Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (Paperback)

by Jordan Fisher Smith (Author) "IT WAS MIDSUMMER, a couple of years into my time in the foothills..." (more)
Key Phrases: American River, North Fork, Barbara Schoener (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Slated to be drowned by a dam, the California state park patrolled by the author of this haunting memoir is a "condemned landscape" of gorgeous river canyons hemmed in by exurban sprawl and peopled by eccentric gold miners, squatting families, drug dealers and miscellaneous drunken, gun-waving rowdies, a place where "turkey vultures floated... savoring the hot air for the inevitable attrition of heat, drought and violence." In his 14 years there, first-time author Smith encountered fights, beatings, suicides, daredevil canyon divers and the corpse of a woman jogger killed and half eaten by a cougar. His conflicted task of facilitating the communion of humans with the wilderness while keeping the humans civilized and the wild places wild becomes a mission against the "half-assed and watered-down... gray area" that is the modern world's "perpetual state of uncertainty." The clash of nature and civilization is a resonant theme, but it doesn't of itself yield compelling insights, and sometimes the author's essays add up to little more than shaggy-dog stories. But Smith writes with a novelistic sense of character, atmosphere and pacing, in a prose style that's wonderfully evocative of landscape and its effects on people. It will cause readers to both thrill and shudder at the call of the wild. >
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"Eloquently meditative . . . [Smith writes]with a gritty candor -- think of a gun-toting Norman Maclean or Wallace Stegner." -- Alan Burdick The New York Times Book Review

"Gloriously unlike anything I've ever read before . . . gives entree into a strange, dark, and mesmerizing outdoor world that's absolutely unforgettable." -- Caroline Leavitt Boston Globe

"He writes about the natural world with more grace than anyone since Edward Abbey." Newsweek

"Extraordinary . . . Nature Noir marks the debut of a terrific new nature writer, one whose penetrating, ranger's-eye view of the Sierra Nevada recalls the plain-spoken timbre of Edward Abbey and David James Duncan." Outside

"Gracefully weaves scenes and stories with context, history and reflection, in ways recalling the best of John McPhee." Los Angeles Times

"Our editors recommend . . . In his taut drama . . . Jordan Fisher Smith does much to dispel the notion of park users as docile birdwatchers in hiking shorts or rangers as kindly wildflower guides in khaki hats." The San Francisco Chronicle

"A wonderful antidote to the treacly Ansel Adams image of our parks." The Wall Street Journal

"Astonishing and fine . . . graceful, disturbing. . . [a] remarkable, hard-to-classify book." Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Smith offers a fresh perspective on our threatened environment . . . Nature Noir reflects the spirit of an era as did Desert Solitaire." Charlotte Observer

"A nature book unlike any other. . . infused with wonder, laced with heart-stopping descriptions of natural beauty and peppered with gritty, anti-romantic, all-too-real tales of cops 'n' bad guys in the great outdoors." The San Diego Union-Tribune

"By turns funny, poignant and surprising . . . an intimate memoir of the career of a state-park ranger. Not just any ranger, but one with a wicked pen, patrolling a doomed landscape." Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer

"Nature Noir is by far the best book written by or about the modern park ranger I have read." -- Tom Wylie Bloomsbury Review

"Not only an electrifying tale of bringing the law to the wild west in the 1980s and '90s but also a graphic piece of writing from someone who has learned his craft from the royalty of American naturalists: writers like Gary Snyder, Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey." Buffalo News

See all Editorial Reviews

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Product Details Paperback: 224 pages Publisher: Mariner Books (May 3, 2006) Language: English ISBN-10: 0618711953 ISBN-13: 978-0618711956 Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies) Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews) Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,704 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books) Popular in these categories: (What's this?) #5 in  Books > History > United States > State & Local > Nevada #11 in  Books > Outdoors & Nature > Ecology > Mountains #51 in  Books > Science > Nature & Ecology > Natural History

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First Sentence:
IT WAS MIDSUMMER, a couple of years into my time in the foothills. Read the first page

Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
American River, North Fork, Barbara Schoener, Middle Fork, Placer County, Lake Clementine, Bureau of Reclamation, Yankee Jims, Central Valley, Eight Mile Curve, Foresthill Bridge, Mary Murphy, Sierra Nevada, Rattlesnake Jim, Cherokee Bar, United States, Auburn Reservoir, Ricky Marks, Folsom Dam, Folsom Lake, Foresthill Divide, Otter Creek, San Francisco, Forest Lake Christian, Sherm Jeffries

