Nature Noir (15 page)

Roberta and I had our go-rounds, but on a moonlit midnight on some dusty road deep in the foothills with the whiteleaf manzanita crowding around you like an army of ghosts, Roberta's voice on the two-way radio was a dry-martini, worldly-wise comfort. One warm night I was on my way home from Sacramento and stopped at the district office below the dark bulk of Folsom Dam, where the aluminum-sided dispatch office sat under the radio mast in the back parking lot. I was walking from my Jeep to the main building when I saw her silhouetted in the doorway at dispatch with a glowing cigarette in her hand. She was humming some smoky ballad over the trebly chatter of the radios. It sounded good, and I remember thinking she could have been a jazz singer. But somewhere she must have taken a wrong turn, and she ended up in front of the wrong microphone.

All of us here felt that way at times. We rangers could have been guarding some jewel-like national park celebrated in expensive coffee-table books. Instead, we would spend years in these purgatory canyons up into the hills from Roberta, where our fellow creatures—black bears, pileated woodpeckers, foothill yellow-legged frogs, Sacramento squawfish, Sierra garter snakes, and pipevine swallow-tailed butterflies—were consigned neither to the heaven of a national park's perennial protection nor immediately to the cold hell of inundation.

Most days I just tried to live in the present. When the morning sun warmed the bark of the ponderosa pines in front of our ranger station and the trees filled the air with the scent of vanilla, it almost worked. At the bottom of the canyon the river still ran deep, cold, and clear as an angel's harp, and in late spring the does emerged from the surrounding woods with their new fawns to nibble at the lawn around our flagpole. They knew us as their protectors, for as any ranger will tell you, animals have an uncanny ability to discern the boundary of a park from the dangerous lands around it. And so you contented yourself with saving things, if not forever, for now. And you tried not to think about where you might have been had things been different, or where Roberta would send you next.

One day Roberta radioed Doug Bell at the ranger station, where he was catching up on reports. There was a ball game on the little clock radio over on MacGaff's desk, and Bell cocked his head slightly toward the announcer's lowered voice as Roberta's first call came in. The bases were loaded with two strikes, the announcer was killing time with a couple of quick statistics, and the pitcher was probably looking at the ground while fingering the ball and shuffling his cleats, then glancing up past the bill of his cap with a measuring gaze at the batter. Bell loved baseball. Each spring he'd take time off, put his wife and kids in his cabover camper, and drive down to Arizona to watch the Cactus League exhibition games.

Roberta's second call ran over the crack of the bat and the rising hiss of the crowd. Bell exhaled, kicked his squeaky swivel chair back from the perpetual disorder of his desk, and walked into the anteroom by the front door, where he leaned over the microphone on the receptionist's desk. Roberta gave him his marching orders—no one else piped up and volunteered—so Bell shambled through the screen door, across the shady porch, and down the concrete path to his pickup. He got in and slammed the door violently, started the truck, jammed it into reverse, chirped the tires, rattled down the driveway onto Highway 49, and turned left toward the river, where he was supposed to meet the victim of a Penal Code 245, an assault with a deadly weapon.

The road Bell followed wound down the wall of the North Fork into the bowl where the North and Middle Forks come together. That junction of two canyons and the need to cross the river where it was easiest had directed wanderers through the Confluence for a long time. At the end of the nineteenth century, a couple of local boys found a hole in the ground near there, which later afforded paleontologists a random sample of foot travelers since the Ice Age—the skeletons of extinct ground sloths, giant bison, saber-toothed cats, and prehistoric people who had fallen into the system of limestone caverns it let into. Before the Gold Rush, Indian trails came to the Confluence from various directions, and a Nisenan village called Chulku had stood there. When the miners finished with it, nothing remained of Chulku but twenty-four mortar holes chipped into a bedrock outcrop by the river, where the inhabitants had ground acorns into their staple meal.

