Sunday, February 06, 2005

Booktown course correction

Contrary to our earlier assertions, Booktown will not be interviewing David Sucher of City Comforts tomorrow; featured instead will be local author and former ranger Jordan Fisher Smith's Nature Noir, about his experiences patrolling the American River Canyon area slated to be inundated by the Auburn Dam. It is very well written:
When I began going through [records] in 2001, they were archived in a decaying midden of sagging cardboard boxes, covered with dust and mouse droppings and stacked haphazardly in an unheated warehouse at our ranger station, surrounded by piles of cast-off things for which there could be no conceivable use: bits of long-gone patrol trucks, shotgun racks, pieces of light bars, dial telephones, ancient sirens in tangles of wire...

Ebb and flow - the Auburn area lost a ranger with Fisher Smith's departure, but Nevada County recently acquired its own game warden; he's slated to be augmented with an animatronic deer, which, if sentient, would be quaking in its hooves at the prospect of a faceoff with the local toughs.

Feb 18 updates:
SF Chronicle book review of Nature Noir last Sunday; also, what a difference a single letter makes:
"We are not at a critical juncture in history when we must take great pains to ensure the survival of those landscapes and species that have not already been massively manipulated," says Fisher Smith.

No comments: