Nature Noir (5 page)

With these preliminaries completed by 1975, the Bureau turned its attention to constructing the Auburn Dam itself. But that year the dam ran into major technical problems—these I will go into later—and by February 1986 the cofferdam and diversion tunnel still stood guard over the dam's unfinished foundations, and no water lapped at the tops of the two four-hundred-foot pillars supporting New Foresthill Bridge.

The civil engineers who had studied floods on the American and Sacramento Rivers for over a hundred years before I got there kept beautiful records. I pored over some of them when I began writing this book—nineteenth-century soundings of river bottoms dangerously choked with mining debris from the mountains, meticulous notes on the flood of 1896 made in an engineer's even hand on college-ruled paper, the ribbon-textured typescript of a report on the Central Valley flood of 1907. These and many other records I found neatly stored in document files in agency libraries. There was an awareness of posterity in the care with which they had been conserved.

In contrast, the records of our lives as rangers under the waterline of the Auburn Dam were less carefully kept. They consisted of criminal investigations, accident and coroner's reports, daily patrol logs, correspondence, bookkeeping, attendance reports, dispatch logs, crime scene photographs, tape recordings of interviews with suspects, and piles of manila envelopes and plastic bags containing criminal evidence. When I began going through them in 2001, they were archived in a decaying midden of sagging cardboard boxes, covered with dust and mouse droppings and stacked haphazardly in an unheated warehouse at our ranger station, surrounded by piles of cast-off things for which there could be no conceivable use: bits of long-gone patrol trucks, shotgun racks, pieces of light bars, dial telephones, ancient sirens in tangles of wire. Inside the boxes were more droppings and mouse nests made of our shredded reports. Bundles of each ranger's citations by year scattered like dry leaves when I picked them up; the rubber bands holding them together had disintegrated to sticky crumbs.

Perhaps by the time you read this, they will have been discarded. More likely, they will be decaying in the same location, because a decision to throw them out would be indicative of a culture of housekeeping we never had. Instead, we scattered our effects—papers, bits of trucks, old holsters and radio batteries, locks without keys—in piles behind us in the cobwebby sheds and offices of our compound, living like squatters or transients, day by day, month to month, year to year. I don't suppose it ever occurred to us that later someone would be interested in the grand social science experiment in which we had all participated without knowing it, which answered the question: How do people behave in a condemned landscape?

The boxes from 1986 contained my work, but not until May. However, by virtue of the other rangers' patrol logs and reports, accounts of witnesses, newspaper reports, video taken by television stations, weather maps, river flow records, and my knowledge of the habitual ways in which the rangers rattled in and out of the American River canyons, I am able to reconstruct what happened during the floods of 1986.

In the first days of February it had been raining and snowing hard in the Sierra. On Sunday, February 2, a bolt of lightning hit a tree on the north end of Auburn and from there passed through two houses. In one, it blew off a wall a patch of Sheetrock the size of a door, which flew across the room and struck a thirteen-year-old girl in the face. She was not seriously injured.

On Monday, February 4, a cell of high pressure off the coast provided a break in the weather. Two of the rangers who later became my partners were dispatched into the canyon under the Foresthill Bridge after a report that someone had either committed suicide or jumped from the bridge with a parachute. On arrival, they found nothing. At about nine the next morning one of them set fire to a pile of tree limbs downhill from our office and stood contentedly in the radiant heat, shovel in hand, as he did with each winter's burn pile. That evening, a twenty-three-year-old woman by the name of Karla Jean Eichelberger drove her car to the east side of the Foresthill Bridge. Evidently her fear of heights got the better of her, because just before seven o'clock that evening she shot herself in the head with a .38 caliber revolver. She was found later that night.

