Nature Noir (26 page)

This river and its canyon were no longer totally wild, nor were they entirely manmade. Rather, like much of the rest of the world, they had become some mixture of the two. No part of the world could now be said to be entirely untouched or unaltered by human enterprise; radioisotopes had been found in Arctic lichens, ice shelves were falling off the Antarctic cap, and it now looked as if the weather itself could no longer be considered entirely "natural." Citing these facts, some university intellectuals had concluded that there really wasn't any "nature" or "wilderness" anymore. Further, considering what we were now learning about the aboriginal use of fire to manipulate ecosystems, the fact that some so-called hunter-gatherer cultures actually cultivated wild plants, and the possibility that prehistoric hunters may have had something to do with the disappearance of some Ice Age animals, maybe there never had been such purity—at least as far back as human culture existed. Therefore, said some intellectuals, any moral claim you could make for saving what was left of wild, unregulated nature was based upon a faulty premise or, worse yet, pure sentimentalism.

Under the powerful influence of postmodernism's cultural and moral relativism and an almost excretory, childlike pride in human creations—our bioengineered crops and animals, brainlike computers, and the Internet—some of these thinkers had gone so far as to say that we ought to finish the job of domesticating the earth and yoking all of it to productive purposes. One writer even claimed that the planet's physical and biological self-regulation is now being replaced by electric grids and communications networks that, with the intimate involvement of human beings, will become the earth's new nervous system.

We rangers have a fair amount of time to read and I'd been aware of these ideas for a while. They are merely a more fashionable version of traditional human-centered technological optimism. But seen from a boat on a regulated river that night, the claims of these postmodernists looked faulty. However poorly managed that day, the job of metering a single river to generate power without killing any whitewater rafters was far simpler than managing the climate that provided the river's water. If dams had many beneficial effects for civilization—our late-summer whitewater rafting season being one of them—they also had many unintentional outcomes. Coastal beaches were now deprived of their sand, for centuries replenished by rivers wearing down mountains. Some of the beaches would now grow rocky—and that change might have an effect on, say, the economy of a beach town or the nesting of plovers, and that change still another effect. In California, a wild salmon fishery so robust that even after the Gold Rush people were still pitchforking fish out of Central Valley streams had been nearly done away with by dams. We humans were reductionists, and neither our brains nor our most powerful computers can begin to account for the complex web of interrelationships in a global ecosystem.

In the end much of what is seemingly known and tamed is in fact unknown, and untamed. Even with our interventions, and now because of them, the world continues to be mysterious and accidental. There are surprises in its most compromised corners, where water is eating dams, lichens establish themselves on concrete, willows take root, and we can almost get killed in wilderness sport because someone turned off the river. It may well turn out to be a more dangerous world for all our efforts to domesticate it. We have always been the beneficiaries of nature's largesse and we take all of this for granted, as adolescents do their parents' roof over their heads, and now we want the car keys. But I, one ranger, do not.

This evening on the river was an achingly beautiful one, and not because of anything I or my species had done; I did not make the uplifting of mountains, the endless wearing-down of them by water, or the adagio of the canyon wren, nor do I want to. I, one ranger, want only for the unregulated wild that has always provided for us to outlive me and all my progeny. While it may be true that human effects are everywhere, it is a matter of degree, and we are now at a critical juncture in history when we must take great pains to ensure the survival of those landscapes and species that have not already been massively manipulated. Open land that has already been damaged, like these American River canyons, may have to be restored to membership in the unregulated wild by, for example, the removal of invasive exotic species and the reintroduction of fire to the ecosystem.

For me, the bedrock of reality is my affection for wild nature, and I take exception to the idea that nature is nothing more than a cultural construction. I do not care if some professor in some rabbit warren of a concrete university office building calls my thinking inexact and sentimental. Sentiment—call it love—for the wild is ultimately why Will and I became rangers. Sentiment is why any of us bother to raise children, who sometimes don't appreciate what we do; why we care tenderly for elderly parents after age has deprived them of the memory of our names. It is why we try to salvage the juvenile delinquent, the alcoholic, the drug addict. Without it we are not human. Perhaps these professors will say that Will and I lack critical coolness, giving our working lives to protecting something they say doesn't even exist anymore. In defense, I can only say that to favor a principle—wild, self-willed nature—with the manifest ability to create your species and support you since time immemorial, over a pipe dream of a manufactured and regulated world with no such demonstrated ability, is the most practical thing there is.

