 Hi. I had the distinct feeling walking in here that I had volunteered for the wrong event. I think what interests me as a writer and I think what runs through my work is the fact that we may be the first generation or a couple of generations in history to live with a new way of seeing our world in which we don't think of it as permanent the way people always did. We've come to view our world as a sort of temporary construction or sort of, well, mortal in our own image. I'm going to read to you a little bit from Nature Noir, which is a book about a group of park rangers who were sent in to watch over a beautiful set of canyons, 42,000 acres of Sierra canyons that were to be drowned under a huge dam. And these were, of course, people who thought they'd be working in places that were permanent. And in this particular section, I'm writing about a murder in Auburn, which three weeks after this book appeared in the various reviews The New York Times and The Chronicle and so on, the police showed up and started digging up this fellow's yard. But as the book's written, of course, this hasn't happened yet. This trial is set for trial either late this year or early next year and they've now found the woman's skull. Flushed with three decades of accolades and swelling budgets since Hoover and Grand Coulee, the Bureau's, that's the Bureau of Reclamation Dam Building Agency. The Bureau's engineers thought they could repair the flawed rocks under the dam. Two years after the thin arch design was announced, the Bureau finished blasting the first 7,000 feet of tunnels under the massive crescents shaped engraved here they were cutting into the canyon walls. From inside the tunnels and from the surface above, they drilled nearly 14 miles of core samples and using these they made elaborate charts of the extent of the weaknesses. Then they excavated the worst sections of rock and filled the resulting cavities with 200,000 cubic yards of concrete. Not surprisingly, the engineers referred to what they were doing as dental work and in dam construction it wasn't unusual. What was exceptional was the extent of it. At Auburn it might have better been described as dental reconstructive surgery like several root canals and a whole suite of crowns. Regrettably the site's problems were deeper than the teeth. In fact, the canyon's jaws, indeed its whole body, were a Frankenstein's monster assembled out of bits of older stuff, grave robbed from dead landscapes elsewhere and sutured together at ragged, partially healed scars. And while dam geology concerns itself more with description than narrative, the dam's engineers and the geologists had no idea at the time how the rocks they were working on had been formed and no idea of the nature of the motions that even then were underway under the dam. From the first surveys of the dam site in the 1920s through the decision to build a thin arch dam there, the American river country had always been thought of if warped, twisted, uplifted, out of the sea, upended, and its rocks remanufactured by heat and pressure, as in some sense of the word still a place. But in fact, the Sierra foothills were a whole collection of places, plucked from a world map that reconstructed backward at 50 million year intervals, looks at first distorted, and then entirely unrecognizable. In 1982, Les de la Sandro was a supervising deputy at the old sheriff's jail next to the county courthouse in Auburn. On his days off he tended a few cattle he kept on the ranch of a fellow deputy over in El Dorado County. In a town where horse trailers vastly outnumbered European cars, that didn't make him unusual. He was tall and blond with a well-trimmed mustache and he had a kind of natural gravitas that demanded respect but didn't invite easy friendship. He's a cold fish, a retired Auburn businessman once told me. I never liked him much. Les's wife's nose had been broken a long time ago, either before or just after she met him, and she had a scar on her arm. Karen told people she'd gotten these injuries in an accident, which may well have been true. But in the days after her disappearance, witnesses told police that they'd seen Les ridicule her for these flaws in her appearance, calling her names like scar arm. One neighbor told investigators she could always tell when Les was home, because, as she said, you could hear the shouting from his house. A fellow deputy told detectives that he and his wife had been seeing the delisandros socially, and on a double date at the county fair the previous summer they'd witnessed Les delisandro excoriating his wife, saying she was dressed like a prostitute. The deputy said the incident had made him so uncomfortable they'd stopped seeing the delisandros. Another co-worker of Les's phoned the police when he heard Karen was missing, telling them that he feared for her safety because he believed Les was fully capable of hurting her. But we've probably all heard something similar about some unfortunate couple in our acquaintance, and to be fair, these accounts don't add up to a murder. For some married people, not even a divorce. I think I'm almost there, huh? You have one minute left? So this is sort of the literary equivalent of speed dating, so I won't overstay my time. But I think what I'm doing in this and my new book is to trace the lines, both the scars and the strong points that run through this line between people in nature. And as I say, this trial is now set for either late this year or the beginning of next. I wouldn't be surprised if you see it in the paper. I should say that by now that it's clear from the press accounts that this is not the delisandro family, but the Kovacic family that has been widely covered in the press. The time the book was published I wasn't able to say that. Thank you very much.