We awoke Saturday morning to a new high water mark.
Our house sits near the banks of a year-round creek, typically a trickle of water a few inches deep and between three and ten feet across in summertime, and a noisy, eager, self-important cataclysm in miniature in wintertime. The larger river that defines one boundary of our property is bigger, but generally well behaved in this particular stretch, though downstream it can and will kill with unthinking, excited abandon.
During Friday night, rain had poured down, but nothing out of the ordinary for a Northern California winter storm. While occupying ourselves with stoking the fire, watching television, and doing other bored late-night activities we had watched occasional slow-moving bulldozers make their way up and down the road in front of the house, usually leading a string of three or four impatient cars following like focused and attentive ducklings. This, too, was hardly unusual; the roads leading into the hills are provoked into mudslides in even the smallest storms. Caltrans road crews would be busy, and cold, and none too happy about spending the last full night of December pushing mud and playing mother duck to area residents at two in the morning. We fell asleep at two-thirty, when the rain was heaviest. By Saturday morning, the banks of the stream are wiped clean.
A dull, thick line of leaves, sticks, and other generally unrecognizable debris at the very top of the gully acts as the newest, few-hours-old layer of geologic strata in the landscape; along the few hundred feet of the stream closest to the house, the line is between one and two feet below the very uppermost rim of the streambank, the point where the flat floor of the valley drops precipitously into a shallow gully about eighty feet across and littered above and below with oaks, wild grapes, riverbank reeds, bushes, and grasses, and thick with blackberry bushes. Only as of this morning, the inner trees are either absent, or strewn at wild angles. The other vegetation, mostly gone. The sides of the streambank are disturbingly barren, every remaining plant either broken, uprooted, or somersaulted into acrobatic positions.
The creek is roaring, full of perhaps eight feet of water, nearly twenty feet wide. The high water mark, however, is eight feet above that. I sight down the line, mentally comparing the new line with the position of the house. About two feet, if that. Two feet, and the flooded creek would have been dribbling, wandering across the plain, finding new paths wherever it could, knocking ever-so-gently at the bottom of the front door.
A little too close.
To hell with that -- a lot too close, actually.
Across the creek, a beat-up child's metal swingset next to a neighbor's house leans with two of the four metal legs dropped down into the ravine. This is more unnerving than any of the rest of it, because I know exactly where that swingset used to be -- next to the house, and no nearer the creek than the old and ragged house itself -- and this, here, is not where it was, and the wind was not coming from any direction to blow it in that direction, and there seems to be no change in the ground to shove it in that direction. I resolve in my mind that the children must have tied a rope to the swingset to act as an aid in climbing down the streambank during the summer months, and that summertime rope, once caught in the current and debris, dragged the rest of the assembly into its new, provoking position. I have no evidence for that, mind you, but it is a good enough story to believe, since there are no other explanations that are not decidedly more alarming.
Wet, polished-looking rocks and boulders dot the sides of the banks. Like the rest of the Northern California coastline, the surrounding mountains are part of the Franciscan Assemblage, a melange of broken rocks of seemingly random types, put together in ways that seem to make little sense, and in ways that nature itself seems to have quite unintelligently designed, judging from the frequency of mudslides. I pull a glistening white six-inch chunk of massive quartz from an exposed section of the bank. The previous owner had lined walks and paths with an impressive array of rock specimens of every description; shales, schists, serpentines, occasional agates and hints of jades -- I had wondered for years whether or not such an absurd variety of rocks were local, or whether he was an unapologetic collector who brought them in from here and there. Now I see from a quick survey that they all likely came from spots along this very bank. So chalk that up as a mystery answered, at the least.
A walk along the creek reveals other odd sights. A tire perched precariously on a massive piece of driftwood guards a trove of plastic bottles, milk cartons, and yogurt cartons nestled amidst a jumble of branches; the stream has chosen this particular hollow to create a recycling center, apparently. Presumably it all came from some upstream recycling bin that got knocked over by winds or washed into the creek. In any event, I can only imagine it started together, and apparently it all came to rest together. Twenty yards away, in the center of the still-churning water, a railroad tie hovers in the rapid water. A large, long, three inch thick grapevine stretches high from the branches of an oak (the wild grapevines in the stream grow to absurd proportions, attempting to outdo whatever tree once generously hosted them) and has wrapped completely around the right side of the tie, holding that side fast while the left side remains firmly wedged against yet another stream-center tree. If it's stayed there that long, it will probably stay throughout the flood; I make a note to fish it out when the water recedes.
