Nature noir
Subtitle: a park ranger's patrol in the Sierra
By: Jordan Fisher Smith
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Published: 2005
Place of publication: Boston
Language: eng
Number of pages: 216
ISBN-13: 9780618224166
Subjects: Park rangers; Anecdotes; Officials and employees; California; Natural history; California. Dept. of Parks and Recreation
Description: "Nature Noir is the story -- part Barry Lopez, part James Ellroy -- of Jordan Fisher Smith"s fourteen years as a park ranger on a huge tract of government land in the Sierras. As Fisher Smith learns on his first patrol, the wildness in this place tends toward the human kind: desperate miners who scour canyons for gold, bad guys who look like armed rock-and-roll musicians, extreme recreators who enjoy combining motorcycles, parachutes, and high bridges. This gorgeous land along the American River is destined to be drowned by a huge federal dam, a paradox that colors every day of Fisher Smith"s patrol. The story of life here becomes, among other things, an extraordinary litany of violence and death; dozens of people lost their lives in the canyons of the American River on Fisher Smith"s beat. In one surreal, heart-stopping scene, he comes across the corpse of a woman jogger, killed and partly eaten by a mountain lion -- the first Californian to die in that way since the nineteenth century."--Publisher description.
Table of contents: title: 1; title: A Day in the Park -- 7 -- 2; title: It Never Rains in California -- 21 -- 3; title: Career Development -- 43 -- 4; title: Occurrence at Yankee Jims Bridge -- 62 -- 5; title: Rocks and Bones -- 82 -- 6; title: The Bridge over Purgatory -- 104 -- 7; title: A Natural Death -- 120 -- 8; title: Finch Finds His Roots -- 136 -- 9; title: Crossing the Mekong -- 156 -- 10; title: As Weak as Water -- 168 -- 11; title: Eight Mile Curve-- 190.