After the Gold Rush, wagon roads had replaced footpaths. As Bell reached the river, the yellow gores of the old roads' switchbacks were visible against the gray-green forests on the canyon walls above him. In front of him, the abutments of generations of bridges littered the banks where floods had left them. The concrete deck of one bridge, from the flood of 1964, lay in the water. Three others remained standing—two for roads, one for a railroad, now abandoned—and high above, a fourth, the new Foresthill, arched across the sky.

From the Confluence in the early 1970s you could watch the two ends of the New Foresthill Bridge grow out from either side of the gorge. As cranes lowered steel to the ironworkers on the two tips, they arched out over the canyon, then down to alight briefly on two towering concrete pylons, and then out again for over 800 feet to join over the river. When the structure was completed in 1973, its twin lanes of pavement ran 2,428 feet along the top of its three arched trusses, so far above the river in the middle that the Washington Monument could have stood upright beneath the bridge with enough room left over to fly a large helicopter between the two.

The featured speaker at the dedication ceremonies that September was Congressman Harold "Bizz" Johnson, an enthusiastic supporter of public works in general and these in particular. He was said to have marked up the House bill authorizing the Auburn Dam—and thus this bridge—over drinks with a local banker and the publisher of the
Auburn Journal
in an Auburn bar called, of all things, the Sierra Club. When he finished speaking, the ribbon was cut as a donkey and an elephant were led out to face each other on the bridge deck—a symbol of the cooperation between Democrats and Republicans that built the new span. Then the crowd bowed their heads for a blessing by Father Brennan of Saint Joseph's, the Placer High School band played a march, and the dignitaries led the crowd in a tour of the bridge.

But without the reservoir beneath it, the bridge immediately became something it wasn't intended to be. Within minutes a man appeared from the crowd and leaped over the railing. He was wearing a parachute, which floated him safely to the canyon floor. Within a year and a half the feat was repeated with a hang glider. Then, on October 8, 1975, a despondent seventy-seven-year-old man from Citrus Heights became the first to jump without either device. Just over a decade later John Carta rode his motorcycle off the span, and in December 2001 a stuntman drove a car off it for the Hollywood feature film
XXX
and, like Carta, parachuted to safety. This time the rangers had issued a permit for the stunt, but it was nevertheless unpopular with them. "No one told us Corvettes are made of plastic and shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces on impact," one of them later remarked. "We're still picking up little red bits of it down there." Meanwhile, the suicides continued.

One man jumped too close to one side of the bridge and survived for a while before he was found dead. With his broken arms and legs, he had made what Ranger O'Leary later told me was an impression like a snow angel in the dust beneath the bridge. Another man wasn't taking any chances, so he sat backward on the bridge rail with a shotgun in his mouth. And in the summer of 2002 a chase involving several police cars ended at the bridge, where the suspect jumped out of his car and into the canyon; he had been paroled from prison and didn't want to go back. It was the second suicide there within a week.

In July 2003, after one man splattered himself on the canyon bottom and another was talked out of it by police, an outraged editorial in the
Auburn Journal
scolded the county—to which the Bureau had turned over the bridge when it was finished—for not doing something: a net, suicide hotline phones on the pedestrian walkway, something. "Unacceptable," the paper said, "that's the only way to describe the fact that repeated calls ... for action at the Foresthill Bridge continue to go unheard." But the situation was hardly the county's doing. For thirty years the bridge had waited for the water to rise beneath it and stop the carnage, and meanwhile its notoriety had spread to the adrenaline-addled and serotonin-deficient all over the United States. When they got there, someone usually saw them standing at the railing and called 911. The 911 operator called Roberta, and Roberta radioed the rangers.

For all those years there had been another, even more common problem with the bridge sans reservoir: People enjoyed throwing things off it, just to watch them fall. Driving along the river now, Bell saw his man waving from the road shoulder ahead and stopped. The thirty-eight-year-old male victim identified himself as John Geary and introduced his female companion, forty-year-old Lynn Parker. They'd been a little down on their luck, Geary told Bell, and they'd been living in a Roseville motel room and driving up to the river during the day to pan gold. It was a common story. For a century and a half people had been coming to the river in hopes their luck would change. It seldom did. We rangers called them "pilgrims."