The scene at the larger river itself, two hundred yards more down the creekside path, is alarming. At this precise point, the creek and riverbanks have more gradual slopes, allowing the water to spread out, which it has done, to the near disaster of a neighboring home. A propane tank sits, intact, though the water has dug a slight channel around the concrete base it rests on. The weak grass of the yard is now a field of wet silt, the grass reappearing a mere twenty feet or so from the front door of the house. The whole scene has a sandblasted look; a monocromatic muddy tan, devoid of even scraps of vegetation or the tiniest hints of lawn, or even of fallen leaves or twigs. Fissures and crevices are draining water from the newly laid silt, and the streambank closest to the house has a tattered, martian edge.
Here the creek and river meet at what we call the "beach" -- a gently sloping, sandy spot at the junction of both that in summer months can host tents, picnic tables, barbecues, et cetera. It is completely unrecognizable, now. A thirty foot tall tree, standing amidst others of even greater size, is simply gone. Another massive log -- one that fell during another winter, remained half-propped up by a sistering oak, and was chainsawed thru in order to try to further fell it, has somehow come to rest ten feet upstream from where it originally laid. And the ground itself, unrecognizable. Where once the ground was gently sloping, there are now berms of silt two feet high, forming vanguards in front of a stand of particularly large trees. A rope tree swing over the river, gone, of course. The tree it was attached to, also gone. From the very height where the level of the plain begins to slope down into the river -- again, a mere foot or two of vertical difference -- there is a thick, sticky, impossibly fine silt. I step experimentally into the foreign landscape a few steps, before sinking into the ground to my twice again past the ankle, stuck fast and balancing like an impromptu stork. With the help of my wife and a few minutes of time, I manage to rescue a size thirteen rubber boot from the muck, me still in it. Another lesson learned, apparently. The dog, however, trots out cheerfully, and glides, sniffling, above the mess, apparently immune to both silt and gravity.
We continue to follow the lines of the river around the property. The river below is loud, and the exact color of chocolate milk. At a twenty foot high cliff, there have been several collapses of land about eight feet wide and twenty feet long. Parts of the remainder are significantly undercut, but below, there is no trace, no telltale pile of dirt and rock to mark the slide. The dirt, and rocks, and grass, and scragged blackberry hedge is simply gone, and it is as if the river has always been this shape. The river below is roiling, the current almost indecipherable amidst giant boils. We will have to shift the location of the poorly defined, grassy farm road next to it -- last season's tire tracks now have bites taken out of them, and water below them. Across the river, yet another neighbor exhibits signs of disaster not visited on our own property: what once was a stairway down to a lower deck and the lower beaches of the river now ends abruptly just below where it starts. Just downstream, however, a large number of the timbers remain, caught spinning in a giant eddy. Another weird, weird vision -- in a river with torn and ragged tree branches, even entire logs, floating by midstream, one particular eddy devoted almost entirely to cut, elegantly weathered squared timbers. About this point, I have a sneaking suspicion that nature is doing this solely for my benefit. Putting on a show of power, but adding constant touches of comedy as if trying to let me in on a larger joke.
This is nothing, of course. A few petty lost spots of land, as it turns out. Driving into town to survey things, past flooded cow pastures and soggy fields of grapes, the meaner streak of the joke becomes a bit clearer. The main road into town, during the darkest hours of the night, had river water flowing across it in several places, knocking down roadside fencelines and leaving muck and the methodical tracks of bulldozers on the road. Others in these counties will be battling floods along these rivers that will flood a thousand homes in the city of Napa, and will leave the always-precarious Guerneville ten feet above flood stage, meaning in places a town ten feet below a vicious, tree-strewn blackened surge, before the next night comes. Most of the trellised grapevines the region relies on with a vigor will probably be fine; it is almost impossible to kill a damn grapevine, it seems. Most of the people, too, will be fine. Floods here are known quantities. You assume it will happen. This is no Katrina, after all; just the tides of immediate geology.
