Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra

by Jordan Fisher Smith

Overview

A nature book unlike any other, Jordan Fisher Smith's startling account of fourteen years as a park ranger thoroughly dispels our idealized visions of life in the great outdoors. Instead of scout troops and placid birdwatchers, Smith's beat — a stretch of land that has been officially condemned to be flooded — brings him into contact with drug users tweaked out to the point of violence, obsessed miners, and other dangerous creatures. In unflinchingly honest prose, he reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780618711956
Publisher:	HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date:	05/03/2006
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	1,101,295
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Jordan Fisher Smith has been a park ranger for more than twenty years in Idaho, Wyoming, Alaska, and California. Nature Noir is his first book. He lives with his wife and two young children in the northern Sierra Nevada.

Table of Contents

	Prologue	1
1	A Day in the Park	7
2	It Never Rains in California	21
3	Career Development	43
4	Occurrence at Yankee Jims Bridge	62
5	Rocks and Bones	82
6	The Bridge over Purgatory	104
7	A Natural Death	120
8	Finch Finds His Roots	136
9	Crossing the Mekong	156
10	As Weak as Water	168
11	Eight Mile Curve	190
	Epilogue	202
	Acknowledgments	214

Editorial Reviews

"Powerful with its intimate knowledge of place, Nature Noir achieves an even deeper mastery with its affection for the people and human histories of that place. Care and respct for a wild landscape attend to every page of this book." —Rick Bass

"Park rangers have one of the tougher jobs our society has yet devised—they come up against all the varieties of human unhappiness that a city policeman encounters, and they come up against nature in all her moods. Both seem amplified in the canyon of the American River that Jordan Fisher Smith writes about with such calm power. This book will tell you things you didn't know, and in a strong and original voice." —Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature and Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age.

"This is a walk in the woods like Thoreau never imagined. I can't make up my mind whether Jordan Fisher Smith is John Muir at the crime scene or Elmore Leonard with a backpack. In any event, this astonishing book, with its brilliant interweaving of murder, irony and natural history, invents a new genre." —Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear.

"Jordan Fisher Smith writes of the present moment as if from some vantage pont in the future. The effect is eerie, and part of what makes Nature Noir so compelling. Smith's is a refreshingly unsentimental kind of truth-telling." —Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams and Of Wolves and Men

"Smith writes with a novelistic sense of character, atmosphere and pacing . . . It will cause readers to both thrill and shudder." Publishers Weekly

"Nature Noir is a stunning work that will appeal on many levels. The descriptions of nature are visceral, often lyrical. The historic and geological details are fascinating. And the suspense is palpable, part murder mystery, part thriller, and part a new genre all its own." —Amy Tan

"Eloquently meditative . . . Smith relishes the physical detail . . . His voice gains authority through its cadence and understatement." —Alan Burdick The New York Times Book Review

"A taut drama . . . Smith's book follows the tradition of nature writers such as Emerson, Thoreau, John Muir and Annie Dillard." —Jennie Yabroff The San Francisco Chronicle

"NATURE NOIR is a nature book unlike any other. . .nuanced. . .infused with wonder. . .the book works in so many ways." —Arthur Salm The San Diego Union-Tribune

"A wonderful antidote to the treacly Ansel Adams image of our parks." —Mark Yost The Wall Street Journal —

From the Publisher

Water, Smith writes, has a way of following the earth's tectonic seams, of tracing its seismic cracks and fractures with minimal energy expended. Joined end to end, his stories reveal the work of a similar gravity. Their sum is a tender exploration of faults -- human, natural, and the fluent, ceaseless meeting of the two.
— The New York Times

Alan Burdick

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, first-time author 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 against the "half-assed and watered-down... gray area" that is the modern world's "perpetual state of uncertainty." 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. It will cause readers to both thrill and shudder at the call of the wild. Agent, Sandra Dijkstra. (Feb. 8) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Violence and beauty in the Sierras: Fisher Smith re-creates the 14 years he spent patrolling government lands along the American river that eventually gave way to a dam. With a national author tour. Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal