Nature Noir (13 page)

From a light aircraft like the one later used to search for Karen's grave, you see a certain visual unity to the west side of the northern Sierra. Beneath you, Placer and El Dorado Counties are a rolling sheet of hills that rise so gradually toward the Sierra crest some fifty miles east—at an overall slope of only two or three degrees—that the landscape appears, if bumpy, almost level. This hilly surface has been cut by deep river canyons into a series of discrete ramps, the even tops of which, lined up by eye as you look north or south, reveal their origin as a whole. But this uniformity is recent, the result of an icing of lava, mudflows, and ash from a period of volcanic eruptions between about thirty and ten million years ago. The swirled marble cake beneath this icing, exposed in the walls of the river canyons, is anything but uniform.

Three hundred million years ago there was no California, and the rocks under my chair legs as I write this were being deposited on an ocean floor off a coast somewhere in what is now Nevada, as layers of silt, sand, and a gentle, steady rain of dead marine life in an ever-changing array of forms—some bizarre, some beautiful, most too small for the eye to see. Underlying these sediments was a thick layer of charcoal-gray basalt, which—as any college student knows today, but the dam's designers didn't—was being extruded as molten rock from a seam somewhere out in midocean and moving toward the landmass that would become North America as it was progressively created.

With all of this movement, a map of the world of about 250 million years ago, as I have said, looks nothing like the world map today. By then the earth's landmasses were joined together into a supercontinent known to today's geologists as Pangaea. Pangaea began to break up, and its coast in the middle of what is now Nevada began to jostle against the sheet of sea floor in what is now the Pacific Ocean, and at various times the ocean floor continued to move toward the continent. The continental rocks were lighter, or so the present theory goes, and tended to ride up over the sea floor as the two collided. The pressures were immense, and in the process of this inexorable collision chunks of ocean floor and whole archipelagos of volcanic islands riding landward on it were scraped off and applied in layers to the growing margin of what would become California.

The poorly healed sutures between these additions to the continent formed zones of weakness, and as the jostling between coast and sea floor continued over the eons, strain built up in the rocks and systems of cracks formed between the layers. Today one such system, the Foothill Fault Zone, runs down the western front of the Sierra in two major strands: the Melones Fault Zone, just east of my part of the American River, and the Bear Mountain Fault Zone, to the west. Crossing the North Fork of the American below its junction with the Middle Fork, the various component cracks of the Bear Mountain—the Salt Creek Lineament, the Maidu Fault, the Spenceville-Deadman, and the southern extension of the Wolf Creek—converge like the waist of an hourglass, as if squeezed between the great iceberg of sparkling granite called the Penryn Pluton to the west of the dam site and the mash of old sea floor to the east of it. That, at the risk of oversimplifying it, is what we know—or think we know—of how this country was formed. And we know that the waist of that hourglass of cracks runs right under the site of the Auburn Dam, and that the cracks may be moving, or probably are. But it's an entirely different story from the one the 1969 geologists had learned in school and on which they based their judgments of the potential for earthquakes in the dam site.

In 1966, the year the Bureau established its dam construction office in Auburn, the California Division of Mines and Geology published what some older geologists in the state now refer to affectionately as "the Old Testament."

Bulletin 190 was a compendium—big and richly illustrated with complex diagrams—of what was known about the geology of Northern California. At the time of its publication, the theory of plate tectonics—which has it that the earth is like a pot of boiling milk and the continents and ocean bottoms so much skin on its surface, made at one location, wrinkled by force, and recycled back into the milk at another—had already been well articulated and supported with a growing body of data. The developing theory was the subject of much discussion in academic circles, but many working geologists still considered it controversial.

Bulletin 190 affords us a look at a widely accepted version of California's geology that was contemporaneous with the thin arch, and entirely excludes what we now see as essential to understanding why the rocks underneath the dam were so worrisome. It's a version that devotes over 49 of the bulletin's 507 pages to the infamous San Andreas Fault and its branches, which caused the 1906 earthquake that devastated San Francisco, but makes absolutely no mention of active faults in the foothills of the Sierra.

Strangely, had that document's eminent authors made a survey of local newspapers, they would have known there had been foothill earthquakes severe enough to scare people out of their houses and ring church bells during their own lifetimes. But geology, like any science, is often directed by commerce and human affairs. After 1906 filled the morgues and cleaned out the insurance companies, coastal geology was about earthquakes (and oil), but in the foothills of the Sierra, it had always been about finding gold. Because foothill faults had moved, but not catastrophically—Auburn's brick business district was still standing sixty years after San Francisco's unreinforced masonry buildings crushed hundreds of their inhabitants—little was known about them, and the Bureau considered them inactive. And a widely held belief in what something—or for that matter who someone—is can be a powerful antidote to the observed truth.

The story assembled later by detectives would show that in the months leading up to Karen's disappearance, the Dellasandros' marriage seemed to be coming apart. One witness remembered Karen expressing fear of her husband, saying he'd recently smashed a chair into bits during an argument. Less than three weeks before Karen vanished, the family dog, a German shepherd named Fuzz, got into the garbage. According to Karen's mother, when Les found out he flew into a rage, flinging the dog around and beating it severely with his fists and feet. The following morning Fuzz was in a coma and Karen took him to a vet's office, where the dog died later that day. After Karen's disappearance the police recovered the veterinarian's medical report. It confirmed that the cause of the dog's death—broken bones and internal bleeding—was consistent with a severe beating. But of course such injuries might be found in an animal that had been hit by a car, too. When detectives went to Les's father's place looking for signs of Karen, they found a smallish mound of fresh earth on his property. Les's father told them that it was Fuzz's grave, and that it contained a blood-soaked quilt the animal had been wrapped in when it was brought there. For whatever reason, the police did not dig it up.

But it was not only Les's behavior that was changing. In her last weeks Karen exhibited new signs of independence and what could be interpreted as attempts to shore up her flagging self-esteem in the face of her husband's withering criticism. She had enrolled part-time at Sierra College and was talking about starting a career. She had confided in a friend that without such an income she could never afford to leave Les and support her children. And she'd begun inquiring about the legal nuts and bolts of a separation and how to get a restraining order against her husband.

Six days before Karen vanished, her mother drove her to a hospital, where Karen underwent cosmetic surgery to remove the scars on her face and arm and had breast implants put in. Her parents told the police they'd paid for that. Karen spent what is believed to have been the last week of her life in postoperative pain, wearing an elastic brace around her chest. The brace and the pain made it impossible to drive, and she'd been relying on her mother and Les to get her around on errands. Investigators came to believe it was highly unlikely she would have picked this time to leave Les but instead would have waited for a week or two, until she felt up to traveling. She'd made at least one previous attempt to leave, but that time she'd taken the children with her, and people who knew Karen well said she'd never have left them with Les.

In the course of the investigation, it became clear that Karen's mother disliked Les intensely and made no secret of it. If even a fraction of what she recounted about her son-in-law was true, she may have had ample cause. But for the sake of fairness, we must remember her prejudice when we assess her testimony. With that said, Karen's mother told police that during a car ride after the surgery—and she claimed Karen had told her this—Les had driven over a bump and Karen had complained about the pain and asked him to take it easy. At this, the mother said, he caused the car to jerk repeatedly, alternately applying the brakes and the accelerator. And, according to the mother, in the days after the surgery he added a new invective to the stream of verbal abuse directed at his wife: "Old Falsies."

After World War II, dam know-how was a key component of United States foreign aid, and Bureau of Reclamation engineers regularly functioned as overseas advisers to developing nations. By the 1960s big dams were going up all over the world. One of them, the Kariba, in Africa, was completed in 1961. At that time geologists considered the region along the border between Rhodesia and Zambia seismically stable. But as Kariba filled, the area was shaken by a series of earthquakes, which increased in severity to a particularly strong set of shocks in 1963, just as the dam reached capacity.

