Nature Noir (17 page)

I idled down the road to the bridge. Here he got out and stepped over the kneewall between the roadway and the pedestrian walkway, then up onto the railing. For a brief instant he balanced between life and death. Far below him, the river was a set of whispering curves, its rapids seemingly motionless at this distance, like white paint on green glass. There were bright tufts of willow along its banks, and then the rocks and pines of the canyon walls higher up. But then it was too late because he'd already stepped into the lake of air, and there was the irrevocable quickness with which the wind increased in his ears and the battered earth came up to embrace him.

T
HERE IS A SORT
of memory that does not refer to a particular day, yet it is not without precision, and accumulates from just being in a place for a period of years. Each time the American River floods big and brown with snowmelt and rain, I remember better the way huge drift logs turn ponderous circles in eddies, and where the river is carrying away land at the outside of turns, and where it builds beaches at the inside of them. Later, on warm spring days after the rains are past, I remember how little pink trumpets of bilobed clarkia and yellow daisies of eriophyllum float, as if mounted on some transparent medium, a certain number of inches, according to their species, above the steep hillsides; and how for 10 or 12 feet above that colorful surface there is a layer of air that hums and sparkles in the sun, composed substantially of insects seeking nectar.

I know where a tiny patch of a St. John's wort, called gold-wire for the shine of its filamentous stamens, grows tucked up under the chemise brush at the top of a red clay bank on a turn in the old Doc Gordon Road above Lake Clementine; it took me ten years to find it. Sometimes in summer one of the thunderstorms that boil up against the Sierra Nevada every afternoon reaches out as far as the foothills to the west, and a sweet damp smell rises from the dust just before the first drops of rain. The novelty of rain is one of the few things I liked about hot summers in the canyons, a season I mostly detested when I worked as a ranger in them. To be fair, however, the things I disliked about that time—the merciless sun that old forests would have shaded me from; the dust on my face, my uniform, and rescue equipment; the spiny star thistle that gets to flesh through thick jeans, wild oats that lodged in my socks, and the other disagreeable European annuals that overwhelmed the perennial meadows of the low Sierra—I eventually came to see as the marks of 140 years of bad treatment of this land. So over time I learned to forgive this place for its bad manners and prickliness, for these are the inevitable outcomes of servitude, in land as in people.

Aside from memorizing these natural phenomena that repeat themselves annually until the idle gaze comprehends them, I was content to let hours of work steal by without straining to save the details for posterity. I was a poor keeper of our required patrol logs. The quieter days were as seamless and unaccountable as water slipping by in the river, until time was apprehended by the duty to record something, such as the report, late in the day on April 23, 1994, that a woman named Barbara Schoener was missing up the Middle Fork.

The only thing I recall about that day before the call came in is an observation I made of the weather. At midmorning I steered my green Jeep into the entrance of the gravel road up the Middle Fork to the old limestone quarry. Turning off the engine, I looked east up the canyon where Barbara Schoener was at that moment, although I didn't know it. The sky was deep blue around harmless-looking puffy white clouds, the air was clear and cool, and the sun warmed my left elbow, out the open window. The riffles in the river whispered and sparkled in the eastern light.

Weather will be a deciding factor in any search, in the survival of the lost or injured, or if there is nothing left to do for them, in the difficulty and discomfort of recovering their remains. In this case, morning made a false promise. By nightfall the clouds gathered into a dark sheet and set upon the searchers, soaking them to the skin with a cold, steady rain.

What you do to investigate a death is a little like being a theater director. Unavoidably detained on the way to rehearsals, you arrive to find the final scene already played out and the actors and props spread around the stage in disordered repose. In your mind's eye, you send them back to their starting positions, marked in the theater with pieces of tape on the stage and in the woods by footprints, the victim's personal effects, and an unclaimed automobile at the trailhead. Then you set them in motion on the stage of your imagination, over and over, until you get it right. Later, when the report is written and the usefulness of thinking about it is long over, it's hard to forget this omniscient vision you've made of the victim's fated progress toward a bad end you know about, and she doesn't.

So it is that I see Barbara Schoener driving north from her home in Placerville. California poppies unfurl their glossy orange petals in the morning light between clumps of blue lupine along State Route 49, two lanes of winding asphalt connecting the string of little white-painted wood and red brick Gold Rush mining towns down the front of the Sierra. After half an hour she comes to the town of Cool, a county fire station and a group of plywood false fronts like a western movie set placed in an expanse of rolling pasture punctuated by stately blue oaks. She turns east onto State 193 at the only intersection in town, past the dirt turnout where scruffy men from the hills sell firewood out of beat-up trucks, advertising their loads with spray-painted signs on scraps of plywood.

Just east of there, Barbara Schoener passes the main gate of a residential development along the south rim of the Middle Fork canyon, expectantly named Auburn Lake Trails. Auburn Lake Trails is one of those gated communities that have turned old cattle ranches into recreational landscapes, with remnants of barbed-wire fences on split cedar posts going to rust and rot between big plywood houses on an aimless network of roads.

There are two more gates into Auburn Lake Trails in the next few miles east on 193, electric ones that can be opened only by magnetic security cards the residents carry. Barbara Schoener parks her car outside the second of these, across a perfectly paved road from the development's water treatment plant.

The woman who gets out of the car is forty years old, athletic, the mother of two children, with shoulder-length reddish brown hair. She wears a pair of blue nylon shorts, a cranberry sleeveless T-shirt, running shoes, a hat, and cotton gloves against the morning chill. She locks the car and puts the key in a little pouch attached to one of her shoes. Carrying an apple and a water bottle, she leaves the road, running down the trail into the neighboring state park.

At first she follows an old dirt road, grown over on either side by Scotch broom and narrowed to a single track. Horses and rain have worn a rut into the center of the remaining path; she places her feet with care. The road descends quickly into a Douglas fir forest, so that only a few feet from her car she is quite alone. Then the trail abandons the road, traversing the canyon side on contour, in and out of the folds of creeks. The trail emerges from the forest onto an open ridge. Far below, the river is spread out in a slow bend, silver against its gray gravel bed. She pauses to look and takes a bite of her apple, breathing deep of the air in which something bright—dust, a bit of pollen—catches the light out over the void. Ahead, entering the forest again, the path bends left into the manzanita.

At five o'clock in the evening, as I drove north on Highway 49 toward the ranger station to go home, the radio dispatcher called me and sent me back across the river into El Dorado County to meet with sheriff's deputies about a search in progress.

When I arrived, the missing woman's sedan was cordoned off with yellow crime-scene ribbon. Sheriff's search and rescue volunteers in orange shirts hustled around a mobile communications van. The wind was picking up. I got my jacket out of the back of the Jeep and shook hands with the officer in charge.

He said that when Barbara Schoener had failed to return as expected from a run, her husband had reported the matter to the sheriff. Her husband knew that she liked to run on this trail, and her car was soon found at the trailhead. She was probably equipped only with light clothing. The deputy and I agreed that I would drive up Quarry Road at the bottom of the canyon. There was a chance I would find her down along the river; when people get lost, they often head downhill until they get to something they can't cross.

It was dusk by the time I got back down to the rusty gate into Quarry Road. I let myself in and idled slowly east with the river on my left, watching the road shoulder on my right—we say "cutting it for sign"—for the lost woman's footprints. It started to drizzle, and I turned on the wipers. About two miles farther on, at Brown's Bar, the road became narrow and bad. The tires began to slip and throw bits of red clay up onto the hood. It grew dark.

This was the reassuringly familiar landscape of my nights—the interior of a Jeep, an exoskeleton of green humming steel, where I was surrounded by heated air and safe from most things, animals and weather, and, compared to a foot traveler, freed from the tyranny of distance. All businesslike: the tan upholstery of my seat, the lower right of its back torn from the constant abrasion of my pistol grips; the flashlight wedged between my right thigh and the radio console between the seats; and from the radio the cheerful blinking lights and a low chorus of calm voices from the rural counties around me, the men and women—police officers, rangers, paramedics, firefighters, pilots of medical evacuation helicopters—who come and go all night cleaning up scenes of chaos and imposing upon them the appearance of order that society requires in order to sleep well.

