Customer Reviews

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

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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~]

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.

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.

Destined to become an environmental classic, Nature Noir vividly captures the reader in a tale of interactions between people and nature, and the park rangers' many roles.
As each chapter relates a true story from an accidental wilderness of doomed public lands in the Sierra foothills, you feel as though you are in the jeep on patrol with Jordan Fisher Smith. As he shares his thoughts on the journey, the reader gains an inciteful view into the real world of modern park ranger work and the conflicting forces affecting all of our natural landscapes. This thought provoking book is a 'must read' if you care about our public parks and forests!

I'm not the hugest nature buff--lived in cities my whole life, never been camping, find hiking kind of boring, do like impressive landscapes (especially deserts), never been hunting or fishing, been white water rafting once, etc. but this memoir by a former California State Park Ranger captured and mostly held my interest. Smith was a ranger from 1986-99 in the Auburn State Recreation Area, a piece of wilderness off I-80, about halfway between Sacramento and Lake Tahoe. Through a complicated quirk, the land actually belongs to the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and has long been marked for submersion due to the imminent building of a dam that would create a reservoir flooding most of the area. Because of this, the California park bureaucracy allocated the recreation area a skeleton staff and minimal funding, resulting in a much more wild atmosphere than one finds at most state parks.

Indeed, the dam (or lack thereof) is a thread that runs throughout the book and looms large over the daily affairs of the rangers. Fisher writes compellingly about these daily affairs, and about how the contrast between the dream of working at some magisterial landscape revered throughout the country and the down to earth reality of being stuck in a backwater park with little support. Like many rangers, he has a deep and abiding love of the wilderness and respect for its beauty and dangers. The difficulty of the park ranger's central task -- to somehow balance the preservation of wilderness with the right of the taxpayers to safely enjoy it -- pervades the narrative. Indeed, the human element is the most interesting aspect of the book. The lack of staff and the unwillingness of local authorities to prosecute park scofflaws makes the large wilderness a magnet for misfits, including typical weekend drunks, meth lab operators, homeless squatter families, and any number of sketchy people trying to keep a low profile and live "off the grid." The most fascinating of these to me are the roughscrabble types seeking to eke gold out of them thar hills, or more usually, suck it off the streambeds using dredges and pumps.

Over the course of his thirteen years, Fisher is involved in all manner of awful stuff, including a rape, an unsolved murder, people jumping off a high bridge to escape their problems, plenty of folks walking around with guns, and the state's first fatal cougar attack in decades. However, he does mix in plenty of flora and fauna specifics (which I tended to skim), as well as a history of the area. There is a running, and rather detailed, discussion of the hydrology, seismology, and ecological issues surrounding the proposed dam, and a long section about the political struggle to block it. Some may find this a bit tedious, but it's a crucial part of both Fisher's experience and is a valuable microcosm of the importance of water for the whole state. There's also a somewhat dark undercurrent to the whole book, as it is clear that Fisher is no longer a ranger, but the reason for this is never mentioned. Then, at the very end, there is a rather stunning revelation to explain this, providing a quite dramatic ending to this intriguing brief glimpse into a profession most of us take for granted.

Jordan Fisher Smith's Nature Noir is a surprise. Far from being simply a ranger's account of all the dark happenings in the American River Canyon, it's also a personal encounter with a naturalist, historian, Auburn Dam scholar, and ace reporter. Smoothly, Fisher incorporates all these aspects of himself in a book that puts the canyonlands into a new, unexpected light -- even for those of us who have lived on the canyon rim for many years. Deftly weaving the often disparate strands of his story, he at times lifts himself above the details and comes to some wise conclusion or insight. At those moments, what he expresses is soulful, affecting, and universal.

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 worked to safeguard a second-rate, or even third-rate, semi-wilderness that was slated for damming and was open country for prospective miners, developers, and social misfits. For those who have sped through I-80 east through Auburn and Colfax, admittedly more interested in the snowcapped peaks of Emigrant Gap and Donner Pass than in the canyons of the Western Sierra foothills that cradle the forks of the American River, a reappreciation of this part of the Mother Lode country is inevitable, thanks to the powerful sense of place and environmental sensibility of Smith, not to mention a writing style infused with humility and devoid of preachiness. Hence the title "Nature Noir", where, unless you are a local who knew the land (such as Smith himself) or an avid river-runner of the North, Middle, and South Forks of the American River, you would have never thought twice of the wilderness quality of a place with a dam and reservoir that never existed but was already permanently emplaced on maps and mindset of people who had power over the use of the land for flood control, irrigation, and hydroelectricity. In this land, laws are broken, boundaries are pushed, and the moral resilience of rangers are tested, but there is salvation in the knowledge that nature still rules--pockets of wildness where human--and boat--tracks are erased, an aerial flood of beetles swarm from seemingly nowhere, people's lives are claimed by the power of water, a runner is ambushed by a mountain lion, wildflowers burgeon, and a clearer understanding of the complex geology merely underscores the power of nature over human folly where short-term gains tend to overlook long-term large-scale disasters.

Being originally from California and an avid hiker in the Sierras (and oh yes, a parttime gold panner), I found this memoir to be right on and very interesting. What I like about true-life accounts, is that you get the background as to what was going on during the dam building, politics, murder investigations, dopers, and lost runners mauled by cougars. As a law enforcement ranger, Smith had to be ready for anything that humans can do in/with illegal activities. The miscreants just happen to be out of the city, but they take their bad habits and unruly behavior with them, maybe more so as they are out of contact with their neighbors and social expectations. Smith manages to throw in asides about nature, the old growth forests, the blooming flowers and their seasons, the wildlife, and the run-off of the snow-melt into the river channels. Of course, he mentions the erosion and continuing problems with the gold fields, back to 1850, and what is happening lately with the price of gold escalating. I recommend it to anyone that enjoys nature with the human elements thrown in for good measure.

The book is very well written, describing the journey of a park ranger through stages of his career. His love of nature led hiim to this career choice, but then he realizes the dangers of the position and decides to become trained as an armed defender of the parks. Anecdotally, he describes situations he was in that were dangerous and how people use the parks as hiding places and then endanger others. The books made me wary of walking in nature unprotected. A good read though.

This book is as intriguing as it is informative. Mr. Fisher-Smith's writing is engaging and the political, bureaucratic and geological tidbits are wonderful. If you live in this area you need to read this book.