Nature Noir (16 page)

The blond guy looked in over my shoulder. "When I got here just seconds after he jumped, the radio was playing like it is now. But it was a sad song, even sadder than this one—I think that's what made him do it right then."

"Could be," I said. "Some of those country songs are pretty sad." I got in to move the truck out of the way of the traffic now stacking up behind my Jeep. He had been shorter than I was. I moved the seat back and turned the key in the ignition. The interior smelled like beer, cigarettes, and the stale sweat of someone who no longer existed.

As the Foresthill Bridge neared completion in the summer of 1973, all over the country—in airports, at displays of televisions in department stores, in bars, any place where a TV was on—people sat riveted to the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate as the idea of loyalty was turned on its head. Back in 1959, when the bill to authorize Auburn Dam was introduced in Congress, loyalty to flag and president had been the gold standard of patriotism. But those who clung to it now were cast as villains, like Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, who tried to shield himself and his boss from culpability by responding more than a hundred times during questioning that he couldn't remember. The hearings revealed that in addition to burgling the Democratic Party offices, Haldeman and his associates had ordered a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was a government employee with a high security clearance who had turned over secret documents detailing the government's dirty dealings to the
New York Times.
Nixon's men had pried open his psychiatrist's file cabinets in hopes of finding something to discredit him.

This, then, was how much attitudes changed during the construction of the Auburn Dam. Had Ellsberg done what he had in the 1950s, he might well have been put to death for treason. But in the 1970s he became a hero to many Americans, and it was his persecutors in the government who went to prison. So it was in this climate of sympathy toward acts of conscience, as the House Judiciary Committee moved toward impeachment of the president in early 1974, that an Auburn Dam whistleblower emerged from the ranks of the Bureau of Reclamation.

George C. Rouse was no wild-haired environmentalist. A small, sharp-faced man with glasses and a pocketful of mechanical pencils, he was passionately dedicated to his work as an engineer for the Bureau. As a young man he'd worked on the Hoover Dam and when the Auburn Dam came down the pipe, he was attached to the Bureau's design shops at the Denver Service Center. He soon found himself at odds with his superiors over the dam on the American. Politically, of course, he believed in Auburn and dams in general. It was the thin-arch design he disagreed with. He thought it was dangerous. He would be remembered as stubborn, even combative, and was not the sort of man to be pressured into changing his mind. Finally, in June 1972, Rouse retired in protest over Auburn and went home to his little white frame house on Pierce Street in the Denver suburb of Wheat Ridge.

That winter, as usual, Rouse's car stayed out in the snow. Never one to stop working when he clocked out, Rouse had converted his garage into a home office. For years he'd been excusing himself each evening after dinner to go out there and work on the Bureau's calculations late into the night, and his retirement didn't change that. For the next year and a half, Rouse kept going over the figures for Auburn. And he ordered up some letterhead: George C. Rouse, Structural Engineer.

In February 1974, Rouse typed a letter on that stationery to Harold G. Arthur, the Bureau's director of design and construction at the Denver Service Center. In reasoned, unemotional prose backed with fifteen peer-reviewed references, Rouse refuted the Bureau's whole rationale for the seismic safety of Auburn Dam. Using the agency's own numbers, he derived that the dam could be expected to crack within the first seven seconds of a bad earthquake. He also differed with the Bureau on what he considered its wild optimism on the strength of its concrete, and further—and this turned out to be the most lethal to the agency's credibility—on whether an earthquake could happen closer than fifty miles from the dam site. The Bureau had dismissed that possibility, but Rouse thought it ought to be planned for, because dams last a lot longer than geological opinions. In a later letter he reminded Arthur that people had lived around Koyna, India, for a long time, so there existed a written and oral tradition of what had happened there for the last four hundred years. Nowhere in that tradition was there a legend of anything like the earthquake that had cracked the Koyna Dam and killed 177 residents of nearby villages. Could the Bureau really be so sure that the faults around Auburn would not behave similarly when the dam was filled?

It would bother Rouse for years that he helped the environmentalists, because he disagreed with the Bureau not about dams in general—he loved them, they were his life—but about what he saw as sloppy engineering, with the lives of thousands downstream at stake. Nevertheless, his timing was fortuitous for environmental groups. California had only recently had a wakeup call: two years before, the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles was shaken by an earthquake that killed fifty-eight people, damaged thirty thousand buildings, and caused the crest of the Van Norman Dam above the densely urbanized valley to collapse. The dam didn't fail entirely, but its perilous condition caused the evacuation of eighty thousand residents, and thereafter seismic risk had become the darling of environmentalists fighting large engineered structures. They used it against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant on California's central coast, although unsuccessfully, and once the Rouse letters found their way into their hands, they used it against Auburn. What would make Rouse's assertions most damaging was that he was so soon to be proven right. A little over a year after his first letter, the Oroville earthquake shook the supposedly inactive Foothill Faults beneath Oroville Dam.

For the Bureau of Reclamation, the following year, 1976, was a low point. Even as it defended the design of Auburn Dam after the Oroville earthquake, the agency was filling another new dam in Idaho. The 305-foot earth-fill Teton Dam had been completed on the river of the same name the previous fall, and like Auburn's, the rocks underneath it were suspect. During construction the Bureau poured over five hundred thousand yards of concrete into the underlying rocks to keep water from seeping through cracks and voids in them and liquefying the earth of the dam. Teton filled quickly with runoff the following spring, and on June 5, 1976, at five minutes to noon, the structure failed, unleashing a torrent that destroyed several ranches and much of the town of Rexburg, Idaho, downstream. Remarkably, only eleven people died.

In the aftermath of the Teton Dam collapse and the Oroville earthquake, the Bureau of Reclamation was well on its way to becoming the most controversial federal agency since the CIA. Later that year Jimmy Carter was elected president, and he went to the White House with a list of expensive federal projects he had promised to kill. One of them was Auburn. He was eventually forced to soften his position, and by the end of his term Auburn still had a budget and was being redesigned for greater seismic safety. Design work continued into the eighties as the Bureau sought money to begin construction again. Meanwhile, the diversion tunnel, the cofferdam, and the big bridge lived a longer and stranger life in limbo than their designers could have ever imagined.

After moving the dead man's pickup, I walked to the rail of the pedestrian walkway and looked over the edge. Beneath me the bridge's green steel trusses were in shadow. A car crossed the span behind me, and the clanks of the expansion joints startled a flock of pigeons from their roost underneath it. They veered out over the canyon as one, wheeled, and disappeared back under the bridge.

The body lay face-down below, where the canyon side had been bulldozed to subsoil and rock when the bridge was built and still nothing grew. There was a scuff on the soil just uphill of the corpse where the man had hit and bounced. He had come to rest with one of his legs twisted underneath him. There was a rent in his blue chambray work shirt at the middle of his back through which his intestines had exploded. They were splayed out on the ground around him.

The coroner's deputies arrived to collect him. They hiked down the steep rock and soil to the dead man, opened a body bag, and went to work. One of them took photographs. Another, a young woman, put on her rubber gloves and began daintily picking up bits of the man's internal organs and putting them into a plastic bag. She stopped for a moment and went over behind a rock to retch. Then she returned to work.

A television minicam operator showed up in a white van and walked onto the bridge to where I stood.

"Can you tell me who he is?" he asked me.

"Not at this time, sir," I answered.

"When did it happen?"

"About forty-five minutes ago."

"Did he leave a note?"

"Not that we're aware of."

"Oh."

The cameraman steadied himself on the railing and started filming a slow pan from the bridge deck down over the edge to where the deputies were working.

"You're not going to show him in that condition, are you?" I asked him.

"No ... but I guess they would somewhere. I deal with Channel Ninety and Forty-seven, and they are mostly pretty tasteful about this kind of stuff. But it's a salable commodity, just showing the death scene, and I'm a freelancer."