Later, by the mid-sixties, India finished a large dam at Koyna, in a region one report called "one of the least seismically active places in the world." During its filling, mild earthquakes began to occur, culminating in a magnitude 6.4 shock on December 10, 1967. The dam cracked but survived; however, nearby communities were not so lucky. The collapse of unreinforced masonry buildings in those villages killed at least 177 men, women, and children.

In Greece, the rapid filling of the Kremasta Dam after its 1965 completion was contemporaneous with an earthquake that caused slumps and landslides, damaged over 1,600 buildings, killed one person, and left sixty injured. Similar patterns were noted at a French dam in 1963 and a Swiss one in 1965. And by January 1972, the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering released a joint study stating that under certain conditions, large reservoirs had a potential to cause earthquakes as a result of the immense pressures they exerted on what were now understood as discrete portions of the earth's movable crust and, some geologists believed, by injecting the faults with water under pressure.

As investigators reconstructed it, the final rupture in the Dellasandros' marriage occurred around the question of where their children would go to school.

Les was Catholic, and the children were currently attending St. Joseph's School in North Auburn. But Karen wanted them moved to Forest Lake Christian School, in Lake of the Pines. The day before her disappearance she went to Forest Lake Christian to have a look around. An acquaintance later told police she had run into Karen in the schoolyard and had talked with her briefly. She remembered Karen saying that the pain from her recent surgery was considerably worse than she had imagined it would be and that she was very worried about her marriage. The next morning at around eight, Karen phoned Forest Lake Christian and made an appointment to enroll her children later that day. She never showed up.

By that morning, the dam site in the canyon below Les and Karen's house was a great hole in the earth like a strip mine, but it was now strangely quiet there. Gone was the noise of construction equipment; there was only the sound of the river at the bottom. Weeds came up on construction roads along the canyon walls. On the manmade cliffs of the dam's keyways, wooden catwalks and ladders on which workers had swarmed like so many ants were going gray and splintery in the sun. Underneath, the tunnels were abandoned, their interior walls still strung with black rubber electrical cord and, every few feet, a light bulb in a wire shield. But the power was shut off, many of the bulbs were now broken, and in the dark the tunnels echoed with drips of water. The water trickled along their floors, emerging at the tunnel mouths high on the keyways, where willows, their seeds carried there on the wind or by birds, were taking root and would soon grow to hide the tunnel portals entirely.

In the Bureau's palatial offices on the canyon rim, janitors still kept the floors perfectly polished, and each morning the engineers showed up for work as usual. Within another few years one dropped dead at his post from a heart attack, still waiting to finish his dam.
NO TRESPASSING
signs were posted on all the locked gates into the dam site, and the gates were checked every day or two by the rangers. But they would never have known if someone had let himself in with a key. And it seemed that everyone in some semiofficial capacity—game wardens, utility linemen, volunteer firemen, even sheriff's deputies—had one. But that's just one of many possibilities.

The quiet in the dam site had come about in the context of two major shifts in public attitudes during the 1960s and 1970s. The first was the advent of widespread public concern for the well-being of the natural world, the second a growing disenchantment with government.

Nineteen sixty-two, the year the Bureau of Reclamation distributed its prospectus on the Auburn Dam to Congress, also saw the publication of Rachel Carson's
Silent Spring,
a book whose wide readership is often cited as the beginning of a broad-based environmental movement in the United States. That movement can be said to have come of age with the 1969 passage of the National Environmental Policy Act. Under the new law, the Bureau was required to publish an accounting of the environmental effects of its dams. Within a month of the 1972 release of the final environmental impact statement for the Auburn Dam, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the Environmental Defense Fund filed suit against the Bureau. A federal judge subsequently found the Bureau's statement inadequate and ordered the agency to amend it. By the time the Bureau presented the amendment to the public in August 1973, it was not the same public at all that had approved of the Bureau and its dams back when the project began.