Nature Noir (7 page)

"Bully for you, Ron," said Bell. "Sissy," he added, with the slightest grin. "What did you put on it, anyway?"

"The usual," answered O'Leary, buttoning up his uniform shirt. "Preserve the status quo."

"Preserve the status quo! Hooahh!" Bell chuckled. He strolled over to a large steel locker just inside the old mess hall adjoining the kitchen, where he pulled a bundle of keys from a clip on his belt, unlocked the door, and removed one of the shotguns lined up inside. "That's what I'm putting on mine," he said, laughing. "Preserve the status quo!" He worked the gun's action,
clack-clack,
to make sure it was empty, grabbed a handful of shells from inside the locker, and fed them expertly into the magazine.

Another pickup crunched into the yard. Sherm Jeffries, from the coal country of Pennsylvania, clomped through the door. If O'Leary didn't exactly look like a ranger, Jeffries, with his flinty eyes, rugged face, neatly trimmed black hair and mustache, and black logger boots, looked every bit the part. He was carrying a reel from a fly-fishing rod, which he set gently on the table. "Check this out, Doug," he said to Bell.

Bell walked over and picked it up.

"Nice," he said, setting it down respectfully.

"Hey, no foolin'," MacGaff continued earnestly through the interruptions. "I need those career development plans and personal performance standards. Bruce's gettin' on my case about it."

"Yeah, yeah," said Bell in mock disdain. He crossed the room with his shotgun slung casually over one shoulder and reached for a set of vehicle keys on a row of hooks by the door.

"Hey!" yelled MacGaff in mock anger as Bell went out the door.

Finch was gathering his equipment. I stood with one boot on the seat of a chair, putting on polish. Outside I heard Bell trying to start one of the old Ramchargers, their paint oxidized in the sun and eighty- or ninety thousand bolt-loosening dirt-road miles on their odometers. The big V-8 turned over reticently for a few revolutions, there were a few expiratory clicks from the solenoid, followed by a final
thhhptt,
and then nothing. I heard the creak of the driver's door opening, then the resonant spring-creak of the hood.

Bam!
The hood was slammed violently back down.

"Fuck!" Bell's voice.

Bam!
His boot hit the fender.

"I'll jump you, Doug," Finch yelled cheerfully as he shuffled out the office door with his arms full of gear.

As our senior statesman, O'Leary had been designated to show me around. That morning he took me up to Mineral Bar in one of the two newer, more reliable rigs. A production sport utility vehicle must be extensively modified for a ranger's work, and this had been done very well on the older Ramchargers, although now, in advanced age, nothing worked right. The two three-year-old GMCs had shown up just after the budget was cut and most of the staff was laid off and had been given to the senior men, MacGaff and O'Leary. The way they were outfitted was a study in resignation.

Loading my gear into O'Leary's back seat, I noticed there was no metal screen between it and the front seat for safely transporting prisoners. The roof was bare of the usual red and blue emergency lights. There were no spotlights, no alley lights, no flashlight charger inside for night work. The vehicle had no shotgun rack, no baton holders, and no radio scanner. I opened the tailgate to check the rescue equipment. There wasn't any, save for a worn fishing-tackle box containing a few gauze bandages in dusty plastic sandwich bags, a superannuated roll of adhesive tape congealed into a solid lump, some dusty bandage scissors, and a stethoscope. There was a suction bulb for removing meconium from an infant's throat at that once-in-your-career emergency childbirth, but no climbing ropes, river-rescue gear, cervical collars, or splints for the falls and boating accidents rangers see a lot of in mountain canyons.

We left the Auburn office, O'Leary driving—he was an excellent driver—and started east up the interstate toward the mountains. At the town of Colfax we left the highway and followed a single-lane road switchbacking down the wall of the North Fork canyon in the deep shade of a Douglas fir forest. At the bottom we reached the banks of the North Fork. The river coursed by us, clear, fast, and cold, its stony bottom dancing through the prisms of waves. We crossed it on a two-lane bridge. Underneath us dozens of swept-winged swallows dipped and weaved out over the rapids in pursuit of a hatch of dragonflies.

