Coming up
Saturday, January 7
So, it is that some things are self evident, and so it was, sans dôut, without doubt apparent that it would flood. Something about the nature of the rain, so unequivocal, so much. The only thing I guess that had been at issue was just how high the water would get. I thought to call Paul at work as if it would make some difference and told him that he had to absolutely leave on time, that the river was rising.
The power went out and I lit the lanterns and I felt safe and snug, especially since even at the late hour I saw candlelight reflecting off Jake and Leila's ceiling. Anyway.
Sunday, January 8
I got up and turned on the radio, as if waiting for the bulletins which would tell me what I already knew. In the mean time, I had already begun moving to higher ground those things which I meant to save. The first bulletin actually came at about 10:30: "People living on the Russian River need to be prepared to take evasive action. The river is expected to reach..."
I went to tell Paul who was still in bed the news. He pulled the covers over his head. He said he was evading thank you very much.
Well, everyone finally got up to speed by mid afternoon.
Paul and I emptied the guest house and then we drafted several plans depending on how high the water was intended to get. Ha!
Rumors of course were already flying. Turned out they weren't so far off.
Anyway.
It was a strange feeling to start taking it seriously.
About four or five we packed overnight bags(!) and began taking things out to our Honda Civic just in case you know. And I think by this time Paul had actually already moved the Thunderbird up to Matthew&Peter's, out of harm's way. And then we made a checklist should we get to defcon one, to red alert.
How do you know, I wondered, what you need when you are fleeing for your life, and how telling is it that among the most important things should be legal documents and bills and checks and pending business concerns.
We put some food in a box and got the cat carriers ready, lining them with scraps of the tattered sheepskin rug that will have once upon a time sat in front of the living room stove. The reality of the pending catastrophe sinks in slowly. It is a lot to conceptualize. And there is a lot that you, that I, miss in the thinking it through. For instance, I thought to move the books up, and the speakers were obvious as was the computer, but the cupboards in the kitchen and bathroom, and the shelves in our clothes closet completely escaped me at first. And it's hard to think totally through issues of particle board and turbulence, so we did things like put the couches on the coffee table and the end tables. On the other hand we bagged up discs and videos, and of course made safe all the electronic equipment. Truth was we assumed the garage and guest house would of course get it, and thought that the laundry room and house would be exempt. Anyway.
We drank a beer, and thanked God the electricity had stayed on during all of this.
Anyway it must have been about 7 pm when Jake came over to say he and Leila were staying, and he could only imagine that we were too. We agreed tacitly none of would leave without proper notification. And we went over the facts and figures: The river floods at 32 feet, our backyard and lower buildings begin to take water at about 41 or 42 feet and the fat lady sings at 45 feet: water in the living room. And not too incidentally, road access from town is cut off at about 35 feet. No problem, that's what floating holidays are for!
And then Jake called at about 8 pm and said, actually the tone of his voice said it all. The words were "the office of emergency services called and urged us to evacuate, the river is expected to crest at 48 feet, it is expected to be at the level of the 1986 flood." Our house (not ours at that time) took 5 feet during that flood.
It was checklist time.
We called Matthew&Peter and told them we were on our way.
Funny how the rain had been so constant, that on some level we didn't even notice it anymore,except for what it was doing to the river. But in fact it had been pouring with hyperbole, and it had been for days. And there was no sense that it would stop anytime soon.
And so the two of us and our three cats moved in with Matthew&Peter, and Jake&Leila and their son and their two dogs and cat moved in with Ann&Martin, and Laura and her two sons and their cat moved in with Mitch&Shirley until they were evacuated, and Stan and Jill and their son Troy and their dog moved in with Bob, and like that, you know.
And so then it was a waiting thing.
We sat in front of the TV, like people used to sit by the radio, you know, and waited, for someone to tell us what we already knew was inevitable. And every once in a while we went out and walked as far down the road toward the river as we could get. And we did normal things like eat supper and take out the garbage. And paced. You know, we even went to bed, but it was to fly in the face of reality. No one slept. And at any given time during the night everyone was out prowling around, surveying the situation. It was grave, it was quiet. The river was big and each of us were so small.
And so as I might have imagined Paul was there to watch the guest house take water at 2:30 in the morning. It was like a boiling cauldron, he said with absolute disbelief, you wouldn't believe it, he said with amazement. It bubbled up through the floor for Christsake.
And then he got back into bed.
Monday, January 9
The water had made it up the street, not to Jake&Leila's yet but past our driveway, and it was higher than our knee high boots, (which put it at this point, just about at our front stoop.) Paul couldn't stay away and he kept going back, followed by Matthew, just to do something, because doing nothing was intolerable. And after a long time they came out in the canoe full of retrievable last minute things, like the TV and Matthew's mother's dress and the rest of our clothes. Peter and I had been waiting by the edge of the water because my knee high boots were even shorter than the boys boots and Peter was only wearing his Birkenclogs. But I got impatient and in a fit of arrogance I just took off my goddamned boots, rolled up my pants and went wading in. Why not. Funny how I never thought to think how cold the water might be, or how contaminated it was. Later I would say more than once, well it couldn't be any worse than the River Kwai in Thailand.
And so not only did the river come up the street, it also came up the path from the beach, and that was that. It stretched clear over the highway without pause, as far as you could see. And we moved the cars to higher ground yet and began wondering what if we had to leave Matthew&Peter's. And as the day stretched into night and the river kept coming up the street we tended to the empty houses, throwing the main breakers and switching off the propane tanks. Before bedtime we even tethered the canoes and kayaks to the house in such a way that should we have needed them they would come up with the rising water. Somehow imagining that if worst came to worst we would evacuate out the bedroom window. Four dogs, four cats, and four adults, mind you.
And there was by now, of course, no electricity, no phones, no running water, in a manner of speaking, no tie with anyone save face to face contact. Oh well we thought, at least the God forsaken telephone had stopped ringing.
Tuesday, January 10
We canoed through the neighborhood ducking the power lines. We paddled in our front gate, it was no easy task getting the sucker open, and looked around, reconnoitering the situation. The house was full of water, in a manner of speaking. You know you knew that, but it was quite another thing to see it, to be up in it. Paul asked if I wanted to go in the house. Somehow canoeing in our living room was more than I could manage. We got the kayak, and he, disembarking and reembarking using the wood shed as a dock, went around to the back of the house. We hadn't been able to get through in the canoe. He looked in the bedroom windows, paddled over to the guest house, looked in the garage. What can you say. We attached the kayak to the canoe and went on our way. On Center Way (the street which backs up against our backyard) we saw, among other things, some of our firewood. We knew it was ours because it was as if bundled by the posts which once had secured it on the ground, and it was still covered by the tarp which was to have protected it from the rain. Logjam. "It floated right over your fence and through our front yard," Tim said later. "I ran someone off it, I knew it was yours." But that was later. We canoed into the backyard over the 8 foot high fence with 18 or 20 inches to spare and lassoed the rest of our about to be errant cord wood so as not to lose it all.
Weird.
That night was the hardest for me, I woke in a panic. What if what if what if, and so I got dressed and went walking in the rain as far as the river would allow me in all directions. I also explored up on Neeley Rd to make sure our car was OK, but I became overwhelmed by the possibility of being hit by an uprooted tree or loose branches. They were all over the road. And someone had already actually been injured by a falling tree, so I turned around and headed down Neeley Rd toward town. Got only as far as Parker's Resort. You know you could see waves on the road. Like ocean waves. And so I understood graphically the concern about high tide.
Anyway the exciting part was while I was standing there I could see the river receding. By God.
So it had crested at 48.7 early Tuesday morning.
There was a whole sensual side to this too, you know.
There was a noise thing.
Helicopters. At a certain point the helicopters were ever present like the rain. The sound was always overhead and it underscored somehow the state of emergency, it made unequivocal the urgency. They were for a long while our only connection to the outside world.
Generators. And sirens. And the explosions of propane tanks as they popped free from their lines with the rushing water. And of course the rain.
There was a color thing. Mud and fog and clouds. It was overwhelmingly muted. It was all so gray and brown.
And you know everything was so wet.