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Citations (learn more)

This book cites 4 books:

• Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey on page 56
• Abraham Lincoln (History Makers) by Philip Clark on page 147
• Silent Spring by Rachel Carson on page 96
• Assembling California by John McPhee on page 210

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Customer Reviews

27 Reviews 5 star:  (11) 4 star:  (7) 3 star:  (2) 2 star:  (6) 1 star:  (1)           Average Customer Review 3.8 out of 5 stars (27 customer reviews)		Share your thoughts with other customers:
Most Helpful Customer Reviews 26 of 27 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars The Ranger's Heart of Darkness, July 22, 2005 By  doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    This review is from: Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (.) (Hardcover) If you think being a forest ranger is just leading happy people on hikes and lazily watching for fires, think again. Hopefully not all state and national parks present as much danger as California's Auburn State Recreation Area, where Jordan Fisher Smith has collected many years of experience in the dark side of human communion with nature. In America's natural preserves, rangers are getting increasingly caught up in law enforcement scenarios and saving under-prepared suburbanites from nature's challenges. With a ruminative and fast-moving writing style, Smith describes various episodes in which he or his coworkers had to deal with anarchic gold miners along the American River (a few hardy souls still think the gold rush prospector's life is possible), gangsters from a hidden meth lab, gun-toting drifters living in the campgrounds, all types of fights and domestic disputes among park users, and even a woman being killed by a mountain lion. Mixed into these narratives are discussions by Smith on the true day-to-day life of a California ranger, which features a lot of paperwork as well as hazards both natural and manmade. Smith also embodies a more insidious natural hazard, as he briefly describes his battle with advanced Lyme disease. There is a fair amount of environmental politics and conservationist history in the book, mostly applied to discussions of decades-long plans to dam the American River in the park for flood control and irrigation. This gave Smith and his coworkers a strange sense of risking their lives to protect a condemned and temporary landscape, and this brings on some pretty good philosophy of the civilization vs. wilderness stripe. The end result of all these varied stories, from Smith's direct experience, is a book that offers a surprisingly original mix of true crime, naturalist philosophy, and social observation. It turns out that a park ranger's life can be pretty wild, in all senses of the word. [~doomsdayer520~] 23 of 24 people found the following review helpful: 4.0 out of 5 stars Tells it like it is, no more, no less, June 23, 2005 By  D. Sean West (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    This review is from: Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (.) (Hardcover) Those of us living in an urban environment tend to romanticize the actually environment thinking of it all as chirping birds and cuddly bunnies (kind of like Bambi without the mom getting shot) - but this is not so. Or at least this is not the view that park ranger Jordan Smith's fourteen year tenure on the American River seems to bare out. The reflective essays of Nature Noir are grittily human and more often about people in nature than about nature itself. For a book I found browsing through the nature section of the bookstore there was certainly more rape, assault and suicide than I had expected but it would seem that is because there is more of that in our national parks system than I expected. More than any of those things though, what was most unexpected in the book was the surprisingly hopeful tone of the book in spite of it all. Instead of demoralizing and hopeless Smith doesn't set out to paint a bleak picture of the national parks system but just an accurate one, not shying away from its beauty or its flaws in a way that books by Edward Abbey and Pete Fromm (both who were just seasonal park employees and not year around rangers) don't fully accomplish. 14 of 16 people found the following review helpful: 5.0 out of 5 stars An Opportunity for Wildness, April 23, 2005 By  J. McLaughlin - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)    This review is from: Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (.) (Hardcover) Most truly fine writers are too dreamy to be much good at anything else. Not that they lack experience, they just lack heroic competence, and generally are confined to the role of (hopefully keen) observer when the stuff hits the fan. The man or woman of action who can write--and the writer who can save your life--is vanishingly rare. Jordan Fisher Smith is that rare exception. Nature Noir is a memoir of place in the broadest, most catholic sense: people, politics, plants, animals, weather, and geology all are acknowledged as characters in the universal hard-luck drama we call "nature." During the last two decades of the 20th century, a handful of park rangers found themselves in the surreal, tragic, deliciously post-modern situation of risking their lives to enforce the law in a condemned landscape--California's American River canyons. The canyons, already used hard for a hundred years by miners and ranchers, had been bought up by the government as the site for a reservoir that would rise behind the still-incomplete Auburn Dam. When young Fisher Smith's tenure as a ranger on the American River begins, the dam project has stalled, leaving the land in limbo, a temporary place. The pause creates a social vacuum in the American River canyons--an opportunity for wildness--and Nature Noir is about what happens in that vacuum. Much of what happens is sad and absurd, and Fisher Smith's tale is partly a sympathetic but trenchant commentary on the behavior of modern humans at the edge of civilization. A bridge built to clear the planned reservoir waits for the waters to rise underneath, presenting a spectacularly vertiginous vertical drop that proves irresistible to suicides, stunt drivers, and parachuting chickens, and the rangers are called upon to deal with the grisly post-mortems and shattered Corvettes. Down in the canyons, a Mad Max atmosphere pervades: everyone seems to be armed, drunk, or both; gold miners run afoul of drug dealers, and people get hurt. The place has become both a temporary refuge for society's misfits and a giant salvage operation as opportunists rush to loot the goods before the waters rise. No one wants to risk loving the canyons except, perhaps, the rangers, who always seem to be perversely aware of where they are in relation to the invisible line hundreds of feet above the river: the ultimate water level of the coming reservoir. The more inspiriting elements of Nature Noir are found in Fisher Smith's portrayal of the rangers, each of them--the author included--improvising a raggedy existential heroism to get through the days, the hot, dusty, dangerous work that all suspect may, in the end, be for naught. Nature Noir is a wild ride, a piercing and unflinching look at contemporary American society's collision with the rest of nature, and ultimately a vector of stubborn hope. No transparent eyeball, Jordan Fisher Smith writes with the authority conferred by a life of action, the perspicacity to see that the action means something, and the artistic talent to convey both action and meaning in compelling story. His style is restrained, matter-of-fact, and when he hits you with lyricism, the effect is stunning: Fisher Smith's description of the body of a woman killed and partially eaten by a mountain lion is unforgettable for, of all things, its startling beauty. For its precision and nuance, Fisher Smith's language remains concrete and visceral, and the reader is invited--compelled--to join the rangers in the dusty, dangerous canyons. You're there with them, disarming belligerent drunks in the middle of nowhere. You help recover bodies, investigate murders, comfort bereaved families, you point out the wonders of the place and receive blank stares for your effort. You protect this doomed place and the people who come here. Hopelessness and despair lap at you like rising water, and you are tempted to leave, but you remain, risking your life for some stubborn notion of duty, a faint hope of making a difference, because you know that if this isn't good enough, what is? Then, slowly, gradually at first, you start to notice the canyons recovering from their century of exploitation, vegetation is reclaiming eroded hillsides, animals are returning. Given its opportunity, the wildness is creeping back in. At the same time, the good people of California are coming to appreciate the American River canyons as an "accidental wilderness," a place for retreat and recreation, and the political tide has begun to turn against the dam ever being completed. Climbing above the river into a side slot canyon on a hot summer day's patrol, you find the intricately woven moss nest of a water ouzel, a bird of rivers, the first you have ever seen. Checking the invisible line on the canyon wall far overhead, you realize the place where you are standing, this secret ledge where the bird has chosen to build its nest, could be two hundred fifty feet underwater. Instinctively, just for a moment, you hold your breath.		Ad feedback   Most Recent Customer Reviews 4.0 out of 5 stars Career adrift How to do your job without support of your purpose. A life in appreciation of nature and in spite of the politics that wants to drown your world. Read more Published 3 months ago by John Bowes 5.0 out of 5 stars Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra Shatter the California Environmental Myth! Then kick it in, step on it and if there is still anything left, shoot if for good measure. Read more Published 16 months ago by James Denny 4.0 out of 5 stars Distinctive stories from a distinctive setting This is the memoir of a ranger assigned to a dying state park whose lands were due to be flooded by a downstream dam. Read more Published 20 months ago by Arthur Digbee 5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating glimpse into the dark side -This gritty book holds nothing back A boldly written book, by an author who is not afraid to take chances, Jordan Fisher Smith, a park ranger whose career led him by chance, or perhaps by destiny, to the canyons... Read more Published 21 months ago by Amy Racina 2.0 out of 5 stars Nature Noir A park ranger talks about law enforcement, dams, miners, and death in California's Auburn State Recreation Area. Published 21 months ago by Sam Adams 2.0 out of 5 stars Good book for the plane I don't really have much to say about Nature Noir. I read it on the plane out to Denver. It was recommended to me by a non-fiction writer and I heard part of an interview with the... Read more Published on June 20, 2007 by Jonathan Carr 2.0 out of 5 stars Mother Nature & Politics--Man is Always the Bad Guy Alas.......A good friend recommended this book for me. He really enjoyed the heck out of it, but I guess I didn't get the same thrill out of reading it. Read more Published on March 25, 2007 by A. J. Mathison 2.0 out of 5 stars Slow, Ponderous The book started with a bang and ended with a whimper. It was tedious reading by and large, as the Park System is viewed by kind of the Willie Loman of Rangers. Read more Published on January 18, 2007 by Glenn Yates 3.0 out of 5 stars Poor writing with some good stories Jordan Fisher Smith's writing is extremely poor. However, some of the stories he writes on are interesting despite his lack of proper grammer. Read more Published on January 4, 2007 by Jared M. Worley 5.0 out of 5 stars Wildness and beauty at the heart of Mother Lode country Far from safeguarding the big-time, high-profile, and first-rate landscape and wilderness of the national parks and national monuments as a ranger, Jordan Fisher Smith instead... Read more Published on January 1, 2007 by Luis P. Fernandez Search Customer Reviews Only search this product's reviews

