Nature Noir (24 page)

In the quiet after their departure we slid our boat into the water. It came alive, dancing and tugging at the bowline in my hand. I tied the line to a willow branch and jumped in. The weight of my feet on the inflated floor caused cold water to well up through the lacing at its perimeter and run over the tops of my wetsuit booties, chilling my feet. The water also cooled the air in the raft's inflation chambers, and I felt the boat go flaccid around me. Will came aboard with a barrel pump, and we connected it to the valves on the various chambers, topping off each one until the boat was firm again. I went ashore and began passing him our dry bags, and he lashed them down with a handful of bright nylon cam straps.

If a whitewater boat is the domain of wilderness romantics without real jobs, it is an awfully serious, businesslike one. Everything must be tied down securely so it won't be lost if the boat is swamped, capsized, folded in half, or flung through the air by the powerful hydraulics of the rapids. No ropes or straps shall be left in a tangle where they might snag a leg, arm, or neck during a capsizing. Will and I attended to our work as if it mattered. We checked our guns, made of stainless steel so they wouldn't rust, then secured the gun belts in two waterproof steel boxes on either side of the oarsman's seat. We pulled our life vests and the chin straps of our helmets tight. I clicked the release on the diver's knife attached to my flotation vest to make sure I could get it out. Should the boat flip over and you become tangled in lines or pinned between the boat and an underwater rock, the knife was for cutting your way out—right through the boat, if necessary. Finally I checked the carabiners on the throw bags full of line for rescuing a swimmer if someone went overboard.

The first part of the river was not, strictly speaking, a river at all, but a groove blasted into ledges of slate from the outlet of the power plant back to the river's original channel, now dry below the dam. Yet its banks had grown over with alders and were now littered with river rocks and drift sand from high water, so it looked like a wild place. The boat collided with a series of standing waves, cutting off the wave crests into our laps. The water was cold enough that it caused us to suck in our breath. That involuntary response could get you in trouble if you fell in.

We entered the river's original channel, passed some abandoned placer mines, and came to a narrow jeep road bulldozed down to the river through the alders. This road had been the center of a property-line dispute between the man with the bulldozer and the man who claimed to own the land. The argument had been settled with guns, or so went the word on the river.

Our first major obstacle was a rapid called Tunnel Chute, a feature as manufactured as our put-in. Here, over eons, the river had cut a sharp oxbow until it passed close by itself a mile downstream, with only a tall fin of rock between the two channels. As the Bureau would later do at the dam site, nineteenth-century miners figured that if they could shortcut the river through that fin, they could dry out the oxbow and plunder its bed for gold. They accomplished this job with blasting powder, mules, and hand tools, and today the river runs in a tunnel through a couple of hundred feet of rock. But the shortcut made the river's pitch steeper, and no matter what you try to do to them, rivers adjust themselves according to their own laws. In response to the short-circuiting of its slope, the Middle Fork began scouring its bed on the upstream side of the tunnel until it excavated a ledge of bedrock. So blocked, the river went back to its old ways in the oxbow. In response, the miners blasted a channel through the bedrock ledge to drop the river back into the tunnel. This channel was about eighteen feet wide and fell away at a steepness roughly equivalent to that of the front steps of a public building. Through it thundered the river's entire one thousand cubic feet of water each second. The miners had never intended anyone to go through it in a boat.

To do this, you pulled over to the riverbank, lashed your oars lengthwise to your rowing frame, tightened your gear lashings, and snugged your helmet and lifejacket again, just for good measure. Then, using your canoe paddles, you took the boat out into midstream and over a drop just upstream of the main event. You then crossed a quiet pool, which gave you enough time to wonder why you were there as you positioned yourself for entry into the Tunnel Chute. Once you dropped into the chute itself, you sat down in the floor of your boat, wedged yourself in as well as you could, and hung on for dear life. Somewhere between a few seconds and an eternity later, what would happen had happened. It was so violent a ride it was really beyond anyone's control. However, most everything and everyone washed through it; it didn't trap people, just occasionally broke their arms and legs. Once I was knocked out of my boat at the top of it and had to swim it. The sheer speed and limb-tearing power of the froth—not water, but a blend of water and air too light to float in yet too wet to breathe—were horrifying. I remembered to roll into a tight ball. Collisions with a couple of boulders left bruises on my thighs and back that lasted for weeks. When it was over, I surfaced facing upstream in the echoing green tunnel with bubbles from the waterfall rising languorously around me. The first thing I saw was the white wall I had just come down in the brightness outside the mouth of the tunnel. For a couple of minutes I couldn't seem to get enough air. I was like a starving man at a banquet.

