Personal Status

The liquor cabinet came through unscathed.

I’ve been agitated—not really worried, but not at ease either, ever since I left the river house early Tuesday afternoon. That was just ahead of the evacuation orders, but I also needed to get through the storm to make a 3 pm work meeting in Martinez.

Just before I drove away, I walked into the backyard, to be enveloped by the sound of the rushing river. I could see the water boiling up the slope, already nearly to the house level and rising a foot an hour.

The next morning—Wednesday— I was up early to drive to Napa and deliver a half-day training workshop. Then back to Martinez to facilitate a big multi-agency meeting.

Then driving-like-hell-in-the-still-pouring-rain to pick up the kid at the Albany library. She’d arranged a playdate, so I let the two girls make a mess in the kitchen while I sat in the El Cerrito home office and refreshed the data on current river elevations, over and over.

The data wasn’t surprising—the surprise had come a day and a night previously, when, after a listening to hours and hours of nonstop downpour, I’d checked the flood forecast and saw the river was going to get to 46 feet in Guerneville, which is higher than most of the big floods of record.

But viewing the real-time data was distressing, because it meant that the water was eight feet deep under the river house right now, and still rising. I’d moved the power tools and some unused furniture out of there, and stowed some of it upstairs in the living room, and some of the rest on the porch outside. But the boats and paddleboards, the hand tools and some work tables, were all down in the flooded basement swirling around in the dark. And the water was creeping up toward the loft, where I’d put some boxes that I was too tired to move, and too short of time to move, up on the seats of some old chairs and was just hoping for the best.

And now there was nothing to do but wait for the water recede. I couldn’t even get near the house if I’d wanted to go there, because the roads were closed.

I realize that it’s kind of crazy—especially since I’ve consulted, during my career, on flood management and how to avoid flood damages—that I’ve become an owner of floodplain property. I’m a fan and exponent of Gilbert White (“floods are acts of God, flood losses are largely acts of men”).

The flip side is that a floodplain is a lovely place to have a house, which is why people build there. It’s especially lovely to have a house nestled under towering redwoods, which keep it cool on the hottest summer days, and to have a beach and swimming hole just down the path.

The way to have it all, I guess, is to build houses that are suitably elevated above floods—in the case of the river house, that means a first floor about 13 feet above grade, which is 2 feet above the 100-year base flood elevation (BFE).

(I’ve been fired as a consultant only twice in my career. Once was by a big-shot manager of a flood control agency. And it was for advocating, a bit too avidly, to make 2 feet above BFE a standard for single-family home construction within that agency’s jurisdiction. Tonight I’m feeling validated.)

The house was raised to that elevation, and rebuilt, with FEMA funding after the 1995 flood. Last night was the first time the now-elevated house has been hit with a comparable flood, and so the first time to test the FEMA standards in effect at the time.

I was distracted all Thursday morning. Around noon I got a kind-of-urgent request from a client. I could have just let it go and headed north to check on the house, but the data said there was no point in doing that—the flood was slowly receding, but the water was still well above the elevation of the roads in and out.

So I finished the what I needed to do for the client and waited until after dinner.

I left El Cerrito at 7:20. The drive up Highway 101 was strangely routine. I got used to seeing this during the fires—just outside a disaster area, everything seems almost hyper-normal, as everybody goes about their regular business.

That lasted as I drove the limit all the way down River Road toward the lower river, even past the Forestville turnoff at Mirabel Road, and on down the leafy, winding canyon where the Russian River cuts through to the Pacific Ocean.

And then there were flashing lights and barriers, and I was diverted on to Old River Road, and up and down steep hills for a mile or two. And then I was across the street from the house. I could see the lights were on, and I could pick up my wifi signal.

And I could see that the street itself was still flooded a few feet deep.

I waited. I watched an abandoned truck left parked on the street, now slowly emerging from from total inundation. When the water level fell below its bumper, I figured the water in the street was shallow enough to drive through the remaining current, and I could make it to my driveway.