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Product Details

• Paperback: 224 pages
• Publisher: Mariner Books (May 3, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0618711953
• ISBN-13: 978-0618711956
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #59,704 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in these categories: (What's this?)

  #5 in	Books > History > United States > State & Local > Nevada
  #11 in	Books > Outdoors & Nature > Ecology > Mountains
  #51 in	Books > Science > Nature & Ecology > Natural History

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

26 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Ranger's Heart of Darkness, July 22, 2005

By	doomsdayer520 (Pennsylvania) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)

This review is from: Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (.) (Hardcover)

If you think being a forest ranger is just leading happy people on hikes and lazily watching for fires, think again. Hopefully not all state and national parks present as much danger as California's Auburn State Recreation Area, where Jordan Fisher Smith has collected many years of experience in the dark side of human communion with nature. In America's natural preserves, rangers are getting increasingly caught up in law enforcement scenarios and saving under-prepared suburbanites from nature's challenges. With a ruminative and fast-moving writing style, Smith describes various episodes in which he or his coworkers had to deal with anarchic gold miners along the American River (a few hardy souls still think the gold rush prospector's life is possible), gangsters from a hidden meth lab, gun-toting drifters living in the campgrounds, all types of fights and domestic disputes among park users, and even a woman being killed by a mountain lion.

Mixed into these narratives are discussions by Smith on the true day-to-day life of a California ranger, which features a lot of paperwork as well as hazards both natural and manmade. Smith also embodies a more insidious natural hazard, as he briefly describes his battle with advanced Lyme disease. There is a fair amount of environmental politics and conservationist history in the book, mostly applied to discussions of decades-long plans to dam the American River in the park for flood control and irrigation. This gave Smith and his coworkers a strange sense of risking their lives to protect a condemned and temporary landscape, and this brings on some pretty good philosophy of the civilization vs. wilderness stripe. The end result of all these varied stories, from Smith's direct experience, is a book that offers a surprisingly original mix of true crime, naturalist philosophy, and social observation. It turns out that a park ranger's life can be pretty wild, in all senses of the word. [~doomsdayer520~]

23 of 24 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tells it like it is, no more, no less, June 23, 2005

By	D. Sean West (Seattle, WA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (.) (Hardcover)

Those of us living in an urban environment tend to romanticize the actually environment thinking of it all as chirping birds and cuddly bunnies (kind of like Bambi without the mom getting shot) - but this is not so. Or at least this is not the view that park ranger Jordan Smith's fourteen year tenure on the American River seems to bare out.

The reflective essays of Nature Noir are grittily human and more often about people in nature than about nature itself. For a book I found browsing through the nature section of the bookstore there was certainly more rape, assault and suicide than I had expected but it would seem that is because there is more of that in our national parks system than I expected.