Geary and Parker had left their car at the Confluence that morning, they told Bell, and hiked up the river underneath the big bridge. Overhead, cars and log trucks made ominous booms and clanks at the bridge's expansion joints, which echoed through the canyon. Maybe it was these noises or the sheer majesty of the structure, but when he got right underneath it, Geary stood looking up at the bridge. It was then that he noticed three people, mere colored specks, standing at the railing far above. Then he saw them throw something into the canyon. As soon as they let go of it, the object seemed to bloom bigger. He and Parker watched it drift toward them, and as it grew larger they could see it was a little yellow parachute with something hanging from it. Something that seemed to move on its own, as if alive.

A few seconds later Geary could make it out clearly. It was a chicken. A chicken on a little yellow parachute. It floated past them and landed below them in the brush. They stumbled toward it, down the steep talus. When they got to it, the chicken was squawking miserably, hopelessly tangled in its parachute shrouds. So they freed the bird and it fluttered off, clucking indignantly, into the manzanita.

Now Geary heard distant shouts from above. He couldn't make out the words, but the tone sounded angry. Looking back on it, he realized the chicken's owners were mad at him for letting it go. But all he was doing was trying to help. You would have done the same thing, he told Bell. Then he and Lynn Parker heard a series of evil, whirring zips followed by loud cracks, and looking up, he realized that the people on the bridge were dropping rocks, pretty big ones, on them. He could make out the rocks as they were released, but then he'd lose track of them until they appeared again just a couple hundred feet overhead, at which time he and his girlfriend had only a second or two to evade them. They began dodging the rocks, running around like crazy people. The rocks literally exploded on impact. Then Geary saw one of the people above heading for one end of the bridge—to get more rocks, he thought—and he and Parker started running and didn't stop until they were back at the Confluence.

"What did you do then?" asked Bell.

Well, said Geary, they got into their car and drove up the bridge to find the assholes and give them a piece of their minds. But the chicken's owners were gone when they got there, so they went to town to call the sheriff, and then back down to the river to the spot where the dispatcher told them to meet the ranger.

Bell finished his notes. He said he was sorry about what had happened, and that we'd keep our eyes out for anyone walking onto the bridge with either rocks or a chicken. Then he excused himself and left. On the single-page report he wrote back at the ranger station, the last sentence was "No further action." What could you do? "One of them had a bright-colored jacket" isn't much to solve a crime on, and like almost every other problem he had along the river, this kind of thing would keep happening until the reservoir filled.

A few months later it was my turn to go to the bridge. It was early morning, and the sun rising over the mountains on the eastern skyline was painting the west wall of the North Fork canyon in gold and long shadows. I'd picked up some coffee from the pastry shop in town and I was carrying the paper cup from the Jeep into the ranger station when the dispatcher called my number.

"One seven nine, Northern."

"Northern, one seven nine," I answered into the microphone clipped to my epaulet.

"We have a report of a jumper at the Foresthill Bridge, can you respond?"

I pushed the mike button again. "I'm en route."

The quickest way to the bridge took me up out of the canyon and along the rim through Auburn. Siren yelping, I left the gas stations and fast-food joints at the north end of town and rolled down the long straightaway to the bridge. When I got there, I could see a red pickup parked in the opposite lane toward the far end of the span. I crossed the bridge going about eighty, made a quick U-turn, and pulled up behind it. The truck was blocking traffic, with the driver's door open. To my right, three people stood peering over the railing. One of them, a blond, muscular man in his thirties—a construction worker, or maybe a mill hand from Foresthill—left the railing to meet me.

"I reported it," he said as I got out of my Jeep. "We were coming across the bridge when we saw the truck. We saw him get out and step over the concrete wall, then up on the railing. Then he jumped off. He didn't even stop to think."

I peered into the abandoned truck. It had matted gray fake-fur seat covers. The keys were still in the ignition and the radio was on—a country station, playing a slow ballad with steel guitars. An open can of Budweiser, still dewy, sat in the drink holder by the gearshift.