Nature Noir
A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra
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4.0 • 9 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
“A nature book unlike any other…peppered with gritty, anti-romantic, all-too-real tales of cops ’n’ bad guys in the great outdoors.”—The San Diego Union-Tribune
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 both portrays the breathtaking natural world around him and reveals the unexpectedly dark underbelly of patrolling and protecting public lands.
“Gloriously unlike anything I’ve ever read before…gives entree into a strange, dark, and mesmerizing outdoor world that's absolutely unforgettable.”—The Boston Globe
“By turns funny, poignant and surprising…an intimate memoir of the career of a state-park ranger. Not just any ranger, but one with a wicked pen, patrolling a doomed landscape.”—Seattle Times/Post-Intelligencer
“Compelling…refreshingly unsentimental.”—Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams
“Smith offers a fresh perspective on our threatened environment…Nature Noir reflects the spirit of an era as did Desert Solitaire.”—Charlotte Observer
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, 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.