I looked back at the deputies and the body. A log truck passed, and the bridge clanked and vibrated with the weight of the bones of some forest up the Foresthill Divide, headed for the mill in Rocklin. From under the bridge, startled pigeons burst over the gorge again, their black-pearl wings catching the morning sun.

Below, the deputies gingerly lifted the corpse into the body bag. Before they zipped it up, the woman collecting the organs put the plastic bag she'd been carrying inside it.

At the end of the day I was doing paperwork at the kitchen table in the old mess hall. Bell's patrol truck rattled into the yard, and he shuffled into the ranger station with his shotgun over his shoulder.

"Fuck this place," he muttered as he passed me.

He walked over to the gun cabinet and unlocked it with a large ring of keys clipped to his gun belt. Then, as he always did, he held the shotgun in front of him and with lightning precision racked six rounds of buckshot through the chamber and out the ejection port. The shells tumbled neatly through the air and landed in a small cardboard box full of loose shells in the gun cabinet, from which we all loaded at the beginning of our shifts and into which we all unloaded at the end of them. None of us did it like this, however. They didn't teach this at the academy, and for good reason. But it was Bell's trademark. He never missed the box, and although each shell passed the firing pin on its way through the chamber, he retired after twenty years without ever having blown a hole in the ceiling.

Bell gently stood the 12-gauge up next to the others and relocked the cabinet. A Vietnam-era veteran and expert shotgunner, he had a lot more respect for a Remington or a hunting dog than for a patrol truck or the government that owned it. On his way back past me, he glanced down at the report I was filling out in pencil.

"Your guy from the big bridge?" he asked.

"Yup," I answered, and sighed.

"A mess?" he inquired, walking over to his locker.

"The usual," I responded without looking up.

"Fuck this place," he said again. He opened his locker, took off his gun belt and uniform, put them away, and left to go home.

Before that, when I'd finished at the bridge, I'd gotten back into my Jeep and run up Foresthill Road. I turned around at Lake Clementine Road and drove back down to the bridge, more slowly than usual, with the window open. I didn't do it because this investigation required it. This one was simple: witnesses see man jump; no associates present; man very DOA; end of case. Instead, I did it because I always did. For a while now it had been my habit to construct a mental approximation of the events leading up to the matter I was investigating.

At the tip of the Foresthill Divide just before the dead man descended the last grade onto the bridge, there is a place where the new road to the bridge had been blasted through a hill of greenstone. Since the cuts were exposed in the seventies, tufts of apricot monkey flower,
Mimulus bifidus,
had grown all over them, in pockets of soil carried down from above by rain and gravity. In the late spring these incredibly tough plants were covered with thousands of azalealike yellow-orange blooms, and in recent years this unlikely spot had become one of the best places on the Bureau's land to see them.

Although thousands of people drove that road, I had never seen anyone stop and admire these gardens, and I doubted that the dead man did either. We are all so caught up in the struggles we get into on the way to the lives we dream of, and the dead man was probably just a little farther down that road than the rest of us. Maybe he had lost a good woman, a good job, or a good friend, or maybe he'd never had them. Or maybe it was bad chemicals, of internal or external origin, that pushed him over the edge.

But maybe he was just suffering from the same regret we've all known at one time or another, when life hasn't lived up to our expectations. Only his was worse, and perhaps his life lacked the sweet little mitigations that get most of us through our days: bandy-legged fawns on the lawn, a soft song you hum looking out on a parking lot with a cigarette in your hand, peach-colored flowers against gray-green rock, the company of friends, children, and animals, and the terse exclamations of your fellows, which let you know you are not the only one who suffers. Everything suffers. Everything has joy. In purgatory you still have a chance; the final judgment on you and everything else has not yet been rendered. So if people are doing something wrong, refuse to cooperate; if the music's too sad, for God's sake change the station or turn the radio off. Stop before the bridge. Get out. Walk down the road. Sniff the air, and if it smells good, breathe deep.