Jordan Fisher Smith -- Nature noir
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It's not a long book, but still, it's several books packed into one:
(1) It's a set of apparently true short stories about a few
ne'er-do-well lawbreakers and about Smith's attempts to deal with
them as a ranger.  There are also some investigations and mysteries.
(2) It's a story of a significant portions if Smith's life,
specifically the time he spent working as a ranger in Auburn State
Recreation Area, just east of Sacramento, California.  (3) It
includes a partial history of the proposed Auburn dam, along with
stories about those who promoted it and those who opposed it.  (4)
And, finally, it contains rather lyrical essays about the ASRA and
canyon and river and wilderness and not-so wilderness in and around
it, along with thought provoking discussions about people and the
(more) natural world and about the changing relationship between
them.

As the title "Nature noir" suggests, it's often not a happy book.  A
ranger is not called in to deal with people who are well-adjusted,
steadily employed, loving family members.  The people who Smith is
sent to deal with are, for example, camping in the canyon by the
river long-term and gold mining, likely because they do not "fit" in
the society with which many of us feel comfortable.  And, because of
Smith's stories about people who are on the far edge of society,
this book can also help give us a little empathy with people who are
"out there someplace just barely hanging on".

There is also the story about the woman who was killed by a mountain
lion while she was jogging in ASRA.  That leads Smith to write about
the boundary between humans and nature, and about how places like
ASRA enable us to step closer to that semi-wild region, about how
that opportunity is and should be important to us, but also about
how increasingly more densely populated regions like those
surrounding ASRA cause more problems.  It's likely that his thoughts
on and around that subject led Smith to research and write his more
recent book "Engineering Eden" about the aftermath of the killing of
a human by a grizzly bear.  And, here is another enlightening and
entertaining book about that intersection between humans and nature:
"Nature wars", by Jim Sterba.

Smith's story about the decades long attempt to build the Auburn dam
that would have flooded much of the canyon that he patrolled and
came to know so well is also fascinating.  Here in California, our
history is about water: about what we do when we have it and what we
when we don't; about when we have too much of it and, more often,
when we don't have enough, about the extreme measures and projects
we undertake to move water from where some of us do not use it to
where more of us, or some of us with more money, will use it.  I
live in Sacramento, California; the Auburn dam, if it had been
built, would have dammed the American River, and that river flows
through Sacramento.  I live more than an hour's drive from the ocean
(the San Francisco Bay), but I also, believe it or not, live at an
elevation of about 50 feet above sea level.  The American River that
Smith talks about and the Sacramento River that it joins just a few
miles from my home must get to the ocean, and while traveling that
twisted hundred miles or so, must do so with a drop of a mere 50
feet.  The rivers and the dams that control them and the dams that
keep those rivers from flooding and the water they store so that I
can have water during a long hot summer when there is almost never
any rain, all those things matter to me, a lot.  So, when Smith
talks about the proposal to build a thin wall curved dam that would
have to be anchored securely to the canyon walls, and then discusses
the prevalence of seismic faults in that area (none as threatening
as the San Andreas and Hayward faults that we have in the San
Francisco Bay area, but still threatening to a dam) and discusses
the composition of the soil and rock in the canyon walls and how
that rock crumbles and is of various consistencies, then he's
helping me think a bit about how maybe we can't do everything we
want with water.  As an anecdote, I took a walk in the ASRA this
last weekend.  After reading "Nature noir", I began to notice the
dirt and rock along the sides of the trail, and I started asking
"How could they anchor a large dam to that?"  I've visited Olmsted
Point in Yosemite National Park.  Olmsted Point is made of huge
slabs of solid granite, which is in part why it so scenic and
majestic.  The canyon walls in ASRA are not like that at all; they
are soft and crumbly.  After reading Smith and "Nature noir", I'm
more than willing to believe that it would be loony to build a
large, thin, concrete dam, to try to anchor it to that jumble of
dirt and rocks, and then to put the huge weight of a high wall of
water on one side of that dam, which of course is a heavy structure
itself.

So, all in all, I think that "Nature noir" is a very thoughtful and
thought provoking book.

10/04/2016

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