Nature Noir (22 page)

In the late eighties when I first worked at Auburn State Recreation Area, the Automobile Association's map of the Sacramento Valley and Sierra foothills showed a large lake filling our canyons of the North and Middle Forks of the American River, although of course no such lake existed. Theirs was not the only map that did. A Rand McNally map distributed through filling stations also showed a twenty-five-mile-long Y-shaped blue feature labeled "Auburn Reservoir" in the middle of our canyons. And the gold-mining equipment shop in Auburn still sold Metsker's Placer County map in a slipcover proclaiming
THE SPORTSMEN'S GUIDE ... NEW UP TO DATE ... PEOPLE WOULD BE LOST WITHOUT US
. It, too, showed our canyons full of water. Not surprisingly, people often came to our ranger station for directions to the lake. "You're close," I would tell them. "It's about fifty feet deep where we're standing."

I still have those maps, along with two or three hundred others. Maybe Finch with his old ranger badges, uniform insignia, and photographs of early rangers reinforced my interest in collecting. But I already had a pretty good hoard, even before I met him. I have the maps I used to find my way around in almost every place I ever worked as a ranger—mountains I climbed, rivers I ran, reaches of tundra and salt-drenched beaches and sea inlets I walked. And others, too, of all the places I traveled when I wasn't working.

My favorite are the topographic maps, the ones with all those sharply drafted lines connecting all the points on a given elevation, which to the trained eye describe mountains, canyons, ridges, and gullies so well you feel as if you could reach out and feel the high and low spots on the paper. I buy those, and all kinds of other maps, wherever I go. I even purchase, speculatively, maps of places I have no time in my schedule to explore while I am there. I keep them all in my office, on two shelves full of those cardboard document files you see in libraries. To me, they are a sort of wealth, of memory and possibility.

I have maps of the Italian Alpi Apuanni, where my second wife and I drank red wine in a little mountain hut with my friend Marco and his Italian rock climber friends and then stumbled by climber's headlamp down several kilometers of steep trail littered with slippery, just-ripened chestnuts that had been falling from the trees, and somehow made it back to his house in a village north of Viareggio late that night. And I have maps of the Juneau Icefield in Alaska, on which I wandered alone with my ice ax and crampons making sharp scraping noises in the vastness for a few days as I tried to make up my mind to divorce my first wife. In a file marked "Sierra" I have maps my immigrant father, his eyes enthusiastically open to the grandness of his new land, used in the early 1960s to navigate us around the high country wearing shoddy work boots and basketball shoes and leading a string of pack animals loaded with army surplus ponchos for tents, water bags from military life rafts, and sometimes my mother's guitar. When I come upon those, I miss my mother terribly.

One day a copy of the long-awaited new topographic trail map of the North and Middle Forks of the American River arrived in my mailbox at the ranger station, crisp and still smelling of printer's ink. I carefully unfolded it and laid it out on the table, admiring the sharpness of the brown topographic lines, the crispness of the blue line representing the river, and all the exact twists and turns of the crosshatched black line representing our boundary. There was no lake on it. And the new map somehow made this place—our strange, sacrificial park, living on borrowed time—less ephemeral, more
real.

For years we'd used the U.S. Geological Survey 7.5-minute topographic maps. But it took a great mosaic of them—they wallpapered a whole interior wall of our ranger station—to cover our 48 miles of river in two counties. And although we had drawn our serpentine boundary in pen on the assembly on the wall, when we carried the individual maps in the field they didn't show it, and we rangers needed to know whether we were inside or outside the boundary when we heard chainsaws or rifle shots.

That wasn't the only problem with the Geologic Survey maps. Of course, the shape of the land and the bends in the river hadn't changed since the 1950s when these maps were made. But the ways people got around on the land had changed considerably. After the Bureau had taken possession of our canyons and burned down all the old ranch and mine buildings, many of the dirt roads serving them had been abandoned, washed out, or grown over. As vegetation encroached from both sides, some became footpaths. And a slew of new trails had been built, none of which were on those maps.

