Nature Noir (23 page)

She walked closer, not to the place where her son had laid dead but past it, down to the river's edge. There she stood perfectly still, staring fixedly across the water toward the place I had shown her where her son had last been seen alive.

She seemed far away. She looked hard at the water, not crying, but as if she was trying to see something, as if she could peer across the months and the change in the water level since July and see him there, alone in his last moments. I felt helpless for her. I didn't know what to do. So I left her and walked back up the beach to where her husband and son-in-law still stood. Why had the husband stayed so high on the beach? I searched his face. There was no sign of anything there but a sort of stoic kindness.

I asked him how he was doing. He began telling me about his work. He and the son-in-law had been forming the foundations for an addition to the house, he said, so between that and his job he was working seven days a week. And I thought,
Yes, that's how it is with us men, isn't it? Our work is our salvation at times like this.

But now he was looking hard at his wife and his face changed. He looked very worried. She was still facing away from us, as if in a trance. Her toes were almost touching the water; she leaned forward. I thought,
He's afraid he will lose her. She will walk around in the land of the living, but really she will be living with the boy forever at the bottom of the river, drowning in cold grief.

The husband took one step toward his wife and called to her, urgently, in Lao.

She didn't answer and didn't give any sign she'd heard him. He called to her again, louder, his voice commanding. Again she didn't respond. He walked swiftly down to the water's edge and led her back up, firmly but ever so tenderly, by the arm. He seemed uncomfortable now. He seemed ready to leave.

"There's no rush, really. I've got all afternoon," I told him.

But he wanted to go. They both thanked me. I followed them and the son-in-law back to their car. At the car door the woman turned to face me. "On the twenty-fifth, we have food. Priests come to our house. It is a thing we must do for Early. We give food to his spirit, in case he is hungry."

Her eyes filled with tears again, and she opened the door and got in. I saw how it was with the mother—this practical kind of sorrow in which one prepared food to feed a child beyond the edge of life. As her husband started the engine, she rolled down her window and said to me, "You bring your children, you come. We have lot of food."

I thanked her and waved as they pulled away. I heard their gearbox whine up the canyon side and saw the cloud of dust behind them spread into the brush. The boy who stood in the shallows fishing and the kayaker had gone.

I was alone on the cobbles. The wind picked up, warm, dry, and dusty; it rumbled in my ears. For several minutes something like an orange haze had been passing in billows between me and the forest at the upper extent of the beach. I walked up to see what it was. As I entered the orange cloud, I saw that it was composed of thousands of migrating lady beetles, an endless swarm of them, undulating up the canyon on the wind. They collided with my hat, making little ticking sounds. They landed on my uniform. They crawled on my sleeves. I let them wash over me, facing the direction they were coming from. The autumn afternoon sun shone through a million wings, turning the light the color of saffron, like the robes of Buddhist monks.

I heard a motor. A young man and young woman arrived at the bottom of the road by the beach in an old white car. I waved them down. I showed them the little beetles on their windshield and told them I had been standing there watching the swarm go by unabated on the wind for twenty minutes. I told them I had worked this section of the river for more than ten years and had never seen anything like it.

I looked at them. They were wearing bathing suits, sitting on towels on the hot seats. The young man sat quietly, respectfully. He had turned off the car now. They had both listened to my little natural history talk without replying. Could they go now? their expressions seemed to say. I looked down and realized I was wearing a badge and a gun. I smiled sheepishly and waved them along. The young man started the motor and left right away, and the car disappeared into the willows down the sandy track along the lakeshore. I was alone again. The saffron light and the brushing of the beetles against my face, my hands, remained.

The cold force of the American River that July has long since spent itself on the ocean. I haven't seen a swarm of migrating lady beetles that big since then; maybe I never will. My friend Marco got remarried and now lives in a different village. I don't know if the old stonecutter who poured his wine so freely in the hut Marco took us to in the mountains is still alive. In life, you travel and what is behind you keeps changing after you are gone.

But on the maps I keep, the places and the stories of people I met there don't disappear. It is also like that with the memories of things that happened to me as a ranger. Some things that happened years ago still raise my heart rate when I think of them; the difference is now I know what happened in the end. I remember the urgency as if I were inside it again. But I also see it at a great distance, like looking down on the tiny mountains on a topographic map. And in a way everything seems to be settled now, and in another way it never will be.

