

There isn't much left of all the wishes and hopes miners brought to the American River in 1848 and 1849 but a few platforms on the canyon walls and an abiding wildness in the culture of California. In the 1970s the Bureau of Reclamation hired a team of salvage archaeologists to survey those cabin sites, when it seemed their story would soon be lost beneath the waters of the Auburn Reservoir. Digging the telltale benches along the canyon walls, the archaeologists found a lot of broken bottles of the kind that once held whiskey and patent medicines, for all the physical and spiritual ills attending this rough miner's life on the river. I've read the archaeologists' reports, and what struck me was that not a bit of gold was found in the footings of those camps. The gold all left here for a bank vault in some faraway city. What remained in these canyons was a certain way of looking at land, waters, and women and a hollow yearning afflicting some members of every generation that neither gold, nor sex, nor wine or whiskey can repair.

W
ORKING IN THE CANYONS
that would be flooded by the Auburn Dam, I couldn't help but become a student of it, in the same way a ranger at a Civil War battlefield can recite the minutiae of Pickett's Charge or the Bloody Road. Soon I knew the story of the dam's political advances and geological defeats, the campaigns to rally its supporters and turn the tide on its critics, and the technical details of what had been done so far in the construction site, which we were required to patrol once a day so the curious wouldn't impale themselves on a piece of rebar or get sucked into the diversion tunnel and drowned. And wherever we went, people asked us questions about the dam.