Then again, when I compared the new map with the old maps, there were things on the old ones I thought I'd miss. In the 1950s, the governments surveyors collected the names of places on them from local people and still older maps. At that time there were people living around these canyons who had been born only a decade after the Civil War, and only three decades after the Gold Rush had swept away the Nisenan Indian place names, along with most of the Nisenan themselves.

Many of the Gold Rush place names reflected the incredible diversity of the immigrants who came to these canyons in 1849 and, affiliated by ethnicity, religion, or origin, banded together in groups to mine gold. There were African Bar, Mormon Ravine, Kanaka Bar, China Bar, Dutch Flat, French Hill, and Spanish Dry Diggings; Maine Bar, Oregon Bar, Iowa Hill, and Illinois Canyon; New York Bar, Philadelphia Bar, and Hoboken Canyon.

The rolling divides between the canyons bore the names of families that had settled them after the Gold Rush to raise cattle: Holt Homestead, Baker Ranch, and Butcher Ranch, where the Bureau burned the last house in my time. Perhaps most evocative were the place names that remembered misfortune: Murderer's Bar, Slaughter Ravine, Small Hope Mine, Robber's Roost, Sore Finger Point, and Deadhorse Slide. Others offered hope of redemption: Honor Camp, Temperance Ravine, and Salvation Ravine.

All of these old names were missing on the new map, and in their place were some new ones. For example, the name of an Auburn banker, lumber company owner, and avid horseman who had died in 1984 was now strung out along a dotted line representing a main bridle path through the canyons. And where before the turns of the river were identified with the origins of miners, now they bore the names given to the major rapids by whitewater rafters and kayakers since the 1970s: Chunder, Parallel Parking, Tongue and Groove, Chamberlain Falls, Zig Zag, and Bogus Thunder.

At first it made me a little sad to think the traditional names would be forgotten. But then I thought, if the river is to survive, it must mean something to each generation. Those Gold Rush immigrants to which old California families trace their lineage were only the second wave—the Indians had come here perhaps twelve thousand years before—and immigration continues. Perhaps it is salutary to allow for people to bestow new meaning on these canyons periodically. We rangers had done it: the Bowl, Campsite Number One, Nude Rock, and Pig Farm were ours. Some of us weren't born here—MacGaff and Jeffries were from the East Coast. I was a native but my parents had come from Europe. And so, in this way, new Californians could make this river their own and hold it close to their hearts with the memories of what had happened along it.

One autumn day shortly after the new map came, I arranged to meet some people about a case I'd investigated the previous summer while on boat patrol at Lake Clementine. They were Laotians, new Californians. They pulled up in front of the ranger station in a pale gold sport-utility vehicle so new it still had paper plates. In California your license plates generally come within six weeks, so I knew it had been bought since July.
Did he buy it to cheer her up?

From the first moment I saw the man and the woman, I understood. They were the kind of married people who had known each other since they were teenagers. They were in their late forties now, and would be together until they died. He sat in front next to the driver, their American son-in-law—the one who had taken the directions from me on the telephone, because his mother- and father-in-laws' English wasn't all that good. She sat in the back seat.

The three of them got out. I greeted the son-in-law and asked him how he was doing. Well, he said, it had been a tough time. I ushered them through the screen door into the ranger station. I led them to the topographic map mosaic of our canyons on one wall and showed them where we would be going, up on the North Fork. I offered her the use of the ladies' room. While we were waiting for her, I talked to her husband.

He was a slight, handsome, polite man with graying hair cut neatly and combed straight forward toward his face. He wore loose-fitting dress slacks, a button-front shirt with a subdued pattern, and nice shoes. He had worked hard and, I judged, done okay for his family.

"What do you do?" I asked.

He smiled shyly. "Mechanic," he said.

"What kind of cars?" I asked him.

"All kinds," he replied.

"Where do you work?"

"American shop."

His wife, returning from the restroom, added, "He was airplane mechanic."

"Where?" I asked.

"In my country," he replied quietly.

"What kinds of planes?"

"T-28, C-130," he said.

"C-130—isn't that a military plane?"

"Well ... yes,"he said, still smiling.

"Was this during the war?" I asked him.

"Yes, from 1968."

"So when the U.S. pulled out, you had to leave?"

"Yes—after a while Communists came looking for us, for helping Americans. Yes."

"Did you two know each other at that time?" I asked.

She, standing next to him, answered, "Yes, Early was born three months before we left." She smiled faintly at the affectionate joke and then explained it to me. Her husband had named their son Early in the new language he'd picked up from the Americans at the airbase, for being born several weeks after he was expected. When they had to flee she carried Early in her arms. For days they hid in the jungle with the Communists all around them. They found a man with a boat to take them across the Mekong River under cover of darkness. Eventually they came to America. Their kids had grown up solid here.

"I hear from everyone he was a very good boy," I told them.

"Yes—he want to be soldier," she replied. "He always want to help people, since he was little boy. Always help people. We lucky to have him. But he is not lucky—" Her eyes brimmed over, and she turned away.

"Yes, I'm so sorry," I said, and stood there awkwardly for a minute. The husband came over and gently touched her back, and I walked to the screen door, held it open for them, and led the way to where their car waited next to my Jeep in the shade of the tall pines.

Driving ahead, I led them across the Foresthill Bridge and up the divide between the North and Middle Forks. At the beginning of the steep dirt road to Upper Lake Clementine, I pulled over to let them pass me, so my car, not theirs, would be enveloped in dust.

We got to the bottom and stepped out of our vehicles. Down a beach of cobbles in front of us, the North Fork entered the little reservoir of Lake Clementine to our left, no more than a riverlike finger of water itself, distinguishable from the rapid above it only by its flatness. Above the inlet, the rapid was so shallow now that it was hard to imagine how the river had looked, unusually high with late-melting snow, back at the beginning of July.

Along the water the cottonwoods were beginning to turn, and their leaves sparkled as they fluttered in a gentle breeze up the canyon. A child's voice from down the lakeshore echoed off the far canyon wall. A boy fished from the bank. A lone kayaker pulled lazily for shore.

The father stayed up on the beach by the car, the son-in-law with him. The mother walked alone across the cobbles to the river's edge. She couldn't know, could she?
Right ahead of you now; that's where his body lay after he was pulled out, during CPR.
I walked down to stand next to her. There on the beach in the bright sun, in her fitted white blouse and navy blue polyester slacks, with her flat, pale, pretty face, she looked so young that I could hardly believe her son was all grown up and going into the Army National Guard.

She had a little camera in her hand. She took some pictures of the river.

After a while she looked at me, her eyes imploring, "Where—?"

I pointed to our left. "He was sitting on the beach with the girl, his friend, there." Then, turning and pointing upstream, I told her, "They had been floating through that rapid all afternoon. They would ride it down to here, and then they'd walk back up the riverbank and ride it down again. They were all tired. Maybe he was more tired because, as his companions put it, he was 'playing lifeguard.' They said he was pulling each of them out of the fast water at the lower end before it swept them into that turn, where the river stacks up on that cliff before entering the lake. He must have sensed the danger there. That's where he later disappeared."

I looked at her, she nodded slightly, and I continued. "So they were about to go home, and Early and the girl were sitting over there to our left on the beach, across from the turn where the river collides with that wall. Early saw the young boy coming down toward them, struggling in fast water. Early yelled to him, 'Do you need help?' but didn't wait for a reply. He stood up and tossed his car keys to the girl. She said he didn't say anything, just left her, ran to the water's edge, dived in, and swam hard for the boy. When he got within reach Early grabbed the ten-year-old and towed him toward the beach. The little boy later told me that when they got close to shore, Early pushed him toward several other people who had waded in to help. Now all the attention was on the rescued boy, as the people on the beach bundled him up and took him to his father. No one saw what happened to Early, who was still in the water. A few seconds later the girl he'd been sitting with noticed he was missing and began looking for him. For a moment she saw the top of his head come up over there, just downstream of where the current hits that wall. Then he disappeared, and she said he came up once more, about over there, in the lake inlet. That was the last she saw of him until they pulled him out, right here."