Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol In The Sierra (2006) - Plot & Excerpts
Nature Noir is the first book written by Jordan Fisher Smith. For a first book, he did a fine job as a wordsmith. The content of the book is quite personal to me since it is about an area that I have always loved from my first glance. I have much in common with the author and his experiences. It is a detriment that the book is contaminated and with a radical environmental view which was injected with an energy similar to the Salem Witch hunts. Of course this book is about the “dark side”. It would be wonderful if his next book was Nature Blanc, the bright side. Although at times I too suffered experiences of the ‘noir’ some of the best times and most wonderful people of my life were connected to the not only this narrow river canyon but places nearby of a similar make up. There are so many amazing and good things in these areas including the wildlife, water, views, and people that a book should also be written about them. Perhaps the darkness of the text was intentional? I think the negative most likely could have been foretold based on the author’s fundamental attitude toward his career and the nature of his job. To be blunt, the areas he patrolled were “industrial areas” that still retained some nature and an attractive draw for recreational visitation. Being near but not “too near” populated areas, what I call the “fringe people”, also were there in droves as well. Even though I think that the author was not in a job well suited for him, I a grateful for his service. In my time in the outdoors in this same area I have had many incidents that were caused by “squatters” or “people of the fringe.” While exploring, fishing, mountain biking, kayaking, motorcycling, Jeeping, etc., I have run into people such as he described in his book. Most are not too difficult to work with as long as I gave them the respect they did not deserve and was agreeable in general. If I had acted tough or expressed animosity, the bullets my have been redirected to me rather than over my head. There is something to be said for “getting along.”The author’s fanatical views predestined the author to not only misunderstand his job but how he interacted with the land, and most importantly, the people. Vigorously pursuing the law enforcement portion of his job with the attitude and zeal of the Inquisition was certain to create a life of conflict and offense rather than a life of public service and positive influence. As I said, I share a great deal of commonality with the author and although I do not understand the irrational radical environmentalism, I do understand public service and trying to do a good job in a poor or hopeless situation. I understand falling short in that goal despite providing my best effort to be excellent. I thank Jordan Fisher Smith for attempting to do his best. Among the things that I have in common with Jordan, is an incident on Mammoth Bar when I am certain that he and I met. After a short ride, my motorcycle began running poorly. I was nursing my ill running motorcycle back to my trailer and a State Ranger waved me over. Even though I was struggling to keep my motorcycle running I veered over to the ranger. I paused and explained that I needed to go “Just over there to my car because I would not be able to restart the motorcycle” which was clearly running poorly. He instantly became belligerent and unfastened to strap lock on his pistol. I shut my bike off simply by taking my hand off the throttle. Once my bike was silent, the ranger instantly became the super polite in the most offensive manner possible. He began talking down to me with all the smugness he could muster.... and that was quite a bit. It turns out that this random and needless stop was not for anything more than checking to see if my bike was legal with the proper spark arrestor and registration. There was not behavior that provoked the stop, indeed my bike had a current license plate and valid functioning spark arrestor that could be verified at a glace from 100 yards away. My sick motorcycle would not restart. The State Ranger went away with a smirk. I was forced to push my motorcycle the quarter mile through the sand and rocks to my vehicle. I had been successfully harassed by this ranger. This incident was just as Jordan Fisher Smith bragged in his book. He bragged of harassing people doing legal and sanctioned activities of which he did not approve. In the end, it was just as Jordan Fisher Smith also says in his book, “most often the crimes that took place in the canyons were not reported.” This abuse of power and public trust was not reported.Overall, I would recommend this book to people who want some insights into the area near where I live and where I like to recreate. Just be aware and warned that the book is tainted with fanatic and self serving views. I can’t help but notice it is ironic that the most recognized sight for this area is the man made structure from the times of resource exploitation, “No Hands Bridge”. I think it verifies that there is something special about the mixing of nature and mankind. Indeed Nature Noir book is about a State Recreation Area, not a national park nor wilderness. I wonder if the author has realized that yet?
On its surface, Nature Noir is a collection of Smith's tales from his days as a ranger at the somewhat sad-sack Auburn State Recreation Area in California--a site doomed to be flooded by the push to create the Auburn Dam across the American River. At a deeper level, it is a natural and human history of the area that is cogently constructed, with a readable depiction of its history from the Gold Rush to modern day. And at its most satisfying level, this is Smith's love letter to the land and insightful treatise on the relationship between man and environment.The stories run the gamut from adventurous and exciting to dangerous to heartbreaking. While nature may be characterized as the source of danger in the title, far more frequently the peril is of the two-legged sort: miners, drinkers, brawlers, and even worse, guys in suits sitting in a capital building making decisions they don't understand. The sword of Damocles that threatens the park means that all too often its visitors were of a more fringe and rough-and-tumble sort than those who flock to Yosemite or Yellowstone for their photogenic beauty.I enjoyed Smith's clear and direct prose, by which he is able to convey thoughtful and complex ideas about environment and society without being lavish. He has a very good ear for phrasing, and even keener powers of observation. I noticed that his writing is frequently long and dense paragraphs yet does not ramble or lose clarity of thought. A good example that I noted while reading:This was the reassuringly familiar landscape of my nights--the interior of a Jeep, an exoskeleton of green humming steel, where I was surrounded by heated air and safe from most things, animals and weather, and compared to a foot traveler, freed from the tyranny of distance.Another example that stood out to me:Today, if you drive up into these foothills and allow yourself to wander, you will end up on dusty roads off other unmarked roads, which are in turn off other roads. At the end of each of them sits a relatively new house with no economic relationship, as a ranch house or a miner's cabin would have had, to the land around it. Everything that gets up there, from the next quart of milk to the next stick of lumber for a fence, arrives in an automobile, a pickup truck, or a sport-utility vehicle. It is a way of life unprecedented in history.Smith does a good job of balancing the cynicism that come from dealing with people at their worst with the enthusiasm for protecting something that he holds dear; he does not shy away from the warts of his profession yet he is also able to convey his sense of duty and the camaraderie that he enjoyed with his fellow rangers. The end of his career--from Lyme disease--is presented without much detail yet makes quite a sad impression.All in all, the most lyrical of the books I've read in the ranger memoir genre; an important and inspiring read as well as an enjoyable one.