On the far side, we turned left on a dirt track through a line of boulders next to a sign that read
MINERAL BAR CAMPGROUND
. The campground consisted of seventeen campsites laid out along the track, about half of which were occupied by a collection of faded tents, sagging blue plastic tarpaulins, and wasted-looking old cars, pickup trucks, and vans. I couldn't see a single human being. Somewhere on the other side of a line of alders along the riverbank I heard the hum and rattle of a gold dredge.

"They must be out mining," I said helpfully to O'Leary.

"Uh-huh." He nodded noncommittally. He was a quiet man.

We idled slowly through the campground. Where the road dead-ended I saw two campsites below us, in a dusty basin separated from the river by a windrow of boulders cast up on the riverbank by nineteenth-century miners. In one camp, I saw people.

"Those are the Hallecks, a whole family of them," O'Leary said with no apparent pleasure.

A faded wall tent slumped at one end of the site. From it, a short man, his grubby shirt unbuttoned and his pale belly overhanging the waistline of his grimy cutoffs, made his way toward a short woman in a faded, multicolored muumuu. Her long hair hung forward in greasy strands as she bent over a frying pan on a camp stove. The ground was littered with beer cans. The man was yelling something I couldn't make out, and the woman yelled back, waving a corpulent arm. Continuing toward her, the man threaded his way through four dirty-faced children playing on the ground. They seemed oblivious to the domestic strife. I was reminded—and instantly I was ashamed, for these were
people,
I thought—of looking down into one of those pits at the zoo, where some poor creatures pace out their irritable lives in whatever is the opposite of a state of nature. This was not nature, I thought. This was not a park. My career had hit bottom.

O'Leary got out with his clipboard and bank bag and walked down a little footpath from the road to the campsite. I stood above at the edge of the embankment to watch. Below me, O'Leary greeted the inhabitants with genuine politeness. He waited patiently while they dug around in their filthy duffels and disheveled tent for the camping fees. When they finally pieced together enough change and counted it into his hands, he produced a little receipt, which he filled out and handed to the man. Then he made his way back up the path. When he arrived at the top, he was wiping his hands on his green jeans.

"Even the money was dirty," he said quietly, opening the door of the Jimmy.

We circulated back through the campground one more time, trying to find someone else to shake down. At one site O'Leary left a warning note for nonpayment. At another, a wisp of smoke rose from a scorched milk carton and some potato peelings sizzling on the coals of an abandoned campfire. A pump from a gold dredge lay in pieces next to the fire ring on a grimy tarpaulin.

"Where are they? Mining?" I asked O'Leary. I retrieved my canteen from the Jimmy and poured water on the hot ashes, stirring them with a stick. The fire sputtered and steamed.

"Cheese Day," O'Leary replied, squinting at me through the acrid smoke. He turned to walk back to the truck.

"Cheese Day? What's that?" I asked, following him. We got in.

"That's where they give out government food up in Colfax and Auburn. You know, Department of Agriculture surplus commodities for indigents and welfare miners—generic cheese, dried milk, generic macaroni, sacks of beans."

"Oh?"

"So if you want to collect fees, don't bother coming here on the morning of the first Thursday of the month," he said, putting the Jimmy in drive. We left the canyon, headed back to our office.

Back in the ranger station's kitchen, O'Leary chewed a takeout taco he had picked up on our way back through Auburn and absorbed himself in a paperback Louis L'Amour cowboy novel. I studied him in silence, munching sandwiches I had brought from home. When he finished, he wiped his beard with a paper napkin, put the book away in one of the kitchen cabinets, and walked outside into the covered alleyway between the kitchen and what had been a walk-in cooler, now used for storage. I heard the raspy click of his cigarette lighter. When he finished his cigarette, we got back into the Jimmy and headed for Cherokee Bar.

Cherokee Bar was on the south side of the Middle Fork, about twelve miles upstream of the dam site and four hundred feet beneath the dam's high-water line. It took about forty minutes to drive there from our office. Given a vehicle with decent ground clearance and traction, you could have reached Cherokee Bar from the gilt-domed state capitol in Sacramento in an hour and a half. But somewhere in between, the normative influence of the capitol and its laws was exhausted. In those days the situation at Cherokee Bar resembled those peculiar 1970s Westerns in which the bad guys all looked like armed rock-and-roll musicians.

We crossed the North Fork canyon into El Dorado County, headed east toward Georgetown, and then turned off the main road onto a smaller one, up a gully into the pines. Three and a half miles out the pavement expired. We lurched into a muddy wash surrounded by a thicket of blackberries and Scotch broom and then emerged onto the canyon rim. A meek little state park boundary sign stood to the left of the road, thoroughly ventilated with bullet holes. A thousand feet below, the rapids of the lower Middle Fork glittered in the afternoon sun. From there the road got better, but the improvement was temporary, and three miles farther we rattled down a last precipitous switchback onto Cherokee Bar.

Cherokee was a large sandbar on the inside of a slow bend in the Middle Fork. In front of us the road petered out into multiple sets of vehicle tracks across an expanse of beach, shimmering with heat. In the distance along the water's edge, thickets of willow and a few cottonwoods and alders formed oases of shade. The only other refuge from the withering sunlight was a narrow strip of overhanging live oaks along the canyon wall. In their shade, to our right, stood an outhouse coated with that chocolate-brown paint park maintenance workers use on everything. The outhouse was riddled with bullet holes. On its far side was a campsite: a couple of old pickup trucks parked next to some piles of dredge parts, two wall tents, and a large blue plastic tarpaulin strung between them as an awning. Underneath the latter was a fireplace made of stones, around which were arranged a few threadbare aluminum lawn chairs and a couple of ice chests.

"They owe us," said O'Leary, steering toward the camp.

Before we got closer than seventy-five feet, two dogs, a massive Great Dane and a hulking mongrel, emerged from the campsite and charged us, barking furiously. I looked at O'Leary. He sighed and stopped the truck. The dogs circled us, barking and snarling through the open windows. O'Leary didn't look particularly alarmed. Apparently this was normal.

A man in his early thirties appeared from the campsite and ambled toward us, yelling at the dogs. His long brown hair was tied in a ponytail down his back. He wore a broad-brimmed cowboy hat over a red muscle T-shirt. His jeans were stuffed into cowboy boots. From a cowboy gun belt festooned with bullets around his waist hung a holster containing a huge, long-barreled revolver. The holster was tied to his lower thigh with a leather thong, gunfighter-style.

One fundamental of all parks, state and national, is that they exist to preserve wildlife. Further, parks are used intensively by hikers, horseback riders, mountain bikers, and boaters, and this kind of recreation is generally inconsistent with gunfire. Most park system regulations are designed to promote civility between users and make casual visitors feel at ease. So, not surprisingly, it's illegal to walk around wearing a pistol at almost every park in the United States—outside of Alaska, where subsistence hunting is common and some people feel the need to have a ready defense against grizzly bear attack.

When an armed man approaches you on foot, you don't stay in your patrol car. Perhaps counterintuitively, two armed men in a stationary motor vehicle are no match for a single man on foot. Wedged between your seat, dashboard, steering wheel, and doors, you make a fatally predictable target. It's surprisingly difficult to draw your weapon from the type of holsters we use when seated in a vehicle. If you do manage to get your gun out, seated facing forward, your field of fire is extremely limited. You are entirely visible to your opponent through the glass, but fire a single round from your own gun through one of those windows and immediately you will be deafened, and your aim may be warped by the bullet's impact with the glass. And the thin steel of an automobile body affords little actual protection from modern firearms fired from outside. You had better get out.

I watched O'Leary for a signal. He sat quietly with both hands on the steering wheel, watching the man with vague interest as the latter approached his open window. The Great Dane and the huge mongrel raced back and forth from one side to the other, pawing at the doors. Arriving at O'Leary's window, the miner grabbed at the Dane, and I saw his shoulder jerk as the animal strained against his grasp on its collar. It was still barking furiously.

"Buck! Shut the fuck up!" the miner yelled down at the dog.

"How you doing today?" O'Leary said casually to him. The dog whimpered. The other one was over at my window, showing me its teeth.

"Okay, I guess," the miner replied to O'Leary. "What's goin' on?" Now both dogs were barking again.

"Buck! Moocher! No!" the miner yelled, swatting at the Dane below O'Leary's window.

O'Leary reached for a clipboard between us on which he recorded who had paid and who hadn't. He showed it to the miner. "Seems like you haven't given us any camp fees for a while."