Nature Noir

by Jordan Fisher Smith

  The road Bell followed wound down the wall of the North Fork into the bowl where the North and Middle Forks come together. That junction of two canyons and the need to cross the river where it was easiest had directed wanderers through the Confluence for a long time. At the end of the nineteenth century, a couple of local boys found a hole in the ground near there, which later afforded paleontologists a random sample of foot travelers since the Ice Age—the skeletons of extinct ground sloths, giant bison, saber-toothed cats, and prehistoric people who had fallen into the system of limestone caverns it let into. Before the Gold Rush, Indian trails came to the Confluence from various directions, and a Nisenan village called Chulku had stood there. When the miners finished with it, nothing remained of Chulku but twenty-four mortar holes chipped into a bedrock outcrop by the river, where the inhabitants had ground acorns into their staple meal.

  After the Gold Rush, wagon roads had replaced footpaths. As Bell reached the river, the yellow gores of the old roads' switchbacks were visible against the gray-green forests on the canyon walls above him. In front of him, the abutments of generations of bridges littered the banks where floods had left them. The concrete deck of one bridge, from the flood of 1964, lay in the water. Three others remained standing—two for roads, one for a railroad, now abandoned—and high above, a fourth, the new Foresthill, arched across the sky.

  From the Confluence in the early 1970s you could watch the two ends of the New Foresthill Bridge grow out from either side of the gorge. As cranes lowered steel to the ironworkers on the two tips, they arched out over the canyon, then down to alight briefly on two towering concrete pylons, and then out again for over 800 feet to join over the river. When the structure was completed in 1973, its twin lanes of pavement ran 2,428 feet along the top of its three arched trusses, so far above the river in the middle that the Washington Monument could have stood upright beneath the bridge with enough room left over to fly a large helicopter between the two.

  The featured speaker at the dedication ceremonies that September was Congressman Harold "Bizz" Johnson, an enthusiastic supporter of public works in general and these in particular. He was said to have marked up the House bill authorizing the Auburn Dam—and thus this bridge—over drinks with a local banker and the publisher of the Auburn Journal in an Auburn bar called, of all things, the Sierra Club. When he finished speaking, the ribbon was cut as a donkey and an elephant were led out to face each other on the bridge deck—a symbol of the cooperation between Democrats and Republicans that built the new span. Then the crowd bowed their heads for a blessing by Father Brennan of Saint Joseph's, the Placer High School band played a march, and the dignitaries led the crowd in a tour of the bridge.

  But without the reservoir beneath it, the bridge immediately became something it wasn't intended to be. Within minutes a man appeared from the crowd and leaped over the railing. He was wearing a parachute, which floated him safely to the canyon floor. Within a year and a half the feat was repeated with a hang glider. Then, on October 8, 1975, a despondent seventy-seven-year-old man from Citrus Heights became the first to jump without either device. Just over a decade later John Carta rode his motorcycle off the span, and in December 2001 a stuntman drove a car off it for the Hollywood feature film XXX and, like Carta, parachuted to safety. This time the rangers had issued a permit for the stunt, but it was nevertheless unpopular with them. "No one told us Corvettes are made of plastic and shatter into hundreds of tiny pieces on impact," one of them later remarked. "We're still picking up little red bits of it down there." Meanwhile, the suicides continued.

  One man jumped too close to one side of the bridge and survived for a while before he was found dead. With his broken arms and legs, he had made what Ranger O'Leary later told me was an impression like a snow angel in the dust beneath the bridge. Another man wasn't taking any chances, so he sat backward on the bridge rail with a shotgun in his mouth. And in the summer of 2002 a chase involving several police cars ended at the bridge, where the suspect jumped out of his car and into the canyon; he had been paroled from prison and didn't want to go back. It was the second suicide there within a week.

