Nature Noir (4 page)

I learned that heat and dust made people testy, so I kept a tight leash on myself when things got tense. But there was little I could do to control their effect on others, and a good many of the men I met in the American River canyons carried guns (in case of rattlesnakes, they always told me), so I wore my bulletproof vest every day. The vest retained heat in the worst way, but I learned to discipline my mind so as not to be panicked by the claustrophobic discomfort of it. Whenever I had to talk to someone or take a report, I learned to walk to the shade of an overhanging tree and beckon to my reporting party to join me there. By the end of a string of summer workdays I would commonly have lost five to seven pounds through dehydration; I gained them back on my days off. I was leaving a brown stain on my bed sheets, so I began showering before bed and washing the sheets every other day. But the stain appeared anyway, and persisted for weeks in the late autumn, even after the rains had settled the dust. Evidently the dust had gone deep into the pores of my skin, and I suspect even now my body contains some of it.

Although my summer habits resembled those of any desert ranger, the foothills of the Sierra Nevada are in no way a desert. Deserts are often defined as regions that receive fewer than ten inches of rain a year, and my part of the American River gets over thirty-four at its lower-elevation, southwestern boundary and over fifty on the higher ground to the northeast. By comparison Seattle averages only thirty-eight. But in Seattle the rain comes year-round, and on the American River almost all of it falls between November and April.

Perched on the 39th parallel, the American River country is neither a southwestern desert nor a northwestern rain forest. Instead it is claimed alternately by season, a sort of Alsace or Lorraine—those European provinces taken by France in the 1300s, won back by the Germans in the Franco-Prussian War, and lost again to France at Versailles in 1919.

In our hot, dry summers and in the sort of dry, scrubby vegetation you see on our south-facing canyon walls, this country belongs to the great Southwest—dusty, parched, and baking, the leaves of its prickly brush and tree species coated with layers of waxy stuff to seal in their moisture. But in the rainy winters and in the lush coniferous forests of our north-facing slopes and shady side canyons, the American River country pledges allegiance to the Pacific Northwest, that nation of Douglas fir, thimbleberry, black bear, salmon, and rain, which stretches from here to southeast Alaska.

By late September, the first thing to change is the wind. Absent for most of the summer, it begins to blow again. One day thin clouds streak the sky, then lower to form a thick, featureless blanket. A little rain falls on a warm night, and when the weather clears the days are still warm but people begin to feel like putting up firewood. By October the nights grow chill and the black oaks on the ridges are tinged with yellow and orange. By November the rains come in earnest. In the woods, the carpet of moss covering rocks and tree trunks that has been brittle and apparently lifeless for months becomes vibrant green again. Bug-eyed orange salamanders and newts make jerky slow-motion patrols across the forest floor. Ferns tremble with drips from the trees. Mushrooms come up. Water falls in diamond ribbons from moss- and fern-covered cliffs and skeins together into creeks, seeking the river. And the roads we rangers travel, which for months have hemorrhaged clouds of soil behind every car, turn to mud.

Steve MacGaff, our supervising ranger, was about forty when I met him, a slight, taciturn northeasterner with a boyish face and a small mustache. He had been left in charge of the American River canyons when the Auburn Dam effort stumbled and the Bureau of Reclamation cut the budget for patrolling the lands it intended to flood. The superintendent, chief ranger, and most of the rest of the staff had been transferred, and by 1983 MacGaff had been left to handle forty-two thousand acres with three rangers, a maintenance man, and a couple of seasonal assistants in the summer. By the time I arrived he'd managed to beg back one more part-time and one full-time ranger, but he spent the rest of his career with responsibilities far greater than men and women of his rank usually had. He was much loved by his subordinates, because he was highly competent at his own work and mostly left us to do what we pleased with ours. In practice we functioned as a sort of consensus paramilitary. The downside of this was that certain things didn't get done at all. But since no one at headquarters had the slightest interest in the land that had been intended to go underwater or us, our omissions went as unnoticed as our accomplishments.

MacGaff was ideally suited for running the place on the Bureau's shoestring. He had a talent for bookkeeping, but more than that, he was by nature a fearsomely parsimonious man. Ranger Ron O'Leary, an avid theorist of the effects of race and national origin on character and personality, said that MacGaff, whom he sometimes referred to as "the Scotsman," was genetically predisposed to his almost pathological thrift by his ancestry. And because no one else volunteered to handle the mountain of paperwork the department required to requisition the smallest thing, MacGaff exercised a virtual stranglehold on our acquisition of supplies and equipment.

Most of the things MacGaff ordered came from State Stores or Prison Industries, and their cheapness was proportional to the disappointment you experienced as soon as you used them. These goods were the kind you might imagine getting under the command economies of communist countries at the time: tires that blew out on our rough roads, truck batteries that didn't have the power to run all of our radios and emergency lights (we were constantly jump-starting each other), steel lockers for our gear that, once loaded, turned from rectangles to parallelograms so their doors would neither open nor close, and the like.

Our raingear was no exception: a two-piece set consisting of a rubbery yellow parka with a hood and a pair of voluminous bib overalls like those used on fishing boats, but of poorer quality. At one of the frequent motor vehicle accidents on our rain-slick canyon roads, they made me immediately identifiable to ambulance attendants, witnesses, and volunteer firefighters from town—as a commercial fisherman who had somehow lost his way to the sea. There was no shoulder insignia on this rain suit, or any place to pin a badge. Worn together, the parka and overalls had the advantage of putting a double layer of protection between the drenching rain and your gun belt, with its pistol, handcuffs, and portable radio. At the same time, should you need any of these things, you would have to undress to get to them, and for a law enforcement officer this constituted something between a constant annoyance and a potentially lethal situation.

These rain suits are among my first recollections of the American River canyons. When I arrived in May of 1986, they hung on a gray Prison Industries coatrack just inside the old kitchen where we dressed each morning. They were covered with orange smears of mud from the floods of February, when the cofferdam had collapsed and the river had very nearly taken Sacramento.

Sacramento was founded in the winter of 1848–49. From the very beginning, the city existed in fundamental denial of the nature of its site. Local Indians knew that the riparian woods around the junction of the American and Sacramento Rivers flooded regularly. No doubt had the city's founders bothered to look, they might have seen little collections of driftwood caught in the lower branches of trees in what is now Sacramento's downtown. But after the discovery of gold up the American's South Fork the previous year, Sacramento's boosters knew spring would bring thousands of gold seekers to California by sea. Arriving at Yerba Buena—now San Francisco—they could be expected to come up the Sacramento River and debark at the mouth of the American, where they'd provision themselves and head upstream to the mines. One of the city's founders had stockpiled supplies to sell at inflated prices, and so that winter he and his associates surveyed the floodplain into town lots for sale, and those who bought the lots set up stores, restaurants, hotels, and livery stables. It was a disastrous choice.

By the time the two meet in the utter flatness of the Central Valley, the Sacramento River, flowing south out of the mountains of Northern California, and the American, flowing southwest out of the Sierra Nevada, are no longer the swift mountain streams they began as. From Sacramento, the Sacramento River must go another sixty miles to reach salt water at San Francisco Bay, and in that distance it loses only
two feet
of elevation at low, summer flows, and only about thirty feet when the water stacks up on itself trying to get out of the valley during floods. To make matters worse, every other river on the west side of the Sierra Nevada and the east side of the Coast Ranges must, like the American, join the Sacramento to pass through the only breach in the mountains around the four-hundred-mile-long bathtub of the Central Valley—an aggregate, before human modifications, of over half of the state's annual rain and snowmelt.

