Nature Noir (21 page)

The first troops were under orders to evict squatters, capture fugitives, protect natural features and visitors from harm, and control depredations by innkeepers and guides. But their commanders intuitively invented the larger trade of park management in a rough form of what it has become today. They made maps and surveys of plants and wildlife. They constructed trails, roads, and headquarters. They stocked fish, fed herds of elk and buffalo through hard winters, and began closely regulating the activities of hoteliers and other park concessions.

And so, if our pedigree as rangers goes back to the never-uniformed Galen Clark and Harry Yount, we are more recognizably the descendants of these uniformed and intensely bureaucratic turn-of-the-century cavalrymen. From them came the flat-brimmed cavalry hat rangers still wear, and from them the olive-green uniforms, which had supplanted the army blues by the time the Park Service took over from the army during the First World War. This horse-soldier army, the historian Harvey Myerson has remarked, existed on rules and regulations; its lifeblood, the orderly flow of paper forms for every conceivable occasion through successive ranks for approval. Today California state park rangers have no fewer than 142 forms and I spent about a third of my time as a ranger filling them out. Our rules and policies filled four extra-deep three-ring binders. Forms and requisitions went from us to supervising rangers with lieutenant's bars on their collars, and from them to chief rangers with captain's bars, and from them to superintendents with gold oak leaves. Our class-A jackets were festooned with gunmetal buttons and our leathers were supposed to be polished, but like cavalrymen in the hinterlands, they often got dusty. We set our digital watches to military time.

The guns that rangers carry are often thought of by the public as a recent addition, but the need for such martial protection in the face of hair-raising encounters with miscreants goes all the way back to the beginning. In 1916, the first director of the underfunded National Park Service dug into his own pocket to buy each of his rangers a pistol. Today, when the talking, cajoling, and educating are over—and all good rangers prefer these methods to the use of force—the fundamental mode of park protection remains coercive, by force of law and arms. The threats facing today's rangers are more than theoretical. According to a 2002 federal study, rangers are more than ten times as likely to be killed or injured on the job than agents of the Drug Enforcement Administration.

After the failure of the first undermanned civilian authorities, their replacement by the army, and the army's replacement by an armed and uniformed civilian police force, the problem of who would manage the parks, and how, and under what philosophy, has never gone away. Adding to the philosophical stresses within them, by the mid-twentieth century park agencies were placed in charge of an increasing number of "recreation areas"—lands of a profoundly different character from those their founders had in mind. Typical of these areas were crowded coastal beaches and the shorelines of water storage reservoirs. As any ranger who has worked in them can tell you, the atmosphere in these places is less contemplative and more boisterous than that of a nature preserve. At times it is downright lethal.

For decades park professionals have worried that the sort of duties rangers grow used to in a recreation area—controlling crowds, quelling drunken fights, and contending with an urban criminal element—would change the fundamental nature of the ranger's role. What has been less widely discussed are the effects of whole careers spent in manmade recreation area landscapes—lifeguard towers, concrete-block restrooms, parking lots, snack bars, and the muddy bathtub rings from the changing water levels of reservoirs—on the wilderness aesthetic of people in the ranger services: that love of unspoiled nature that once characterized the men and women who gravitated to park work.

Auburn State Recreation Area was one of two main areas under the administration of State Parks' American River District. The other was Folsom Lake, where the district's offices were located. By the time I came to work in the district we had a new superintendent there. Tall, blond, and athletic—he ran during his lunch hour—

Bruce Kranz was a born-again Christian with a growing family. He had started his career as a lifeguard on State Parks' Southern California beaches and, rising quickly through the ranks, worked at two other reservoirs before coming to Folsom. Folsom was basically the same sort of operation as the beaches where Kranz had started out: intensive aquatic recreation close to a major population center—in this case, Sacramento and its suburbs. Kranz was by most accounts a capable administrator of such places but had little ability as a naturalist. Nor had his assignments ever required that of him.