I
N THE PREDAWN DARK
of a June morning in 1998, a white pickup truck with government license plates pulled onto the dirt shoulder of the Auburn—Foresthill road at a place the locals called Eight Mile Curve, within the boundaries of the land the Bureau of Reclamation had condemned for the long-awaited Auburn Dam. An unmarked government sedan was already parked there when the pickup arrived, and inside it the dark bulk of a person could be made out in the brief flash of headlights of a passing car. Someone got out and unlocked a gate. Both vehicles drove onto a dirt track inside it. The gate was relocked, and the vehicles moved off into the woods.

They had been coming there on and off for months. Sometimes what looked like a civilian vehicle met them there, or a windowless white van with government plates and no markings. But the routine was the same. In a meadow just beyond the locked gate and out of view of the road, the vehicles would stop. Four or five men would get out, greet each other quietly, and begin unloading various gear: white plastic suits and respirators, rolls of red hazard tape like the kind you see at disaster scenes, folding tables, plastic basins marked with warning stickers, bottles of chemicals with hazard markings, and plastic cases like large tackle boxes containing racks of test tubes.

Using waist-high metal stakes, the men would cordon off an area of the clearing with the red disaster tape. Inside it they'd set up the tables, cover them with sheets of disposable plastic, and arrange lab equipment along them. The van would be backed up to the cordoned-off area and its back doors opened to reveal a mobile laboratory inside, equipped with an exhaust hood for handling lethal substances.

Then the men would don their white suits. When they finished they looked like astronauts, their rubber boots carefully sealed with tape to the ankles of their suits, hands sealed in rubber gloves, heads hooded in white, and faces covered by clear masks attached by ribbed hoses to the breathing apparatus on their backs. They could well have been soldiers looking for a missing nuclear warhead or DEA agents about to take down a clandestine drug lab, but they were neither. They were biologists from the state and the county, and for months they had come to this spot in Auburn State Recreation Area to empty traps they'd been setting for rodents.

The routine this particular June morning was a little different. The men set up their equipment but didn't put on their suits right away. As the first hint of pale gray tinged the eastern sky, they walked away from their vehicles into the woods, carrying dark bundles. Ahead of them the Foresthill Divide fell away steeply into the canyon of the North Fork. They set down their bundles and carefully unrolled them. They were lengths of delicate but sturdy netting, made of gossamer threads. The men began fastening them to trees and shrubs. In the pools of light from their flashlights, the woods were unusually green for June. The grass between the oaks was tall, flexible, and dewy. There were wildflowers everywhere, and the cool air was damp and carried the rich scent of April, not the drying-hay odor of the foothills in a typical June.

It had been a rainy winter and the rains had continued halfway into June. In the bottom of the North Fork, below where the men were, the college students I had hired to keep an eye on Lake Clementine were spending their days sitting huddled in their trucks, running the heaters to keep warm. Seasonal workers were required to purchase their own uniforms and fearing they would spend too much of their wages, I had hinted that it was warm in the foothills by Memorial Day, so they might well get through a summer without owning the hundred-dollar jackets. But at 7:30
A.M.
when they went to work, the lake was gray and misty, and they froze in their shorts and short-sleeved shirts in the drizzling rain. I encouraged them to take refuge in their pickups and to improvise whatever greenish sweaters or jackets they could until the unseasonable weather ended.