I am in the jet boat, going desperately fast upstream where Lake Clementine grows shallow and turns into a river. The siren is screaming. I'm yelling in my headset to the dispatcher about getting a rescue helicopter up there as the V-8 thunders underneath me. The canyon turns east and narrows, and in the shade of its depth the blue strobe overhead flashes on my deckhand's face as the boat pitches on its wake. He's braced himself into the V of the bows with one hand on the gunwale and the other on the diamond-plate bulkhead. I've sent him forward to watch for sandbars, which at this speed could kill both of us if we hit one. In the din we communicate about this matter with glances and gestures.

The helicopter lands; the gray-blue body is loaded by men in blue jumpsuits like angels. It flies away.

I am swimming underwater at the lake inlet, tracing the last moments of the deceased for my death investigation. My deckhand watches anxiously from the boat tethered to the riverbank above. Fighting the cold July current, I claw my way along a submerged face of rock, groping the bottom for a place where the strength of the water might have stolen and kept a human body.

I am on the phone with Mrs. Ditsavong. My children have the flu; I'm sorry but I can't come to the service today. On the other end of the line, I hear the chanting of the monks and the drone of a harmonium, deep and ancient.

Mr. Ditsavong is out on the tarmac, working in the hot sun of Southeast Asia, wiping his hands on a rag. The jets whine in the background.

The saffron beetles caress my skin.

In the jungle, Mrs. Ditsavong is always holding her little boy so close. They get into the boat; they sit; the little boy is falling asleep now. The boat leaves the shore into the moonless night. The boatman leans into his sculls and she can hear the drips from the ends of the oars as they are lifted out of the water and slipped back in as quietly as the boatman can manage. And they leave the still water along the bank and go out into the great current, crossing the Mekong.

E
ARLY ONE AUGUST MORNING
Will Reich and I loaded our oar boat onto the park's Ford six-pack for a whitewater raft patrol of the upper Middle Fork. He was a new ranger, a big, barrel-chested, lantern-jawed man in his early forties with a shock of unruly black hair. As usual, our job on the river that day was to monitor the guide services offering excursions by whitewater raft in our canyons, and to be available to help in the event of a boat accident. But on this day we also planned to call on a miner who'd claimed as his own fiefdom a remote beach the guides and their clients used as a campsite.

The forty-eight miles of the American River lying beneath the waterline of the endlessly delayed Auburn Reservoir had long been withdrawn from mineral status; the Bureau of Reclamation wanted its title to the land unencumbered when it was finally allowed to flood it. That meant you could look for gold but you couldn't stake a claim to the land it was on under that antique provision of western law that still allowed a few rugged individualists to appropriate a piece of public land, scar it in their attempts to make it yield precious metals, and live on it indefinitely, rent free. Nevertheless, this man seemed to believe he had claimed the beach at the mouth of Otter Creek, and the word on the river was that he might be a taco or two short of a combination plate. He had a horse and a mule down there, and he'd evidently used them to pack a considerable quantity of gear and garbage into the canyon. Will had been sending him registered letters at a post office box in Georgetown, but they'd all gone unanswered. So today we'd serve him his walking papers in person. If he balked, we might write him a ticket. We couldn't arrest him: We'd be out of radio range for most of the sixteen-mile run, so there was no getting a helicopter, and it wouldn't do to run rapids with a man in handcuffs. Then again, he didn't know that.

We left the ranger station and drove east up the Foresthill Divide. At the town of Foresthill we turned southeast on Mosquito Ridge Road, descending the two-thousand-foot north wall of the Middle Fork toward the river. Shafts of morning sun from between the high peaks up-canyon gilded each prominence in the velvety knob-cone pine forests along the far canyon wall. We passed the portal of a hard-rock mine. Air hoses for drills ran into it, but the gate across the entrance was padlocked. Hard-rock gold mining had become a romantic anachronism and knobcone pines were considered worthless by loggers. Water and electrical power were what connected this canyon to the economy now.

By the early 1950s, the race was on throughout the West. Whatever waters still ran listlessly into the sea were to be harnessed to do work and make wealth. With construction underway at Folsom Dam on the river's main stem, it became clear to the businessmen and politicians of Placer County that under the Gold Rush-era law of "prior appropriation"—whoever gets there first gets the water—the federals were going to own all of Placer County's water and power rights if the county didn't claim them first.

So Placer County moved aggressively to grab the upper Middle Fork. In 1961 local voters underwrote a $140 million bond issue to begin building what was probably the most ambitious water and power system ever devised by a nonmetropolitan county in California. When a huge storm in 1964 caused the failure of the county's partially complete Hell Hole Dam, destroying five bridges, thousands of trees, and a hundred-foot-long bucket-line gold dredge downstream, it didn't stop the Water Agency. Completed in 1967, the Middle Fork Project gathered rain and snowmelt from a 429-square-mile watershed into 7 reservoirs with an aggregate capacity of 342,000 acre-feet. From the reservoirs the water traveled through 24 miles of tunnel and over 3,600 feet of penstocks—big pipes plunging down steep canyon walls to develop the hydraulic pressure it takes to make electricity—into 4 hydroelectric power stations on the way down the mountains. Today we'd be launching our boat at Oxbow Powerplant where the river was allowed to become a river again until it reached Folsom Lake.

The last pitch of road switchbacked down cliffs of dark slate to a dirt parking lot on the downstream side of the dam supplying Oxbow Powerplant, called Ralston Afterbay. There, Will and I unloaded our boat, its aluminum rowing frame, three oars (one for a spare), two paddles, dry bags full of gear, food, and a medical kit, cam straps, helmets, rescue vests, and ammo boxes and then carried them down a dirt track to the water. The track ended at a little pool at the base of a three-story concrete wall between mossy cliffs of dark stone. A thousand cubic feet of water every second surged from a hole in the base of the wall. Drawn from the cold bottom of the reservoir upstream, it had passed through a gleaming underworld of electrical generators hidden in the canyon wall behind us, where it had just been subjected to unspeakable violence in the turbines' scroll cases. It came to light again in this small pool, as cold as ice and as clear as gin. In the three decades since the powerplant was completed, willows had established themselves around the little pool, so that it seemed to be some combination of a manmade and a wild place.

One day when I had been preparing to get on the river, I had happened to encounter the maintenance supervisor for the powerplant as he came up from underground. I spent a few minutes asking him how the powerplant worked. During this conversation, he told me that his men were working on an eroded turbine blade. Water and the tiny bits of sand it carried, he said, can literally wear away steel. So the hardened steel blades of the turbines had to be periodically restored to their original contours by welding new metal onto their leading edges and grinding it to shape.

On another occasion, an engineer for the Bureau of Reclamation at Folsom Dam had shown me photographs of some of his colleagues standing in one of the huge tunnels through which water travels to and from the turbines inside a dam. The hard-hatted men were examining enormous galls in the tunnel's walls and floor. The engineer explained that rushing water can quickly erode even the high-grade steel-reinforced concrete of which dams are made. Unless the tunnels are constantly inspected and air bubbles are properly mixed into the water to provide a cushion, the water can literally eat a dam's interior, he said. The Chinese sage Lao Tzu was born 2,400 years before anyone thought of capturing rivers behind towering dams, but he nevertheless seems to have understood what would happen to them without constant attention:

Nothing in the world is as soft, as weak, as water; nothing else can wear away the hard, the strong, and remain unaltered.

As we reached the powerplant's outflow one guided party was just paddling away on it: four sky-blue rafts full of matching yellow helmets, orange lifejackets, blue wetsuits, and nervously excited whoops. In recognition of the income the guide industry brought to the motels, restaurants, and private campgrounds of Placer and El Dorado Counties, the powerplant's operators had agreed to provide reliable flows in the river on weekends. Their releases usually tapered off by midafternoon, when boaters were well downstream. The commercial rafters liked to get on the river early, so they could give their clients time to lounge on hot rocks during lunch and still stay on the crest of the release as it ran down the canyon. We could move more quickly, so we generally started later and often passed them at lunchtime.