That done, I pulled on some hip waders and started walking around. The backyard brush pile was distributed around the yard and some if it had floated through the open door and into the basement. The 250 gal. propane tank was gone, the anchoring hoops now advertising their own failure. Inside the basement, the boats and ladders still where they belong. The work tables and a lot of odds and ends redistributed amid a lot of mucky sediment. The in-line water heater had been about half-immersed; it might be OK, or not. In the loft, the legs of the chairs were wet, and the seats, and the boxes they held, still dry. I could see the high-water mark just a couple of feet below the rafters.

All in all, I got off easy. I’ll get a good night’s sleep and start the cleanup in the morning.

In a few minutes, Melanie, Zoe, and I will get on our bikes and ride from Cannery Row to Monterey’s downtown to join the “First Night” New Years Eve festivities.

It’s an annual tradition for us, in the way traditions should be—involving, each time, an evaluation of other options, and due consideration of possible variations, followed by a decision to do the same again, and pretty much the same way we did it last year, because we like it that way and we don’t see any good reason to change. Traditions should be nothing more, or less. We’ll decide about next year, next year.

In the big picture, for everybody and the world, 2018 was goddamned awful. I’m happy to kick it to the curb. The thing to celebrate is this: In all that goddamned awfulness, it became more apparent that the awfulness is more of the same again, as it has been in previous years, and maybe what’s changed is us, and our willingness to continue in the same vein. There is nothing really new in the planet being destroyed, or placing toxic sexual deviants in high office, or Mississippi being an affront to civilization, or that most Americans are cowards and choose to believe outright lies. These phenomena are all so constant and repetitious in my lifetime that they are like traditions. But I have a feeling we all, collectively, might not decide to do it the same way next year. We can hope, and be optimistic.

In 2018, I tallied some bits and pieces along this stretch of my journey to the grave.

• I biked on 108 occasions, traveling 3,695 miles and climbing 235,109 feet. I expect to do the same or more in 2019.

• I began a daily meditation practice on April 30, and meditated on 263 of the following days, most times a 20-minute silent sitting meditation, totaling a little more than 87 hours. I expect to meditate more than 350 days in 2019. More than the hours, though, is the purpose of this practice. In her excellent book, How to Meditate, Pema Chodron describes nurturing five qualities through practice; I have condensed them, for the purpose of recall, as follows: loyalty to self, clarity, courage, presence, humility.

• I billed a little over 1,000 hours of working time. In a reversal of my earlier plans for semi-retirement, I anticipate working a bit more in 2019. There are some things that I want to spend money on, and I don’t think it’s wise to dip into my retirement savings for them. And I continue to see a lot of demand for my services, and who am I to argue with that?

There are some things I’ve meant to do, or wanted to do, for some time, and I guess this is the time to restate those intentions:

• First, there’s my yoga practice, which is essential if I’m going to keep up the biking. Back in September, I had to cut way back on riding for time until I could get my muscles stretched out again. Also, I’m getting, you know, old, and I’d better make this a regular habit. Besides, I like it. So I’ll make the resolution to start a regular once-a-week yoga class, plus a half-hour before meditating at least twice a week, plus continuing my 10-15 minutes yoga prelude to meditation most other days.

• I plink on the guitar occasionally, but I didn’t get any better, and may have lost some ground, during 2018. I won’t commit to lessons, quite yet, but I’ll aim for a 30-minute practice session twice a week—mostly for the therapeutic benefit.

• And then there’s the business of getting my affairs in order. I use that phrase as a way of getting at the mystery of why I haven’t straightened that shelf in my bookcase, or cleaned out that closet, or caught up with my accounting, or completed my estate planning, which I feel are really the same mystery. Moreover, that same mystery encompasses, in some essence, why I haven’t expended the effort to make this or that thing—my wardrobe, or various aspects of my personal space and effects—more to my liking. So my goal for that is not so much about completing any of these things in the sense of putting them behind me, but more to understand better my relationship to them, and to my motivations for doing them or, as has been the case, not doing them.

