Let Us Now Praise--Ourselves

Picture a man in muddy rain boots, muddy jeans, muddy T-shirt, muddy cap. On the T-shirt is printed this thought: “Cheers.” The man’s ruddy face and golden hair, his hands and forearms and neck--all are flecked with mud. And not just any mud. This is nature’s muddiest mud, a thick, rich, chocolate brown mud, scraped from the bottom of a roiling, runaway river and dumped all over town. The mud of a flood.

The man stands beside the Russian River with a pressure hose in his hand. He sprays water back and forth across a light blue house, methodically rinsing away fresh mud. The river is still high, well beyond its banks. The sky is filled with storm clouds. Forecasts for more flooding abound.

Still our man cleans away, a picture of contentment. On a sunny day, he might have been washing his truck; instead, he’s been dealt a flood. Yawn. He knows this river and, prognosticators be damned, knows the worst has passed. Not that he would suggest that the worst was all so terrible.

“It happens,” he says, turning off the compressor and cracking open a can of Coors. “This same house got it in ‘41, in ‘55, in ‘64, in ‘86, and now this one. It will get it again. There’s not much you can do about it. You strip out the Sheetrock. Rewire the electricity. Mop the floors. And move back in.”

Ah, the Californians.

*

The weak were cut from the herd long ago. Maybe they were chased out by the Whittier quake, or sent running by the Oakland fires. Pick a disaster. Pick a dateline. Santa Barbara. Hollister. Malibu. Glendale. Santa Cruz. Ferndale. Altadena. Northridge. In a sense, they’ve all been pretty much the same drill. And what they’ve left behind is a people no longer surprised when Nature comes knocking rudely in the night, a state of philosopher-janitors, of mop-up specialists whistling while they work to reassemble houses, lives.

Take this man with the hose. He is introduced as Bill Guerne, “as in Guerneville.” Incidentally, he says right off, it is pronounced Gern-ville and not, as they were saying all week in television land, Gurney-ville. Guerne should know, since the town was named after his great-grandfather. The pioneer Guernes came around the Cape after the Civil War, sensing opportunity. A California boom was on, and it would require lumber, and the banks of the Russian River teemed with tall redwood trees.

“Right over there,” Guerne says, pointing toward downtown, a block away, “was one of the world’s greatest stands of timber. They called it the Great Pumpkin Patch. Some of the tallest trees in the world stood right where the Safeway is now. Well, we took care of that.”

Well, yes. The timber industry is now part of Guerneville past, having pretty much gobbled itself to extinction. Guerne, 48 years old, toils as a contractor, building houses for folks from San Francisco and Los Angeles who come seeking a funky life on the river. It’s a growth industry. Or at least it was before this latest Flood of Floods.

*

The house Guerne is cleaning belongs to his father, who is 84. Early last week, as the rain poured down and the river filled, the old man was moved to a trailer on higher land. Guerne made some calculations and then piled his father’s furniture outside, on a platform supported by sawhorses. He covered it all with a tarp and then watched the river do its work.

“At first, it was rising about 18 inches an hour,” he says. “By the time it reached the house, it slowed down to about five inches an hour . . . I saw propane tanks go by, little houseboats, wine barrels; everything imaginable floated down that river. It was kind of interesting to see.”

The river crested about a foot below the sawhorse platform. Guerne had cut it pretty fine. Of course, he was working with four generations of inherited river knowledge. “The only sad thing about this whole deal,” he says, is that so many newcomers evacuated early and thus failed to protect their belongings. Anyway, he brightens, flood insurance will bail them out. Not that he intends to apply for any assistance.

“I’ve always known when a flood was coming,” he says. “People who know, they don’t deserve it.”

With that, Guerne extends a muddy hand and returns to his work. Which is to say, mud. Elsewhere in California, it might be glass shattered in a quake, or flotsam from a wild sea tide, the ashes of a canyon fire, and so on and on. In any case, it’s cleaning up. It’s what Californians do.