Smith, Jordan Fisher

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Smith, Jordan Fisher

PERSONAL:

Born in CA; married; children: two.

ADDRESSES:

Home—CA.

CAREER:

U.S. Forest Service, surveyor and wilderness ranger; National Park Service and California State Parks, ranger.

WRITINGS:

Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra (memoir), Houghton Mifflin (Boston, MA), 2005.

SIDELIGHTS:

Jordan Fisher Smith grew up free to roam the redwood forests of northern California, and while he was in college, he surveyed logging roads for the U.S. Forest Service. At the time of his graduation, he was a wilderness ranger and patrolled the west slope of the Grand Tetons on foot for days at a time, and he fought late summer and fall fires in the northern Rockies. Smith also worked for the National Park Service and the California State Parks system.

Smith has written magazine articles about his life as a ranger, as well as his memoir, Nature Noir: A Park Ranger's Patrol in the Sierra. He writes of his job with the Forest Service, one of danger and daring, and of his less-romantic tasks as a ranger in northern California, which included collecting camping fees in parks, keeping the peace, and completing a great deal of paperwork. He notes that in 1867, the first ranger was charged with similar duties, dealing with poachers, squatters, criminals, and other troublemakers. That ranger quit after a year, and the government replaced him with members of the cavalry, which is how the wide-brimmed ranger hat originated. Smith writes that although the job has improved, rangers do not receive medical benefits, and they work seasonally and receive low pay, this in spite of the fact that a park ranger is fifteen times more likely to be hurt or killed while working than an agent of the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA).

Smith writes of his assignment on a piece of neglected wasteland that was meant to be turned into a reservoir. The planned dam was never built, so the land has all but been forgotten by the agencies in charge, and is slowly being taken back by the plants and animals, including the cougar that killed a female jogger, a death that Smith investigated. Smith's career as a ranger ended when he was diagnosed with Lyme disease, but in Nature Noir, he shares with the reader the life he has always loved.

A Publishers Weekly contributor commented that "Smith writes with a novelistic sense of character, atmosphere and pacing." Reviewing the book in the New York Times Book Review, Alan Burdick wrote: "Another writer might turn these experiences into a bitter, tumbling rant. Smith instead scours away quietly with his words, steadfastly devoted to the notion and reality of wilderness despite the many complications of that idea. Critics who claim we have reached ‘the end of nature’—that there is nowhere left in the world unsullied by the human touch—lack for imagination, he argues. ‘Much of what is seemingly known and tamed is in fact unknown and untamed,’ he declares."