On Saturday, February 8, as was their routine on winter weekend mornings, the rangers gathered at the top of the dirt road down to Mammoth Bar. Mammoth was a quarter-mile-long beach on the Middle Fork, about a mile upstream from the Confluence. In the laissez-faire regime of the Bureau prior to the rangers' arrival in 1977, it had become popular with off-road motorcyclists, and the canyon wall above it was now covered with the red gouges of hill climbs, which bled muddy water into the river whenever it rained hard. Under the relentless logic of "It'll all be underwater sometime soon anyway," State Parks could not summon the political will to close it. In fact, over the following years it was expanded. Helpless to defend their ground against this onslaught of off-road vehicles, the rangers exacted increments of revenge in a multitude of small cuts, setting up roadblocks where they stopped every pickup truck-load of all-terrain vehicles coming into the area and writing whole books of tickets for offenses such as expired registration and no spark-arresting muffler.

This particular morning, two sheriff's cars came driving down the road. The deputies were looking for three all-terrain vehicles that had just been stolen in town. The rangers volunteered to check the canyon bottom. As so often happened, while looking for one thing, they found another. Down at the river they heard yells for help, and looking across the water, they saw a stranded climber hanging from a cliff on the other side. Dave Finch and his partner drove to the bridge downstream, crossed the river, and made their way up to rescue the stranded man. Later that night one of the sheriff's deputies, a young reserve by the name of Tim Ruggles, was killed when a patrol car driven by his partner skidded off the road and hit an oak tree as they were responding to back up another unit on a theft call.

The next morning the rangers were back at Mammoth Bar, running off-road vehicle license checks on the radio and eating doughnuts and cinnamon twists from Hilda's Pastries in Auburn off napkins on the hoods of their trucks. And again the comfort of their routine was disrupted, when a man named John Carta and several associates towed a trailer onto the middle of the Foresthill Bridge. On the trailer were a specially constructed ramp and a motorcycle. Carta's accomplices set up flares to stop traffic, deployed the ramp, the motorcycle, and two men with video cameras, and situated a getaway car at a trailhead in the canyon bottom. Carta donned a parachute, snugged the harness, mounted the motorcycle, and accelerated up the ramp and over the bridge railing into thin air.

Airborne, Carta pushed away from the motorcycle and pulled the ripcord. His main canopy opened with a crack and a jerk, and he drifted sideways, passing over the live oaks and gray pines as the motorcycle tumbled away from him. It landed on the canyon bottom with a distant metallic crash, a tinkle of flying parts, and a spray of oil and gasoline. The sound drifted up to Carta, mixed with the whisper of the river, as he rode his canopy and a happy wave of adrenaline, tugging the control lines toward a safe landing on the slope below him.

Someone reported the jump to the Sheriff's Department, the sheriff's dispatcher called State Parks, and two rangers were rolled from Mammoth Bar. Arriving at the big bridge at twenty minutes before noon, one of them recorded the identification numbers from the twisted wreck of the 1983 Yamaha at the bottom of the canyon. The other checked the surrounding area for clues and soon found the trailer and its ramp stashed nearby on Lake Clementine Road. The trailer was registered to Carta. Within a few hours one of the cameramen sold his tape to a television station, and there was no doubt who the daredevil was.

***

That Monday, on the sixteenth floor of the Resources Building, a serpentinite-green monolith in Sacramento housing the headquarters of the State Department of Water Resources, a meteorologist by the name of Bill Mork pulled the morning weather charts off the old wet-process plotter and with growing concern showed them to a fellow forecaster, Curt Schmutte.

There was something jarringly familiar to both men about the pattern, and Schmutte went looking for the old weather maps from the Christmas storm of 1964—a storm so warm it rained at ten thousand feet above sea level in the Sierra, causing flooding that killed twenty-four people—and the Christmas storm of 1955, which flooded a hundred thousand acres and killed sixty-four. When Schmutte returned, the two men spread the old weather maps out next to the new ones, and after they finished looking at them, Mork picked up the phone and called the National Weather Service's lead forecaster in Redwood City. Comparing notes, the state and federal men agreed: There was something to worry about.