We return to our house, and I notice from a foggy window that our main water line from well to house, which spans over the creek on an increasingly precarious bridge, has decidedly changed position in the last few hours. It is a black rubber irrigation pipe, part of a Rube Goldbergian water supply that has cursed us since the day we first moved in, and which times its failures according to hardware store holidays with uncanny precision. It has definitely moved, shifted downward, from where it was before. I walk to it, scurrying halfway down the bank, trying to determine if it is failing in some immediate fashion, or was just knocked slightly loose from a falling limb and can be safely ignored until a safer time.
There is a miniscule crack, at the point where the pipe meets one particular coupler. Is it truly leaking, or is it just wet with rainwater?
I touch it, to wipe the water off and get a closer look.
Seconds later, I am fully soaked with water. The pipe is in two pieces, one of which is shooting water with aggression, I am sprinting across to the wellhouse to the main shutoff valve, and every young child within a three mile radius has learned a new and particularly spectacular chain of expletives.
Ah, rural life. Take that, local school district.
And so, I spent the last hours of daylight, on the last day of December, balancing on a streambank above a chocolate torrent, cutting, tugging, recutting, retying, and refastening the main water supply for our house. In an unusual stroke of brilliance, the last time this happened I bought a small bagful of similar replacement parts, knowing damn well they would be used, so at the least, I won a minor philosophical victory over The Pipe. (Note to self: bag used up -- revisit hardware store tomorrow. Buy more replacement parts. When your house water is driven from a well, a twenty-two cent clamp or ninety-nine cent coupler is indistinguishable from true karma.)
With the last inch of daylight, I again walk the farm road skirting the banks of the creek. The creek is already down to normal wintertime levels. In the raking sunlight, I am suddenly treated to the sight of, well, new land.
At the midpoint of our property, where once the creek was so choked with the omnipresent, feral blackberry bushes and other vegetation as to be simply invisible, much less accessible, the ravine is cleared, revealing a view of a full fifty yards of winding stream. Where the worst tangle of blackberries once stood, they are gone -- vanished without a trace, roots and all -- and there is now a wide, sandy, impossibly flat beach, the central pivot point of a riparian view that, once the stream succeeds in taming itself into a normal summertime color and flow and the grasses return, will look like something fashioned from a postcard. Even now, it is an astonishing view, a hidden vista revealing two, three, no four separate lazy turns of the stream, as it wanders under the canopy of the giant trees. In years past, visits to the river itself, with our young daughter, have been unpleasant experiences. Despite the inviting river beach, the river is too deep, and moves far too fast, to be trusted with children. But this -- this beach, at the edge of a typically three-inch deep trickling creek, during the summer and fall months, already reeks of frogs, and turtles, and tadpoles, and pristine sand castles.
This is new land.
In college, my circle of friends had a running joke, used in all circumstances both good and bad, but mostly bad, used for months on end, used far past the point where it made any categorical sense whatsoever. A finger accidentally slammed in a car door, a glassful of water accidentally dribbled down a shirt, a book dropped on the way to class in the one -- one -- puddle on the entire campus, resulted in a sigh and the monotone, sarcasm-dripping refrain "well, that's a good metaphor for life." It made no sense, of course, and yet benefited from being simultaneously, absolutely true.
After all, most things are metaphors for a larger, irrevocably random, astonishingly unplannable lifetime, if you look hard enough, or twist your bearings to a sufficient degree to be able to enjoy the smaller set-pieces as crystalline miniatures of the whole.
This, though? This flood, this land? Not a metaphor for life, not really. It simply is life.
I start the year 2006, and the very land beneath me is not the same as it was a week ago. In the wrecks and splinters, new things will grow. The farm roads will edge along slightly different paths than they did before, and lead to slightly different places. In the softening fissures, new vistas present themselves as hidden treasure.
It is a new year.