  In July 2003, after one man splattered himself on the canyon bottom and another was talked out of it by police, an outraged editorial in the Auburn Journal scolded the county—to which the Bureau had turned over the bridge when it was finished—for not doing something: a net, suicide hotline phones on the pedestrian walkway, something. "Unacceptable," the paper said, "that's the only way to describe the fact that repeated calls ... for action at the Foresthill Bridge continue to go unheard." But the situation was hardly the county's doing. For thirty years the bridge had waited for the water to rise beneath it and stop the carnage, and meanwhile its notoriety had spread to the adrenaline-addled and serotonin-deficient all over the United States. When they got there, someone usually saw them standing at the railing and called 911. The 911 operator called Roberta, and Roberta radioed the rangers.

  For all those years there had been another, even more common problem with the bridge sans reservoir: People enjoyed throwing things off it, just to watch them fall. Driving along the river now, Bell saw his man waving from the road shoulder ahead and stopped. The thirty-eight-year-old male victim identified himself as John Geary and introduced his female companion, forty-year-old Lynn Parker. They'd been a little down on their luck, Geary told Bell, and they'd been living in a Roseville motel room and driving up to the river during the day to pan gold. It was a common story. For a century and a half people had been coming to the river in hopes their luck would change. It seldom did. We rangers called them "pilgrims."

  Geary and Parker had left their car at the Confluence that morning, they told Bell, and hiked up the river underneath the big bridge. Overhead, cars and log trucks made ominous booms and clanks at the bridge's expansion joints, which echoed through the canyon. Maybe it was these noises or the sheer majesty of the structure, but when he got right underneath it, Geary stood looking up at the bridge. It was then that he noticed three people, mere colored specks, standing at the railing far above. Then he saw them throw something into the canyon. As soon as they let go of it, the object seemed to bloom bigger. He and Parker watched it drift toward them, and as it grew larger they could see it was a little yellow parachute with something hanging from it. Something that seemed to move on its own, as if alive.

  A few seconds later Geary could make it out clearly. It was a chicken. A chicken on a little yellow parachute. It floated past them and landed below them in the brush. They stumbled toward it, down the steep talus. When they got to it, the chicken was squawking miserably, hopelessly tangled in its parachute shrouds. So they freed the bird and it fluttered off, clucking indignantly, into the manzanita.

  Now Geary heard distant shouts from above. He couldn't make out the words, but the tone sounded angry. Looking back on it, he realized the chicken's owners were mad at him for letting it go. But all he was doing was trying to help. You would have done the same thing, he told Bell. Then he and Lynn Parker heard a series of evil, whirring zips followed by loud cracks, and looking up, he realized that the people on the bridge were dropping rocks, pretty big ones, on them. He could make out the rocks as they were released, but then he'd lose track of them until they appeared again just a couple hundred feet overhead, at which time he and his girlfriend had only a second or two to evade them. They began dodging the rocks, running around like crazy people. The rocks literally exploded on impact. Then Geary saw one of the people above heading for one end of the bridge—to get more rocks, he thought—and he and Parker started running and didn't stop until they were back at the Confluence.

  "What did you do then?" asked Bell.

  Well, said Geary, they got into their car and drove up the bridge to find the assholes and give them a piece of their minds. But the chicken's owners were gone when they got there, so they went to town to call the sheriff, and then back down to the river to the spot where the dispatcher told them to meet the ranger.
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  Bell finished his notes. He said he was sorry about what had happened, and that we'd keep our eyes out for anyone walking onto the bridge with either rocks or a chicken. Then he excused himself and left. On the single-page report he wrote back at the ranger station, the last sentence was "No further action." What could you do? "One of them had a bright-colored jacket" isn't much to solve a crime on, and like almost every other problem he had along the river, this kind of thing would keep happening until the reservoir filled.

  A few months later it was my turn to go to the bridge. It was early morning, and the sun rising over the mountains on the eastern skyline was painting the west wall of the North Fork canyon in gold and long shadows. I'd picked up some coffee from the pastry shop in town and I was carrying the paper cup from the Jeep into the ranger station when the dispatcher called my number.

  "One seven nine, Northern."