Last—perhaps it should be first—there is my personal big picture of striving to live my values. I wear a bracelet that says, “Express Yourself,” by which I mean to bring myself to the job of living, and especially, or parenting, and to help and inspire others, and particularly my daughter, to do the same. Meditation, and some other forms of self-discipline, helped me to significantly advance that effort during 2018, and I mean to realize the benefits of that, and make further advances, in the coming year.

We’d opened all our presents, which were now scattered about the living room along with the wrappings and the remains of our breakfast.

I stepped out the front door to the street. I got our old pickup truck started and backed it into the driveway. I opened the camper shell and stood there a while, thinking through how to pack everything we were taking on our family road trip: Suitcases and bedding. A camping stove. Pots and pans. Wet suits and boogie boards. Three bicycles.

I was fitting the first of these items into their spaces when I sensed someone standing behind me. I looked over my shoulder and saw a small lean girl.  Hair worn natural. Cappuccino skin. She wanted something. I asked her to wait a minute.

I finished what I was doing and turned around to face her. I had guessed she was going door-to-door, and I was already braced to refuse another scam.

But it wasn’t that at all. This girl’s face was soft, and her lip was trembling. Her voice was a child’s voice, and it was so faint that I could barely make out what she was asking.

A ride. To get home. Where was home? Near Ashby Avenue. I knew that neighborhood well. Could I offer her BART fare? No, she didn’t want to get back on BART.

Then I saw she was shivering, and starting to cry. Her backpack, the kind kids take to school, looked like it would slip off her shoulders.

She wouldn’t come in, but I got her to sit on the porch steps, in the weak winter morning sun and away from the constant wind, while I grabbed a couple of energy bars from the kitchen. Inside, I told Melanie I was going to need some help. It was Christmas Day, and this kid needed a ride home, and I wasn’t going to get in a car with her alone.

I went back out on the porch and took a place next to the kid. She told me her name was Justice, and that she was 15 years old. She looked younger, in the way undernourished children do. I coaxed her into eating one of the bars. She put the other in her backpack.

I asked her what was wrong.

Here’s one thing about having PTSD: Other people’s experiences remind you of your own experience—that much is normal. Except that with PTSD, being reminded of a traumatic experience can cause you to relive it, and pretty soon you are not where you are at all. Instead, you’ve disappeared inside your own head, and then you aren’t of much use to yourself or to anyone else in the here and now.

And I wanted and needed to be present to hear what Justice was telling me.

Her story was sad; it was not entirely coherent, but held few surprises. She’d had trouble with her mom’s new boyfriend. She liked school but didn’t feel connected to it. Someone had promised to meet her today and didn’t show.

I told her that life was tough for me when I was her age, and it had got steadily better. I told her that if you hang on, in a few years you get old enough that you can get a job, and have some of your own money, and then maybe you can figure out how to find a place to live that’s safe, and next you can figure out who you want around you and who you don’t, and in time you can make a life for yourself.

Melanie came out of the house, car keys in hand. I said goodbye to Justice and went back inside the house—inside, to be with my own 8-year-old daughter.

The love I have for my daughter heals me and also scares me half to death. Each day I struggle to make her experience of childhood—and my experience of parenting—all about her, and about us, and about the here and now, and to make my own childhood experience a source of understanding and compassion for the present, and nothing more.

Melanie came back after a while. There’s a neighborhood in South Berkeley where the infant mortality is about four times what it is in the wealthy white areas of town, and the life expectancy about 20 years shorter. Justice asked to be dropped near a corner, and Melanie had waited in the car a few minutes as Justice walked up the block. Driving away, she maybe saw Justice approaching a disheveled middle-aged woman in a housecoat.

And that was all.

In the days that followed, I had a frustrating time when I told story to friends. I heard a lot of opinions about what Justice could or should have been doing differently, or could or should do next.

I imagine Justice was probably doing what made the most sense that Christmas morning, which was to leave the house and wander the cold streets for a while, and come back home a while later and try to duck back inside without being noticed too much, and to try to stay safe and out of the way, and hope some adult would put some food out, and hope that nobody got so mad or crazy that she had to leave again, and hope she could live from one day to the next like that, until things changed, and to hope that when things did change, that they would get better rather than worse.

I think it’s that way for quite a few kids trying to grow up. My own path was adventurous and fairly successful, in large part because white men like me have so many privileges in this society that you really have to screw up badly to go wrong. It was only much later in life that I came to appreciate what family can mean, and to learn to cope with everyday interactions without dissociating myself from my feelings.

I’m still learning. And there’s still part of me that remembers, and understands, why it would make sense to walk a cold unfamiliar street rather than going home. I hope this Christmas, a year later, Justice will be somewhere warm and safe, and feeling loved and protected. However, on the good chance she isn’t, I wish her the strength and resilience to find her own way, alone, in whatever way she can.

In 1983, when summer came, I took an opening on the lobster shift. It was full-time work, and I needed to save some money to get through the next academic year.

In the cool of the late evening, I’d take the IRT down to Times Square and walk over to the type shop near 38th and Madison. I was always glad to see the folders of work, freshly arrived from the ad agencies and the corporate headquarters, marked up and ready to go. Working made the overnight hours go by.

I had a special deal with management: I could leave at 7:30 am, so I could make my 8:30 class at City College. Third-semester calculus and analytic geometry. Some of the those mornings, as the summer heat built in the classroom, I could scarcely keep my eyes open.

At 11:15, class over, I’d make my way back to my place on 109th Street. There was no air conditioning, so I’d set up the fan to blow toward the bed while I tried to sleep. The noise helped cancel out the voices and the sirens out on the street.

One Sunday morning, I woke up with the thought that I wanted to make a record of neighborhood life, at that time, in that place. Our building was on rent strike, and some of us were organizing a block association to deal with some of the neighborhood problems.

Anyway, I loaded up the 35mm with a roll of Tri-X and headed out. I walked around the block, keeping my attention on the block on which I lived, bounded by 109th St., Columbus Ave., 108th St., and Amsterdam Ave.

This is what I saw.

In the space under the house, I had the load all ready to go–trash bags stuffed with debris I’ve removed from the beach over the past year, a sizable stack of cheap inner tubes and other floaties, some of which needed a stroke from the machete to fully deflate, a couple of old TVs, and a bat of insulation left by the previous owner that got soaked in last winter’s flood.

With a little shoving, it all fit in the back of the pickup, and I rolled out toward Guerneville’s transfer station.

Which is in an odd location–it’s out on the windiest, narrowest section of the Pocket Canyon Highway (SR 116) between Guerneville and Forestville. Then, a turn at a sign that says (simply and somewhat inaccurately) “Refuse Disposal Area.” Then up a steep, windy 1-lane path, much like the ones I’m used to navigating by bicycle. Then around the edge of a forested subdivision, and into a clearing.

Having arrived, I had a fine experience–friendly staff, free recycling for the TVs, only $15 to dump the trash, and then I was quickly on my way back down the steep path, except that I had to back up quite a ways and fit into somebody’s driveway to let an incoming garbage truck pass.

However. What an odd, un-economic, and un-ecological location for a transfer station. I didn’t get to see one of the big semitrailers head fully loaded down the path, and I’m not sure I’d want to.

There are  a lot of undeveloped flat sites along, or close to, the main road through the Guerneville area. Some of those sites are unrecovered from the area’s legacy of foresting. Some are even publicly owned.

Certainly, over the years, the powers that be must have considered relocating the transfer station to one or more of these safer, more accessible sites. They must have taken into account the reduction in vehicle emissions from haulers and residents. The increased safety. The opportunity to move the facility away from a residential area and to restore the current site, which I’m guessing is an old landfill.

And I’m guessing they also took into account NIMBY opposition to any new site, and the potential for lawsuits and delays, and the limits on their powers of eminent domain.

The crippling of government power–which is synonymous with the undermining of democracy–has left our society unable to make sensible decisions that can improve quality of life and enhance environmental value.