What do You think about Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol In The Sierra (2006)?
Nature Noir is a beautiful example of the merging environmental history and storytelling. Jordan Fisher Smith spent fourteen years as a park ranger in an ephemeral place where the disparate elements of wild nature and wild people are swept together within the tumbling waters of the American River. This chaotic conflict intensifies as plans are laid for a large dam, one that would smother the good with the bad. Smith weaves together compelling insights, detailed histories, breathless action, and a distinct feeling of meaning to such an effect that I had to put the book down after many chapters to exhale and look out my window, letting the gravity of it seep into the deepest recesses of my mind. Sometimes he introduces tangential narratives which sort of disrupted the flow but he used them to good effect. Overall, Smith’s first book is one of the best I’ve read this year. I wish that I could’ve found it sooner.
—Doug
Really this book begins as a 2.5 star, but quickly ramps up to a solid 4. What draws the reader in and helps keep them there is the 'noir' component mentioned in the title, where Jordan Fisher Smith shares his sometimes disillusioning experiences dealing with visitors with no respect for the land or other human beings. I admit to my own sense of morbid curiosity if you do to yours. However, there are several elements that make this book stand out from the rest of its 'park ranger memoir' peers. The first results from the fact that Smith is working in an area doomed to be flooded for a dam under construction, and he examines the effects this has on himself, the psychology of his fellow rangers, the park's visitors, and even the superiors in charge of budgeting and decision-making for the park. As might be expected, it is hard to make a constructive plan for a park that has no future, even if the dam construction process is halting over a period of decades. It is also difficult for the park rangers to find their work fulfilling, and to justify to themselves and their families why they risk their lives protecting something so ephemeral. Their lives are even more at risk because of the fact that their superiors are reluctant to spend money on such a doomed place, so their vehicles, firearms, rescue equipment, and other gear is not up to par. Smith makes each of his fellow rangers come to life as he writes about their methods of dealing with their frustration.The second is the way that Smith goes into the background and history of both the political and geological landscape he is working in. These well-researched accounts are always nicely segwayed into, do not wander off-topic, and are ended before they get too dry.The third is the way he paints a picture of the parks and the park ranger's profession. He begins it by delving into the origins of both, the histories which I found to be the most interesting. His own experiences and those of his fellow rangers add color to the black-and-white base, and by the end of the book I was ready to fill out an application for the National Park Service. As a budding biologist used to working on the science side of the USFWS or the USGS, I've always looked at the NPS in a certain light, but after reading this my respect for them rocketed.Finally, for being such a crusty park ranger, the man can write. His prose is noteworthy, he is observant of his surroundings, and he brings insightfulness to every recorded situation. With the instinct of an author he introduces a surprise in the end; I won't say 'plot twist' because it actually happened, but it causes the reader to think about the entirety of the book in a whole different light. I kept finding his writing and thoughtfulness hard to reconcile with the ranger he introduced himself as in the book; with the married man with children who could also swim rapids, pull a fellow ranger and a boat out of a river perched on a rock using a belay, and arrest miscreants. Truly a competent and versatile person."Admittedly, cracks in the ground and water witching are of little relevance to finding Karen Dellasandro, and these details would interest only poets, park rangers, and anyone else who thinks about the mysterious connections between the land and the people on it. But to such as us, the blood that ran in Karen Dellasandro's veins and the cold water in the ground and the water in the American River are all of the same stuff. Everyone in these hills comes from the ground, and we will all return to it, and maybe for the brief period when we are walking around on it, whether with copper rods murder weapons, or shovels in our hands, the connection between us and it is stretched but never really broken. And so we know things about the rocks we cannot say except with copper rods, and we yearn to have returned to us people whose presence we feel in the rocks and soil beneath us, and in a story told in whispers around town, like the wind that always comes in late September, just before the first rains bring life back aboveground."
—Erin Eve
His focus is on both nature and political issues. Details evoke people and place in the Sierra foothills. From Publishers Weekly:"Slated to be drowned by a dam, the California state park patrolled by the author of this haunting memoir is a "condemned landscape" of gorgeous river canyons hemmed in by exurban sprawl and peopled by eccentric gold miners, squatting families, drug dealers and miscellaneous drunken, gun-waving rowdies, a place where "turkey vultures floated... savoring the hot air for the inevitable attrition of heat, drought and violence." In his 14 years there... Smith encountered fights, beatings, suicides, daredevil canyon divers and the corpse of a woman jogger killed and half eaten by a cougar. His conflicted task of facilitating the communion of humans with the wilderness while keeping the humans civilized and the wild places wild becomes a mission... The clash of nature and civilization is a resonant theme, but it doesn't of itself yield compelling insights, and sometimes the author's essays add up to little more than shaggy-dog stories. But Smith writes with a novelistic sense of character, atmosphere and pacing, in a prose style that's wonderfully evocative of landscape and its effects on people."
—judith