My seasonals were not the only ones who were wet that year. In the early part of 1997 the easterly trade winds that normally push sun-warmed equatorial seawater toward the Asian side of the Pacific, to be replaced along the coasts of North and South America by upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean, had weakened. Warmer-than-normal water temperatures in the eastern Pacific increased evaporation and cloud formation, driving great wet storms onto the west coasts of the Americas. In Peru torrential rain flooded villages, destroying homes and killing their occupants. The rainwater pooled in low areas, mosquitoes bred in it, and some areas of the country suffered three times the average number of malaria cases. This phenomenon in the Pacific also had far-reaching effects elsewhere in the world. In Kenya and Somalia heavy rains led to outbreaks of waterborne disease, Rift Valley and dengue fevers. But in other areas the 1997–98 Niño had the opposite effect, causing drought, crop failures, and forest fires. My fellow park rangers on Southern California beaches saw unusual numbers of sea lion pups wash up dead in the surf. They looked like rumpled bags of bones. The failure of the nutrient-rich cold upwelling along the coast had led their mothers' prey—squid and small fish—to leave the sea lions' hunting grounds seeking colder water, so the mothers were starving and had little milk for their pups. But on the American River, whitewater rafting outfitters had a banner year, because all the rain and snow in the mountains kept the North Fork at high flows into the beginning of July.

***

But the men at Eight Mile Curve were not there about El Niño.

When they finished hanging the nets, they extended like invisible fences through the forest, about nine feet high and almost forty long. As the morning light came to the sky between the silhouettes of the oaks, the men quietly retreated into the shadows to wait. Around them the forest awakened in a profusion of birdsong—the plain calls of towhees, the buzzing recitations of Bewick's wrens, the sweet piping of hermit thrushes and Nashville warblers, the raucous squawks of jays. The birds began to flit through the limbs of the trees and along the ground through the underbrush, seeking bugs, grubs, and caterpillars. Some flew into the nets and were entangled. The men emerged from the shadows, gently extricated the frightened birds, and put them in containers, alive and unhurt.

The biologists were employees of the California Department of Health Services and the Placer County Health Department. They had been trapping at Eight Mile Curve since February of the previous year. They had begun by live-trapping dusky-footed woodrats and deer mice. As they would do today with the birds, they had been taking all of the animals to the tables in the cordoned-off work area. When they worked with rodents, no one was allowed into that area without a suit and a respirator, because by now rodents in the Sierra Nevada had occasionally been found infected with bubonic plague and hantavirus, the latter disease previously unknown. These potentially lethal pathogens could be picked up from rodents by humans who handled them.

By this time, creeks in remote wildernesses in the West also contained a human and animal parasite called
Giardia lamblia,
and backpackers now carried high-tech water filtration systems as a matter of course. Such precautions would have seemed ridiculous at the time of my boyhood, when my parents and I traveled widely in the higher elevations of the Sierra, drinking from any creek we pleased. At home my younger brothers and I sometimes found mouse nests in woodpiles and held them wonderingly in our cupped hands, admiring the pink babies with their blind eyes, for none of us had ever heard of hantavirus, or Valley fever, West Nile virus, or Lyme disease.

It was the latter that the biologists at Eight Mile Curve were actually looking for that June day in 1998. Lyme disease hadn't even been identified in the United States until 1975, and no one had heard of Lyme in the Sierra Nevada foothills until the early nineties. Even then it seemed rare and obscure. By that decade, the state Department of Health Services and the Placer County Health Department had began collecting a species of tick that was the local representative of the group that carries the disease to humans and animals, and a fair number of them had tested positive for Lyme. This western black-legged tick,
Ixodes pacificus,
carries the Lyme bacterium—a microscopic corkscrew-shaped thing known as
Borrellia burgdorferi
—in its gut and saliva, and disgorges the bacteria into people and animals when it finishes sucking their blood. Under a powerful microscope the spirochete, as this class of corkscrew-shaped bacteria is known to scientists, looks not unlike that which causes syphilis, and indeed the late-stage neurological effects of the two diseases can be somewhat similar, once the bacteria are fully disseminated in your brain and nervous system. Syphilis, however, is far easier to cure. Lyme is very curable early in the infection but devilishly resistant to antibiotics once it's hidden in the deep reaches of your body.