That aside, I’m really going to enjoy future trips to the transfer station. It’s beautiful up there.

As I usually do on Wednesday nights, I picked up a little before I vacuumed and mopped the common areas. I like to leave things clean for the girls.

Then I packed my overnight bag and my work satchel. It was late, and the house was quiet. I couldn’t help making some noise opening and closing the garage door, and then the Mini Cooper was rolling through the familiar nightime streets that lead to the freeway and the bridge.

I set the cruise control and made myself relax. In an hour, I’d arrived at the river house and was on my way to bed.

In the morning, I got straight to work. About 5:30 pm, my project done and sent off to the client, I went down the stairs to check how the river was doing.

Returning, I stopped to dig, idly, at the roots of some English ivy that’s clambering up the redwoods at the corner of the house.

That’s when I realized I wasn’t alone.

I don’t know why the two young men were hanging out in the backyard, a little on my side of the line, standing in the bushes. I didn’t really care. The neighbors’ house is full of activity, and I purposefully give little mind to the comings and goings. I don’t bother them, they don’t bother me, except for the cars and trucks and travel trailers parked everywhere in and around the lot. And the derilect washing machines waiting to be taken to the dump. And the occasional explosion. And the loud knocking every weekday morning at 5:00.

Live and let live, I say.

We exchanged greetings, though the bushes, without really being able to see each other.

“How you doin’ man?”

“Good, how are you?”

I went back inside and took that hot shower I’d been wanting all day. I put on a sweater and started out on my 20-minute stroll to the pub.

It’s a nice walk–only a little of it is on the shoulder of busy River Road, and part of it goes through a County beach park. And you can look down at the river from the historic Hacienda Bridge (an unusual camelback truss, built in 1914).

When I got to the pub, the bartendress asked if I wanted my usual pint, and I looked around for a table.

And there were my two young neighbors.

I sat at the table next to them, as it was the only one open. We exchanged small talk about canoeing the river–where to put in and take out, and how you can canoe down to the Blues Festival and watch the acts from the river without having to pay.

I thought it was nice that they knew the bartendress. After a while she stopped by their table to say she was ready to check out what they had, and they all went out into the parking lot to do some business.

When they returned, my neighbors’ take-out order was ready.

Me, I ordered another beer and watched the Giants get beat by a run, and then walked back up the road in the dark.

 

Ever cringed at an annoying noise that just goes on and on? Ever wished some Act of God would occur to silence it–suddenly and decisively?

When I arrived at the river house, last night around 11:30, there was a party going on next door.

My neighbors seem like perfectly nice people. When I arrived at a similar time, just a few weeks ago, and found the street in  front of our houses flooded, one of these folks got in a canoe and came over to paddle me across. Another time, their two girls came over to introduce themselves to Zoe.

Still, they park in front of my garage door, blocking me out (or in). There’s a trailer parked in the driveway between our houses, and the occupants cut a hole in the roof of it to install a wood stove, and it belches clouds of smoke.

And then there’s the noise. TVs on loud after midnight, and again before 6 AM. Occasional shouting and carrying on.

Last night it was heavy metal rock music. It didn’t bother me for the hour after I arrived, while I unwound with a whiskey and read the paper in the living room. But when I got into bed, I heard it plenty loud. Enough to keep me up. It was still going at 12:30. At 1:00.

I got up and found my bluetooth earbuds. I downloaded a white noise app, and listened to a canned rainstorm, hissing over the thump, thump, thump, of the bass.

About 1:30, I took out the earbuds and tried sleeping with my head between two pillows. I was, in fact, dozing fitfully when a mighty explosion shook the bed.

And then all was blissfully silent. I looked over to see what time this blessed event had occurred, and the bedside clock was dark.

As was the rest of the house.

What the hell. I listened for screams, and hearing none, gratefully dozed off until the first of their cars, many of which lack mufflers, roared to life about 5:15.

In the morning, I lit the gas stove manually. I took my cup of coffee and strolled down the block to where workers were cutting up a mighty bay laurel which had fallen across the road–and the power line.