As it happened, Kranz arrived at Folsom right after the floods of 1986 and just in time for a long drought that followed. For the next six years the reservoir outside his office window was perennially drawn down to fill the Bureau's water contracts. It was so bad during those years that Kranz employed a full-time maintenance worker whose job was to go around the lake on a barge, setting out buoys to mark all the rocks emerging from the water so that speedboats wouldn't hit them.

By the summer of 1992 the lake's marina looked like a desert. Every day Kranz had to look at the expanding shoreline, now over half a mile of bare yellow dirt. Dust devils whirled across it, picking up beer cups and bits of paper. At night his rangers pursued kids in four-wheel-drives over it and their headlights flashed in crazy circles over the dusty wastes, as if searching for anything that lived. To make matters worse, the storm of 1986 caused a rewrite of the flood control rules for Folsom and now, at times in the winter too, almost two thirds of the lake's capacity was held empty for flood control space.

During this time Kranz developed an interest in politics. In 1992 he unsuccessfully campaigned for a seat on the board of directors of the Placer County Water Agency. Later he served as chairman of the county's Republican Central Committee. In the latter role he rubbed shoulders with Placer County's archconservative state and federal legislators, among them freshman Congressman John Doolittle, Republican from California's Fourth District, and State Senator Tim Leslie. In such company Kranz soon become an outspoken advocate of the Auburn Dam. Auburn, he pointed out, would store runoff from the mountains that could be used to keep Folsom full for swimming and waterskiing all summer. Furthermore, Auburn would enable the flood control capacity presently held open at Folsom to be moved upstream, so Folsom could be allowed to fill in the winter and spring. But Kranz's motives were not entirely myopic. Like many natives of Southern California, a near-desert that by the end of the nineteenth century was reaching four hundred miles north for its water, Kranz believed that if the state was to continue to grow and prosper, we would need more water. Lots more.

So it was that in 1991, when a discussion was held at a regional meeting of district superintendents on what California State Parks's official position on the Auburn Dam should be, Kranz alone spoke in favor of drowning his own park, Auburn State Recreation Area. Within two years drought gave way to normal rainfall again, but Kranz, who once described himself as "a pro-business guy in a preservationist agency," never changed his opinion. Interviewed in 2003, he still thought a dam on the North Fork was a good idea.

If having our own boss come out in favor of putting us underwater wasn't enough, new legislation to authorize completion of the Auburn Dam continued to appear in Congress. No sooner had Representative Norm Shumway's Auburn Dam Revival Act of 1987 died in a legislature more worried about deficit spending than about floods or federally subsidized water for California agribusiness than another Auburn Dam bill appeared in 1988. This one was a $600 million plan for a flood-control-only dam. It perished without ever leaving committee. But its backers didn't give up easily, and the next year they were back. Again they were defeated.

The new concept—a "dry dam" that didn't store water or generate power but remained empty until a major storm, when its gates would rumble shut, filling the American River canyons with runoff for a few days or weeks—brought arguments between two factions: those who supported a more expensive all-purpose dam and those asserting that flood control must be secured for Sacramento without triggering the opposition all-purpose dams had among budget conservatives and environmentalists. By 1989 local governments around Sacramento had formed their own flood control agency, and by 1992 this agency, the State Reclamation Board, and the Army Corps of Engineers were all backing the flood-control-only dam.

That year the dam loomed in Congress again in the form of a $638 million flood control project buried in a semiannual omnibus water projects bill. Again environmental groups mobilized, and the bill was defeated in a floor vote in the House by a margin of almost two to one. The following year a federal study found sections of the river in the Auburn Reservoir site eligible for designation as "wild and scenic," which would have protected it. However, no such designation was ever made. Then in 1996 the Auburn Dam was back in Congress in another omnibus water projects bill. Again environmental groups mobilized and again the dam was defeated.

In 1992, the year Folsom Lake hit bottom, John Doolittle had been elected to represent Norm Shumway's old district in Congress, replacing Shumway as the big, multipurpose Auburn Dam's principal booster. Doolittle's Fourth Congressional District was a huge chunk of sparsely populated, mountainous, northeastern California. It contained no ground at risk from the American River's floods; however, its southwestern corner happened to include three of the fastest-growing towns in California: Roseville, Rocklin, and Lincoln. By 2002 Lincoln's population increased by 28 percent in a single year, making it the state's most rapidly growing city.