I turned on the rotating emergency lights on the Jeep's roof, so that if Barbara Schoener could move and was somewhere above me, she would see me coming from a long way off and have time to get to the road. Spokes of red and blue light circled around me, across the slopes of the canyon and the raindrops. I turned on all the spotlights, training them in different directions so I could watch for her, as I imagined it, waving urgently in the darkness. I reached down, punched up the loudspeaker, and pulled the mike off the dashboard.

"If you can walk, come down to my lights here on the road! Come to my lights!" I called over and over.

As I did so, it dawned on me that Barbara Schoener was gone. It was just a feeling, after all those years of searches, that I was talking to myself, that there was no one to hear me when I called to her. But still I called again and again, sending my amplified voice washing out over the cold boiling surface of the river, surrounding the dark trees and thickets of manzanita, filling up secret hollows.

Beyond Maine Bar, Quarry Road becomes two Jeep tracks across the sand and round gray cobbles of the gravel bars. I stopped to put the Jeep in low range and got out into the rain to listen and have a look around. Across the side of the canyon, several hundred feet above me, I saw the twinkling flashlights of other searchers through the mist of rain. I got back in the Jeep and bounced and scraped upstream across the boulders to the end of the road, watching the pools of my spotlights move across the feathery limbs of fir trees up the side of the canyon and straining to listen, through the roar of the rapids and the whine of the gearbox, for a cry in the darkness.

When MacGaff, O'Leary, Finch, and their fellow park rangers arrived in the American River canyons in January 1977, a team of park planners from State Parks' Sacramento headquarters was already there; their assignment, to prepare a plan for the development of recreational facilities on the Bureau's land. Finished in 1978, the General Plan for Auburn State Recreation Area featured a visitors' center, a lakeside snack bar, campgrounds for boaters, and a huge boat-launching ramp. The launch ramp was actually constructed, a steep cut in the canyon wall the size of a freeway that ended abruptly in thin air, hundreds of feet above the river. But the rest of the park's facilities were on hold until the dam's seismic problems were worked out. They wouldn't have done the rangers much good anyway, because like the launch ramp, these facilities were all about a reservoir that didn't exist.

With nothing to guide them, as time went by, the rangers managed the place according to the manifold desires of its most vocal users. Chief among these were the well-heeled residents of mini-ranches and horse properties in the foothills, where an annual hundred-mile endurance horse race over the crest of the Sierra had long been, for those on the social register, the equivalent of the symphony and opera in San Francisco. The Western States Trail on which this race was held ran right through Auburn State Recreation area, and the horse people soon saw the reservoir site as their private domain. Since State Parks lacked a clear vision for the place, the planning of a bewildering array of bridle trails through previously impenetrable (to human beings, anyway) thickets along the canyon walls was mostly done on the spot with pickup truck loads of shovels and mattocks delivered to volunteer equestrian trail crews by field staff—when, indeed, a ranger was even involved.

By the time Barbara Schoener was reported missing, no complete map of these trails existed in the hands of rangers or anyone else. In the search we used a sketch map that someone from the stables at Auburn Lake Trails had drawn. It showed only a portion of the south wall of the Middle Fork, but the maze of paths on it looked like a plate of spaghetti tipped by a careless elbow onto a restaurant floor. Some searchers got lost immediately, and the two of them I found wandering in the rain became the only people I would save that night.

However, if uncertainty about the dam's changing fortunes created in State Parks offices an atmosphere lacking in the sense of permanence that people who manage public lands ought to feel, the land in question lacked the capacity to equivocate. In the two and a half decades since the Bureau began acquiring it from its previous owners, it had begun to go seriously wild again. And no one at State Parks or the Bureau was studying this process.