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NATURE NOIR - THE AUTHOR  Jordan Fisher Smith on the American River. Photo by Jim Herrington Jordan Fisher Smith grew up along the boundary of a national park in Northern California. "We didn't have a baseball field or a store with sodas and comic books anywhere we could walk to, so to keep us out of my mother's hair, my brothers and I were allowed to roam through forests of ancient redwood trees," says Smith. "The rangers had a slice of a redwood tree on display with various historical events marked on it, and you could see this big tree was alive during the Norman conquest of England in 1066." That had a lasting effect on Smith: "The fact that there were living things older than any government in the world really left an impression on me," he says. In another boyhood ramble Smith saw his first mountain lion kill, a deer. The experience helped him recognize what he was seeing when he recovered the remains of the first Californian to be killed by a cougar in a hundred years, in the American River canyons in 1994. Smith surveyed logging roads for the U.S. Forest Service as a summer job while in college. "I didn't have much of a stomach for that," he says now. By the time he graduated he was a wilderness ranger, patrolling the west slope of the Grand Tetons on foot for ten days at a stretch. In the fall he fought fires in the northern Rockies. Later, he worked for the National Park Service and California State Parks. Smith got his first magazine rejection notice for an essay he wrote in a ranger cabin at Sequoia National Park. "That one depressed me," he says with a chuckle, "but with practice I developed some equanimity about it, and I have quite a collection of them now." A string of successful magazine pieces began in 1992. Nature Noir is Smith's first book. He lives with his wife and two young children in the Northern Sierra Nevada. excerpt | ranger jobs | American River Copyright © 2005 by Jordan Fisher Smith. All Rights Reserved. "NATURE NOIR" is a trademark of Jordan Fisher Smith. No portion of this Website or the works of authorship described here may be used in any manner or for any purpose without the prior written consent of the copyright owner with the exception of brief quotes in published reviews. site by Velocity7 |
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