John Doolittle's reelection campaigns were driven by large drafts of development money, and the water it took to sustain the kind of growth developers wanted was, if adequate for now, not limitless. So by 1995 Doolittle was vowing to use a key committee assignment and the new Republican majority in Congress to kill any solution for flood control on the American River that didn't store water and make power for his suburbs. Then January 1997 saw a storm come off the Pacific whose peak rainfalls on some portions of the northern Sierra topped even those of 1986. In the storm's aftermath, with Sacramento's congressional delegation pushing for flood control and Doolittle holding out for a multipurpose dam, the American River was rarely absent from the news. Each day we went to work in its canyons with a curse of futility hanging over us. And futility is the most debilitating thing there is for someone in a dangerous job.

A couple of months after the melee at Upper Lake Clementine I found Finch in the old mess hall where we dressed each morning, stripped down to his undershirt and green uniform jeans. On the floor in front of him was a little box about a foot high, made out of wood scraps from the maintenance shop. Finch was stepping up onto it and then back down again to the bouncy beat of a pop ditty from a couple of years before playing on a portable stereo:

Here's a little song I wrote.
You might want to sing it note for note.
Don't worry, be happy.
In every life we have some trouble,
But when you worry you make it double.
Don't worry, be happy.

"What are you doing?" I asked him.

"Training for our new physical fitness pay," he panted. "Sixty bucks a month if you can do this for a few minutes and keep your heart rate low enough when they take your pulse afterward."

"Seems worth it. Nice music."

"Yup. Helps me keep the pace. Sixty dollars a month—it helps."

"Sure." I nodded in agreement.

—ain't got no cash, ain't got no style.
Ain't got no gal to make you smile.
Don't worry, be happy.
Cause when you worry your face will frown, and that will bring everybody down.
So don't worry, be happy.
Don't worry, be happy now.

The song ended. Finch picked up a towel draped over the file cabinet next to the stereo. Wiping his face, he put two fingers of one hand on his neck while looking at his wristwatch. After a minute he removed them, shook his head, rewound the tape, pushed the play button, and went back to stepping up and down.

For over a quarter century—longer than anyone else—Finch would work under the waterline of the Auburn Dam. His secret, he later told me, was to keep himself busy. He went from union organizing to badge collecting, to collecting historic photos, to researching the history of rangers, to exercising with that therapeutic little song, all the while clinging to the fundamental virtue of the original idea: a ranger guarding his park and its visitors as well as he could, no matter what the politicians above him said or did.

***

AUTHOR'S NOTE
: Finch's research led him to the idea of celebrating the 125th anniversary of Galen Clark's appointment as guardian of Yosemite. He promoted this notion until our agency adopted it, followed by the California Legislature. In 1991 yearlong observances of the 125th anniversary of the California rangers culminated in a conference at the state's oldest remaining nature park, Big Basin Redwoods—Yosemite having long since become a federal park.

Drawing on his interest in badge collecting, Finch designed a special commemorative badge for the occasion and got it approved by the department. He and O'Leary distributed the badges to rangers statewide, packaging and mailing them from our old mess hall.

In 1995, Finch self-published a history of California's state park rangers in a lavishly illustrated coffee-table book. We all bought one. Along with the anniversary celebration, the book helped us see ourselves as part of something larger and lasting. Still, none of us who worked with Finch ever let on how proud of him we were.

It wasn't our way.

F
OR A LONG TIME
the best highway maps available in California have been those published by the California Automobile Association. They are finely drawn things that presume a greater level of interest on the part of the highway traveler in wandering off the main roads than other maps do. They are known for their accuracy in mountain recreation areas. Where other maps often show generalized green blobs for parks and national forests, the auto club's depict with precision each campground, ranger outpost, secondary road, and body of water.