The nature of Sacramento's site was revealed to its citizens in the first winter of the city's existence, when the American and Sacramento Rivers transgressed on the city a mile back from their banks. There were floods again that spring of 1850, in March of 1851, a few days before Christmas in 1852, on New Year's Eve of 1853, and again that March. After a string of deceptively reassuring years in the late 1850s, during which there was much building, in December 1861 and January 1862 the whole middle of the Central Valley became an inland sea sixty miles wide and a hundred long. Scores of people and thousands of cattle drowned, hundreds of homes and businesses were destroyed, property losses equaled a quarter of the assessed valuation of improvements in California at the time, and on Inauguration Day in 1862, the state's new governor, Leland Stanford, made his way to the festivities in a rowboat. Although attenuated by flood control structures, that sort of thing has continued in Sacramento every decade or two until the present day.

And yet the problem with the climate of California was worse than just floods.

During the Gold Rush, with supplies coming expensively by sea around Cape Horn, a market for locally produced food was created and some immigrants took up farming. The new farmers had come from the East, from Europe, and from other places where it rained in the summertime, but in California they had to make it through five or six rainless months every year. Some winters and springs the rains failed to come; fresh on the heels of the catastrophic floods of 1861–62 came the drought of 1864, and the Central Valley was littered with dead and dying cattle and abandoned crops and homesteads. So farmers were soon attracted to irrigation.

By 1854 the first diversion dams were constructed on the American, one of them at the later site of the Auburn Dam. The North Fork Dam was made out of tree trunks stacked in cribs, log-cabin style, and filled with stones. It served ditches and aqueducts that eventually reached some sixty miles in length, and by the late nineteenth century it supplied a growing number of irrigation farms. Never higher than 25 feet, the dam didn't store water, just diverted some of it, and therefore it had no impact on flooding downstream. But by the end of the nineteenth century, with the technologies of concrete and earth-moving machinery, came a solution to both floods and drought: the storage of flood waters behind huge dams for use in the summertime. The advent of electric light and power in the 1890s made the damming of rivers in the mountains triply attractive, and between 1910 and the late 1920s demand for electricity grew at the rate of 10 or 11 percent a year in California. By the mid-twenties surveyors ranged all over the hills, looking for dam sites. One they found was a bowl-like valley around the confluence of the American's North and South Forks near Folsom; another was upstream, in the eight-hundred-foot gorge of the North Fork below Auburn, where the little North Fork Dam already stood.

It took over twenty years for either site to be used. Folsom was the first, and at the time a 340-foot concrete dam was rising from the riverbed there in the early 1950s, its builders believed it would protect Sacramento from floods of a size seen only once in two hundred years, or longer. But before it was even finished, a huge storm over Christmas 1955 filled Folsom's million-acre-foot reservoir in a single week. (An acre-foot is just what it sounds like, the amount of water it would take to cover an acre of land with a foot of water if nothing soaked in, or just over 326,000 gallons. This is roughly the amount an American family uses in a year.) By the following year bills were introduced in Congress to authorize a larger dam upstream at Auburn. It took a while to get Congress's approval, but after Northern California suffered catastrophic flooding again in 1964, by September 1965, Auburn Dam was law.

To construct Auburn's foundations, the Bureau of Reclamation had to dry out the riverbed. So the engineers built a tunnel big to enough to drive a train through, which created a shortcut at a bend in the river through over two thousand feet of canyon wall. When the diversion tunnel was finished, they constructed a temporary earthen dam over two hundred feet high at its entrance to steer the river into it.

Basing their conclusions on only a half-century of data (river gauges had not been installed on the forks of the American until 1911), the Bureau's engineers calculated that the temporary dam—called a "cofferdam"—could safely contain a storm that came only once every thirty-five years on the average, and the main dam could be finished in far less time than that. Most of the time during construction the entire river would flow through the tunnel, but the Bureau knew that every few winters the river's flow would exceed the tunnel's capacity and the water would back up behind the cofferdam and flood the bridge over which ran the only all-weather road to the town of Foresthill, upstream. When the big dam was finished it would inundate the old bridge anyway, so by the fall of 1973 the Bureau finished a new Foresthill Bridge, which soared across the North Fork canyon 730 feet above the river.