Beyond the Tunnel Chute we ran the Three Queens, Kanaka Falls, and Cache Rock Rapids, then several smaller, unnamed ones. Better that they remain unnamed, I thought. Even the well-known rapids for which whitewater guidebooks give step-by-step instructions are periodically rearranged by floodwaters, and then they become mysterious again for a few wonderful months of the following spring. It isn't good for the world to become too well known, we whitewater rangers think. Said Lao Tzu:

The way you can go
isn't the real way.
The name you can say
Isn't the real name.
Heaven and earth
Begin in the unnamed.

By now we'd allowed the commercial rafts to gain a good mile or two on us, and they'd long since passed from view around the Middle Fork's stately bends. As we floated deeper into the canyon, the effect was the opposite of climbing a mountain. On a mountaintop the whole world is laid out beneath you, but in the bottom of the Middle Fork the whole world is gone; there's just moving water, green and brown canyon walls, and sky. The river remained unmarked by those ahead of us and for all you could see we could have been the first ever to run it, or the last two men on earth. The late Tang dynasty poet Chia Tao was born twelve hundred years before the invention of Hypalon, the strong, flexible fabric out of which our craft was made, yet he understood how a river is always new to each one who runs it:

Passing on the river, a boat leaves no trace on the waves.

By the first week of August it was hot in the Central Valley. All visible snow was gone from the high peaks up-canyon and white towers of thunderhead rose above them most afternoons. By the time the Middle Fork's waters bore us through the gorge, they had already kept air conditioners humming somewhere in the great civilization down-canyon, to the west. Before that those waters had been snow on the mountains, and before that clouds, and before that part of an ocean around Hawaii or the Gulf of Alaska. The winds that would bring them back around the cycle, or not, and the snowfields that would shrink and disappear over the next hundred years, or not, would now do so or not according to the aggregate actions of bankers and oilmen in Houston, Almaty, and Bahrain, and of politicians and motorists in Washington, D.C., Berlin, Paris, and Beijing.

From this bewildering world to these fabled canyons of the Gold Rush continued to come a small stream of those whose fantasy was to go into the mountains and live like nineteenth-century miners. In a way they were no different from us rangers, for we too had sought our own version of the simple life here on the edges of civilization—if not, it turned out, beyond its reach—or from the whitewater guides who sought their own simple peace in the exigency of the right command at the right moment. "Paddle hard, forward, now!" we heard them yell at their clients, who had paid good money to be yelled at—their own version of simplicity—as they entered the bigger rapids.

The river turned south. The Hornblende Mountains loomed on our left, steep green battlements of pine and Douglas fir. The river was quiet in this section, a sinuous path of silver reflecting the afternoon sun between bright green ranks of willow and alder at the water's edge. Helmets off, wetsuits off, wearing only shorts, we spelled each other on the oars, dabbed our noses and ears with sunscreen, and ran an easy series of riffles between long blue-green pools. We passed African Bar in contented silence, pulling our shifts at the oars.

Around another bend, Otter Creek entered the Middle Fork from our left at such a sharp downstream angle that the ridge between it and the main canyon had eroded to a cleaver. The ridge top was so sharp it appeared not wide enough to walk on, its sides near-vertical jungles of hardwoods. It rose steeply to an old jeep road on Cock Robin Point, sixteen hundred feet above us, and it was from there that our man had apparently made his way down with his horse and mule. You had to admire his fearlessness, or pity his foolishness, as the case may be. His camp lay on a delta of sand that Otter Creek had deposited around its junction with the Middle Fork. Nothing moved there as we approached, and there was no smoke. We rowed in and pulled our boat up on the beach. In front of us, nailed to a post made of a rough branch, was a hand-lettered sign on a piece of cardboard:
THIS IS A MINING CLAIM. DON'T THROW YOUR GARBAGE ALL OVER OR ELSE
.

