Rainbound Above the L.A. River

For two days this week the rain gods held me prisoner in my own house. The trouble began when a gigantic black acacia, weary of life’s struggle, decided it would resist the storms no more and collapsed across my driveway. This surrender took place in the dead of a rainy night, accompanied by the awful, moaning sound of a great tree dying.

Anyway, the next morning I walked outside and discovered my entrapment. The tree’s corpse, half as large as my house, blocked the driveway like a woody wall. I could barely crawl through that wall, much less drive my car through it.

I stared at my predicament for a moment, considering its implications. And then I thought, goody. No office today, no freeways in the rain. I skipped back inside and called the men with chain saws, praying they would be swamped. They were. Three corpses littered the landscape from the mountains to the sea. Two days, they said, maybe longer.

I walked to the back patio and sat for a while, watching the rain come down. The daisy beds filled up and spilled over. The gutters flooded, sending sheets of water off the roof. The system was overloading.

Somewhere out there, I knew, people were suffering miserably. But the truth was, I loved this rain. I only wanted it to rain harder.

You can always tell an L.A. rain from a Midwestern rain or a Southern rain. Here it comes down as if from a machine, straight and steady, striking the Earth at 90-degree angles. L.A. doesn’t really have “storms” in the continental sense. L.A. has methodical downpours, something closer to the rains of a monsoon.

My house sits on a small hill in Studio City, so I was getting the Valley version of this rain. Which is to say, a heavy dose. Just down the hill, barely half a mile away, the Los Angeles River was pretending it was the real thing, trying to drain a watershed in the midst of a very rainy season.

I decided to walk down and have a look. After all, I had two days on my hands. I was rainbound.

Down by the riverside, things were cooking. Over the years, I have seen the river running at flood many times, but nothing like this. So great was the surge that it seemed barely contained by its concrete cage. Later on I would read that the river carried 500,000 acre-feet of fresh water out to sea during the days of the storm.

Half a million acre-feet. Criminy. That’s almost as much water as the entire city of Los Angeles consumed last year, in what was our fifth year of drought. Now the sixth. We finally get our rain, and the major result is not drought relief but a few Winnebagos floating out to sea. Who says God doesn’t have a sense of humor?

Still, this rain brought a definite blessing, though it may go unappreciated by those with sandbags stacked around their foundations. This rain guaranteed that L.A. will see a real spring in 1992.

In four of the last six years of drought, we have lost spring entirely because the rains never came. Last year, the rains did come, but in March, too late for a full-blown, L.A. spring.

In L.A., spring properly begins in February. And that’s what we’ll have this year. You can already see it, everywhere.

The hillsides--or what’s left of them after the building boom of the ‘80s--have begun to turn green. Not sage green or dim green or any kind of subtle green. This is the green of the L.A. spring: intense, freakish, so bright that it seems lit from within. An emerald green belonging only here.

From the river I could look up toward the hills and see the green getting started. For my book, this season--and especially the days following a storm--constitute the best that L.A. has to offer.

On such days you can almost imagine an earlier time in L.A., a time before the smog, before the city made a whore of itself. On those days, after the rain clears, a Mediterranean light seems to bathe the neighborhoods, and the air is filled with scent. Everything is blooming.

That quality of fresh, dreamy spring--a spring that appears while winter still sits heavily on the rest of the country--is the commodity that made L.A. the destination of generations of immigrants from Iowa, Ohio and Pennsylvania, all those places where winter rules harshly. You could put a price on that commodity in L.A., you could sell it and make a fortune from it.

People did, and now that commodity mostly is gone. You have to wait for those days after the big, winter storms when you can catch a short glimpse of the way things were. But those glimpses are worth the trouble, if only for the memory.