By Tuesday there were high, thin clouds over the American River canyons. The upper-level charts from the National Weather Service showed that a mass of high pressure that had been blocking storms from entering California since February 5 had split into two pieces. A strong westerly flow of warm, moist air off the tropical Pacific had broken through the high in two branches. One branch took a meandering route around the northern remnant of the blocking high through the Gulf of Alaska, where it was chilled, and then flowed south again. The southern branch was charging east toward California through the breech between the two masses of high pressure. Colliding, the two branches formed a deadly pattern, because warm, moist air, when suddenly cooled, can no longer hold its moisture and drops it quickly as rain. The storm would hit the ramp of the Sierra Nevada at an almost perfect right angle, lifting it more quickly than if the storm had struck the mountains at an oblique. The quick push upward into colder regions of the higher atmosphere would increase the storm's violence, as moisture was suddenly wrung out of it over the mountains.

That morning the two rangers who'd written up Carta's jump hiked back up under the Foresthill Bridge to check on his smashed motorcycle. The county sheriff had taken an interest in Carta and planned to remove the motorcycle as evidence. But the rangers found it gone, and when he learned of this later in the day, the sheriff was angry. There had now been at least eleven suicides from the bridge, he told a reporter from the
Auburn Journal,
and all sorts of people were making a hobby out of leaping from it on hang gliders and parachutes. He had no intention of allowing the bridge to become a destination for every crazy person who wished to risk his life, or end it. But, of course, this had already happened.

The storm set in on Wednesday, and Blue Canyon, in the mountains east of Auburn, got three and a half inches of rain. That evening a rosary was recited for Deputy Tim Ruggles, and the rain beat down on the roof of the funeral home where he was laid out, and on the mourner's umbrellas as they arrived. At ten the next morning Sheriff Nunes attended Ruggles's burial. Ruggles had been twenty-three. The grave was filled, and that afternoon the rain beat down upon the fresh mound of earth under a formless sheet of gray sky, and dusk fell early on Auburn. The town got an inch and a third that day.

By Thursday it was raining as if the world was ending. That day a request for a warrant for the arrest of John Carta made its way from the Auburn offices of Sheriff Nunes, across a wet lawn and a parking lot to the offices of District Attorney Jack Shelley, a big, red-faced man in suspenders. By this time the clay soils of the hills around the American River were saturated and every drop was running off into the river. At two-thirty that afternoon enough water was going down the North Fork alone to fill a container the size of a football field with six feet of water in less than a minute. By Friday that figure doubled; by Saturday it tripled.

By Sunday, aircraft over the Pacific Ocean were reporting jet-stream winds of 210 miles per hour at thirty-five thousand feet, and airline passengers from Hawaii were arriving early at mainland airports. Satellite photos showed the normally spiral patterns of clouds coming in off the ocean straightening out into a sort of gun barrel. The gun was loaded with moisture and pointed right at the American River. That day Blue Canyon got over five inches of rain; on Monday it was eight and a half. Now enough water was going down the North Fork to fill that football-field-sized container with a foot of water in less than a second. By afternoon, every route over the Sierra Nevada was closed by weather; huge landslides covered all four lanes of Interstate 80, both lanes of State Route 50, and the main transcontinental railway tracks. For the next couple of days, the park rangers could do little but watch the water rise behind the cofferdam.

By the time of Tim Ruggles's burial, the tunnel around the foundations of the Auburn Dam had reached capacity. As the water backed up behind the cofferdam, the tunnel went under, and big slick logs began racing in crazy circles around an ugly suck hole in the brown water, like the kind that forms over a bathtub drain, but big enough to swallow a cement truck. By Saturday, February 15, one of the rangers recorded on his patrol log that the water behind the cofferdam had reached the Highway 49 Bridge and was rising toward the bridge deck. Just upstream in the Middle Fork canyon a saturated cliff face supporting the Old Foresthill Road gave way, and the road slid several hundred feet down the canyon wall into the river.

Over the weekend no one had emptied the rain gauge at the Forest Service ranger station in Foresthill. By Monday it registered eleven inches of rain. Before dawn that day the deck of the 49 Bridge went under, and at five-thirty that morning Virgil H. Morehouse of Minden, Nevada, became the last person to try—and the first to fail—to cross it.

With his three children in his two-year-old Buick sedan, Morehouse set out across the flooded bridge from the east side, but the vehicle soon stalled. He tried the doors, but the water pressure from outside would not allow him to open them. He tried to roll down the electric windows, but they weren't responding to their switches.