  "Northern, one seven nine," I answered into the microphone clipped to my epaulet.

  "We have a report of a jumper at the Foresthill Bridge, can you respond?"

  I pushed the mike button again. "I'm en route."

  The quickest way to the bridge took me up out of the canyon and along the rim through Auburn. Siren yelping, I left the gas stations and fast-food joints at the north end of town and rolled down the long straightaway to the bridge. When I got there, I could see a red pickup parked in the opposite lane toward the far end of the span. I crossed the bridge going about eighty, made a quick U-turn, and pulled up behind it. The truck was blocking traffic, with the driver's door open. To my right, three people stood peering over the railing. One of them, a blond, muscular man in his thirties—a construction worker, or maybe a mill hand from Foresthill—left the railing to meet me.

  "I reported it," he said as I got out of my Jeep. "We were coming across the bridge when we saw the truck. We saw him get out and step over the concrete wall, then up on the railing. Then he jumped off. He didn't even stop to think."

  I peered into the abandoned truck. It had matted gray fake-fur seat covers. The keys were still in the ignition and the radio was on—a country station, playing a slow ballad with steel guitars. An open can of Budweiser, still dewy, sat in the drink holder by the gearshift.

  The blond guy looked in over my shoulder. "When I got here just seconds after he jumped, the radio was playing like it is now. But it was a sad song, even sadder than this one—I think that's what made him do it right then."

  "Could be," I said. "Some of those country songs are pretty sad." I got in to move the truck out of the way of the traffic now stacking up behind my Jeep. He had been shorter than I was. I moved the seat back and turned the key in the ignition. The interior smelled like beer, cigarettes, and the stale sweat of someone who no longer existed.

  As the Foresthill Bridge neared completion in the summer of 1973, all over the country—in airports, at displays of televisions in department stores, in bars, any place where a TV was on—people sat riveted to the hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Watergate as the idea of loyalty was turned on its head. Back in 1959, when the bill to authorize Auburn Dam was introduced in Congress, loyalty to flag and president had been the gold standard of patriotism. But those who clung to it now were cast as villains, like Nixon's chief of staff, H. R. "Bob" Haldeman, who tried to shield himself and his boss from culpability by responding more than a hundred times during questioning that he couldn't remember. The hearings revealed that in addition to burgling the Democratic Party offices, Haldeman and his associates had ordered a break-in at the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist. Ellsberg was a government employee with a high security clearance who had turned over secret documents detailing the government's dirty dealings to the New York Times. Nixon's men had pried open his psychiatrist's file cabinets in hopes of finding something to discredit him.

  This, then, was how much attitudes changed during the construction of the Auburn Dam. Had Ellsberg done what he had in the 1950s, he might well have been put to death for treason. But in the 1970s he became a hero to many Americans, and it was his persecutors in the government who went to prison. So it was in this climate of sympathy toward acts of conscience, as the House Judiciary Committee moved toward impeachment of the president in early 1974, that an Auburn Dam whistleblower emerged from the ranks of the Bureau of Reclamation.

  George C. Rouse was no wild-haired environmentalist. A small, sharp-faced man with glasses and a pocketful of mechanical pencils, he was passionately dedicated to his work as an engineer for the Bureau. As a young man he'd worked on the Hoover Dam and when the Auburn Dam came down the pipe, he was attached to the Bureau's design shops at the Denver Service Center. He soon found himself at odds with his superiors over the dam on the American. Politically, of course, he believed in Auburn and dams in general. It was the thin-arch design he disagreed with. He thought it was dangerous. He would be remembered as stubborn, even combative, and was not the sort of man to be pressured into changing his mind. Finally, in June 1972, Rouse retired in protest over Auburn and went home to his little white frame house on Pierce Street in the Denver suburb of Wheat Ridge.

