Tuesday, September 01, 2009

Storm Surges, Part 2: California Coast, 1995

Here’s part two of the storms series.  Some folk are reminding me of some big storms from my childhood, with rivers in the streets and downed trees and floating cars.  Some quibble that ash isn’t a storm.  Maybe this little tale will clarify for the blogreading world that I do know a storm when I see one, and have some recall of stuff falling from the sky that was never alive or on fire.

In 1995 a big storm blew in from the Pacific.  It hit all up the coast, with winds at the Golden Gate in excess of 100 mph.  I had been assigned that week to defend a deposition at a client’s home way up in Fortuna, north of the Lost Coast at the mouth of the Eel River.  My road trip up through the big coastal mountains was breathtaking but ominous, as I felt the weather blowing in, imminent and inescapable.  I drove through grey redwoods forests for a solid day, spent the night in a motel, and awoke ready for testimony the next morning.  The client’s house was up on a bluff high above the river, which appeared as a vein of hard old copper that braided sinuously along a wide course lined with brown sand beaches and broad rocky flats, down an outsized channel cut several yards down into the valley floor.  In the morning light it all looked quite serene. 

Just as I pulled up to my client’s home the storm began.  Wind howled, rain sheeted down, the sky was black and angry.  We’d take breaks over the course of the day and look out the front window with its panoramic view, to see how the storm was coming along.  From our vantage point we could see the massive rainheads, we could almost see the actual gusts of wind as the rain was hurled against the house that sheltered us… but mostly, we watched the river as it grew.  From its start as a gentle meandering creek, it picked up a sense of purpose around 10 am, running increasingly faster and broader.  It filled in the little dry spaces between its rivulets, then started scouring itself a deeper channel.  The river was racing, climbing its banks like a snake getting out of a flower box.  The water turned a turbid brown, swirled with shifting whitecaps and cats-paws, showed eddies and swells where something stubborn down below fought the onrush of mountain canyon floodwaters.  Debris swirled down its coruscating spine, branches and shrubs and the occasional piece of signage or drenched artifact caught out of its element, even (and not too infrequently) whole trees, big ones, twisting slowly as the current carried them much faster than I would have thought prudent, occasionally smashing into the bank and rebounding off again with regal apathy.... I could have seen an ark spinning out of control down those sudden rapids and it wouldn’t have surprised me. 

The swell continued into the afternoon, rising almost visibly with trees getting surrounded, then cut off, then cut down by the torrents upcountry that still darkened the eastern skies along piney ridgelines where the rain still poured.  By the conclusion of my work in the gloaming of the December evening, silvery-scoured light finally cast obliquely from the west as the engorged river lost itself in the crazed chop of the pewter Pacific before us.  The storm was coming down from Alaska and hit us early, way up in the north-west as we were.  The coastline actually wrenches inland quite significantly; up in Humboldt you’re a good piece west of San Francisco.  The storm had passed on but was far from spent.

The storm mostly stuck to the coast so my drive home that dark night wasn’t drenched till I joined back up with civilization coming into Sonoma County.  By the time I got well into Marin it was bucketing like a mofo and the old Mazda was getting pushed around the lane by gusts of wind.  The risk of hydroplaning was immediate.  The big orange bridge was truly harrowing to cross; I was sort of surprised it was still open.  Gusts of wind so full of rain as to be, effectively, water balloons without the balloons came whipping at me fast enough to make the vehicle shudder; those two or so miles over the mouth of the bay were excruciatingly long.  But when I got off the bridge at last I knew at least that I was almost home. 

Entering my neighborhood I did have an eerie sense that something was wrong.  When I got to my block, all the lights were out.  We wound up without power for three days; the Conservatory of Flowers took wind damage to 70% of its century-old glass panes and wasn’t repaired for nearly a decade.  Our neighborhood was strewn with limbs, boughs, whole trees thrown around, but the wreckage, as bad as it was, still felt like collateral damage.  Watching the Eel River digging its flood channel had inured me to mere hurricane damage.  It wasn’t that big a river, but after the storm of ‘95, it was sure big enough to remember. 

more stormage later.  cool yer heels already.