More than any of those things though, what was most unexpected in the book was the surprisingly hopeful tone of the book in spite of it all. Instead of demoralizing and hopeless Smith doesn't set out to paint a bleak picture of the national parks system but just an accurate one, not shying away from its beauty or its flaws in a way that books by Edward Abbey and Pete Fromm (both who were just seasonal park employees and not year around rangers) don't fully accomplish.

14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Opportunity for Wildness, April 23, 2005

By	J. McLaughlin - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (.) (Hardcover)

Most truly fine writers are too dreamy to be much good at anything else. Not that they lack experience, they just lack heroic competence, and generally are confined to the role of (hopefully keen) observer when the stuff hits the fan. The man or woman of action who can write--and the writer who can save your life--is vanishingly rare. Jordan Fisher Smith is that rare exception.

Nature Noir is a memoir of place in the broadest, most catholic sense: people, politics, plants, animals, weather, and geology all are acknowledged as characters in the universal hard-luck drama we call "nature." During the last two decades of the 20th century, a handful of park rangers found themselves in the surreal, tragic, deliciously post-modern situation of risking their lives to enforce the law in a condemned landscape--California's American River canyons. The canyons, already used hard for a hundred years by miners and ranchers, had been bought up by the government as the site for a reservoir that would rise behind the still-incomplete Auburn Dam. When young Fisher Smith's tenure as a ranger on the American River begins, the dam project has stalled, leaving the land in limbo, a temporary place. The pause creates a social vacuum in the American River canyons--an opportunity for wildness--and Nature Noir is about what happens in that vacuum.

Much of what happens is sad and absurd, and Fisher Smith's tale is partly a sympathetic but trenchant commentary on the behavior of modern humans at the edge of civilization. A bridge built to clear the planned reservoir waits for the waters to rise underneath, presenting a spectacularly vertiginous vertical drop that proves irresistible to suicides, stunt drivers, and parachuting chickens, and the rangers are called upon to deal with the grisly post-mortems and shattered Corvettes. Down in the canyons, a Mad Max atmosphere pervades: everyone seems to be armed, drunk, or both; gold miners run afoul of drug dealers, and people get hurt. The place has become both a temporary refuge for society's misfits and a giant salvage operation as opportunists rush to loot the goods before the waters rise. No one wants to risk loving the canyons except, perhaps, the rangers, who always seem to be perversely aware of where they are in relation to the invisible line hundreds of feet above the river: the ultimate water level of the coming reservoir. The more inspiriting elements of Nature Noir are found in Fisher Smith's portrayal of the rangers, each of them--the author included--improvising a raggedy existential heroism to get through the days, the hot, dusty, dangerous work that all suspect may, in the end, be for naught.

Nature Noir is a wild ride, a piercing and unflinching look at contemporary American society's collision with the rest of nature, and ultimately a vector of stubborn hope. No transparent eyeball, Jordan Fisher Smith writes with the authority conferred by a life of action, the perspicacity to see that the action means something, and the artistic talent to convey both action and meaning in compelling story. His style is restrained, matter-of-fact, and when he hits you with lyricism, the effect is stunning: Fisher Smith's description of the body of a woman killed and partially eaten by a mountain lion is unforgettable for, of all things, its startling beauty.

For its precision and nuance, Fisher Smith's language remains concrete and visceral, and the reader is invited--compelled--to join the rangers in the dusty, dangerous canyons. You're there with them, disarming belligerent drunks in the middle of nowhere. You help recover bodies, investigate murders, comfort bereaved families, you point out the wonders of the place and receive blank stares for your effort. You protect this doomed place and the people who come here. Hopelessness and despair lap at you like rising water, and you are tempted to leave, but you remain, risking your life for some stubborn notion of duty, a faint hope of making a difference, because you know that if this isn't good enough, what is? Then, slowly, gradually at first, you start to notice the canyons recovering from their century of exploitation, vegetation is reclaiming eroded hillsides, animals are returning. Given its opportunity, the wildness is creeping back in. At the same time, the good people of California are coming to appreciate the American River canyons as an "accidental wilderness," a place for retreat and recreation, and the political tide has begun to turn against the dam ever being completed.

Climbing above the river into a side slot canyon on a hot summer day's patrol, you find the intricately woven moss nest of a water ouzel, a bird of rivers, the first you have ever seen. Checking the invisible line on the canyon wall far overhead, you realize the place where you are standing, this secret ledge where the bird has chosen to build its nest, could be two hundred fifty feet underwater. Instinctively, just for a moment, you hold your breath.