We crossed the beach to the edge of the forest where a tent stood in the shade of an overhanging bay laurel. A rock fire ring had been constructed next to it. The ashes were cold to the touch. Around it were a couple of cheap pots and a few dishes, a gold pan, an aluminum sluice box, and a five-gallon bucket partially full of black sand and water—the last stage of the refining process by which placer miners recover gold dust.

Hoof prints could be seen everywhere, but there was no sign of hay and not a kernel of grain. There wasn't much for a horse or mule to eat in the surrounding woods but thorny buckbrush, wilted redbud, and the less spiny leaves on the tips of scrub oaks. The animals had trampled and torn at every inch of the adjoining canyon wall in their search for nutrition.

Inspecting the tent, I soon found a rent in one side big enough to walk through at a crouch. Peering through the shredded fabric I found the interior in a shambles: a disheveled sleeping bag, clothes, scraps of paper, and various personal items were scattered about, and over them had been spread a white dust like flour, the contents of several bags of macaroni, and some kind of dried goo—tomato sauce or beans. It looked like there'd been a fight.

Will and I split up to search for survivors. I went up Otter Creek, Will downstream along the river.

Otter Creek's canyon was as deep as the main one but far narrower. Its walls were even more precipitous than the Middle Fork's and its bottom so close and junglelike that the only practical way up it was to wade in the creek. The moment I left the beach and entered the shallow water, the world was reduced to a colonnade of gray alder trunks, their canopies obliterating even the narrow strip of sky visible between the canyon walls. The aloneness was intense. The creek sparkled like quicksilver in the dim light, and on either bank great tropical leaves of Indian rhubarb grew from corms that clung to the mossy rocks like the gnarled fingers of an old man's hand. There was no other world. After a quarter mile of wading I had found no trace of the miner or his animals, so I started back.

Back at the camp there was no sign of Will. I climbed through the hole in the tent to search for clues to what had happened among the disordered contents. I came upon a notebook, densely inscribed in a small hand. It was like a shopping list, or perhaps a journal from the manic phase of a bipolar life:

Get topographic maps ... set up solar battery charger ... learn tanning for hides ... latigo for saddle ... ammo ... needles and thread ... buttons ... get some books on minerals to read ... get fish hooks ... what kind of fish?

I leafed though it. More of the same. Near the back I came across a single observation, no doubt reflecting the miner's impression of the way into the canyon:

Trails not for the faint of heart.

Will came back up the beach, having found nothing. Leaving him to have one more look around the camp, I struck out across the beach to the mouth of Otter Creek. Halfway there I came upon an explanation for the torn tent, the mess inside, and the miner's apparent disappearance: a huge pile of fresh bear scat of a surprisingly large diameter. It seemed our intervention was no longer required here: A bear had served our eviction notice. Perhaps it had occurred at night, for bears tend to be nocturnal in the hot summer months. Thankfully there was no blood, but the encounter had no doubt left an impression on our man, for he'd obviously departed in a hurry, leaving his entire camp to the bear.

We got back into the boat. The remainder of that day's patrol passed without incident. Weeks went by, and the camp remained abandoned. In September Will and a couple of his seasonal aides went in and cleaned the place up, burned what they could, and carried the rest out in their raft. The miner was never heard of again on the American River.

Our other river, the North Fork, was a natural flow stream, its main channel undammed above Lake Clementine. The rafting and kayaking season began when the North Fork swelled with rain in January and continued as the snow in the high country melted in late spring. Then, as flows on the waters of the North Fork went down, boaters moved to the dam-release Middle Fork for the remainder of the summer.

The commercial guide industry on the American River had begun in the late 1970s, when young men and women who had been spending a lot of time on the river decided to try to make a living taking other people down it. Few wilderness activities are better suited for a guide business than whitewater rafting, in which novices lack both the equipment and the knowledge to negotiate a river safely yet, when properly outfitted and guided, are usually wildly enthusiastic about the experience. In those days any competent boater who could put together a raft, a few paddles and helmets, and an old school bus to get his or her clients to the river could clear $400 a weekend—not bad for people who'd been living in vans, following the spring melt-off around the mountains of the West.