  That winter, as usual, Rouse's car stayed out in the snow. Never one to stop working when he clocked out, Rouse had converted his garage into a home office. For years he'd been excusing himself each evening after dinner to go out there and work on the Bureau's calculations late into the night, and his retirement didn't change that. For the next year and a half, Rouse kept going over the figures for Auburn. And he ordered up some letterhead: George C. Rouse, Structural Engineer.

  In February 1974, Rouse typed a letter on that stationery to Harold G. Arthur, the Bureau's director of design and construction at the Denver Service Center. In reasoned, unemotional prose backed with fifteen peer-reviewed references, Rouse refuted the Bureau's whole rationale for the seismic safety of Auburn Dam. Using the agency's own numbers, he derived that the dam could be expected to crack within the first seven seconds of a bad earthquake. He also differed with the Bureau on what he considered its wild optimism on the strength of its concrete, and further—and this turned out to be the most lethal to the agency's credibility—on whether an earthquake could happen closer than fifty miles from the dam site. The Bureau had dismissed that possibility, but Rouse thought it ought to be planned for, because dams last a lot longer than geological opinions. In a later letter he reminded Arthur that people had lived around Koyna, India, for a long time, so there existed a written and oral tradition of what had happened there for the last four hundred years. Nowhere in that tradition was there a legend of anything like the earthquake that had cracked the Koyna Dam and killed 177 residents of nearby villages. Could the Bureau really be so sure that the faults around Auburn would not behave similarly when the dam was filled?

  It would bother Rouse for years that he helped the environmentalists, because he disagreed with the Bureau not about dams in general—he loved them, they were his life—but about what he saw as sloppy engineering, with the lives of thousands downstream at stake. Nevertheless, his timing was fortuitous for environmental groups. California had only recently had a wakeup call: two years before, the San Fernando Valley north of Los Angeles was shaken by an earthquake that killed fifty-eight people, damaged thirty thousand buildings, and caused the crest of the Van Norman Dam above the densely urbanized valley to collapse. The dam didn't fail entirely, but its perilous condition caused the evacuation of eighty thousand residents, and thereafter seismic risk had become the darling of environmentalists fighting large engineered structures. They used it against the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant on California's central coast, although unsuccessfully, and once the Rouse letters found their way into their hands, they used it against Auburn. What would make Rouse's assertions most damaging was that he was so soon to be proven right. A little over a year after his first letter, the Oroville earthquake shook the supposedly inactive Foothill Faults beneath Oroville Dam.

  For the Bureau of Reclamation, the following year, 1976, was a low poin
t. Even as it defended the design of Auburn Dam after the Oroville earthquake, the agency was filling another new dam in Idaho. The 305-foot earth-fill Teton Dam had been completed on the river of the same name the previous fall, and like Auburn's, the rocks underneath it were suspect. During construction the Bureau poured over five hundred thousand yards of concrete into the underlying rocks to keep water from seeping through cracks and voids in them and liquefying the earth of the dam. Teton filled quickly with runoff the following spring, and on June 5, 1976, at five minutes to noon, the structure failed, unleashing a torrent that destroyed several ranches and much of the town of Rexburg, Idaho, downstream. Remarkably, only eleven people died.

  In the aftermath of the Teton Dam collapse and the Oroville earthquake, the Bureau of Reclamation was well on its way to becoming the most controversial federal agency since the CIA. Later that year Jimmy Carter was elected president, and he went to the White House with a list of expensive federal projects he had promised to kill. One of them was Auburn. He was eventually forced to soften his position, and by the end of his term Auburn still had a budget and was being redesigned for greater seismic safety. Design work continued into the eighties as the Bureau sought money to begin construction again. Meanwhile, the diversion tunnel, the cofferdam, and the big bridge lived a longer and stranger life in limbo than their designers could have ever imagined.

  After moving the dead man's pickup, I walked to the rail of the pedestrian walkway and looked over the edge. Beneath me the bridge's green steel trusses were in shadow. A car crossed the span behind me, and the clanks of the expansion joints startled a flock of pigeons from their roost underneath it. They veered out over the canyon as one, wheeled, and disappeared back under the bridge.