The Latest 100-Year Disaster

If heartaches were commercials, we’d all be on tee-vee.

--John Prine

Peter Jennings smiled. It wasn’t a big smile, just a flicker in the eyes, a tug at the corners of the mouth. This was on Monday night. The news, again, was of a California disaster: this time, a flood. Fresh reports from the besoaked field were followed by file footage from previous California calamities--the now familiar Armageddon file--rerun in rapid order. Then Jennings was back on the screen, with a little smile that seemed to say: “Ah, well, California, poor, luckless California.”

Now earlier in this ongoing trial by rain, fault line and fire, bemused condescension from outsiders would have provoked 800 words of anger and indignation here. Any more, it barely registers. Who can blame them? There’s no question California is caught in the middle of something strange and--from a safe, dry distance maybe--darkly comic. Maybe God, as the biblical sorts preach, is mad at us for making all those dirty movies. Maybe the Democrats are correct; Pete Wilson is a jinx. What does it matter? The battering continues, and what can anyone do but mop up and move on? Grin and bear it--this should be the new state motto.

A sort of disaster fatigue has set in. After 39 official “disasters” in four years, journalists have grown weary of asking the same unanswerable questions to dazed citizens. Politicians have run out of fresh, Churchillian sound bites for the rubble walk-throughs. Consumers of journalism and politics in turn have soured on gasping headlines and television shots of Pete Wilson in his Windbreaker, trying to look like he’s never seen anything so terrible. Even victims sometimes seem to be going through the motions, dutifully struggling to reduce the sum of their misery to a pithy sentence or two.

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This latest deluge reinforced the syndrome. The storms that swept the state last week created havoc rarely matched in California history: $2 billion in damages; 39 counties declared disaster areas. The imagery was awesome, haunting, pathetic: The I-5 freeway ripped in half; the great California Aqueduct breached; a transient washed up dead on the 18th green; farm workers digging sullenly with shovels to free the corpses of loved ones. “A 100-year flood,” the experts and old-timers called it, “the storm of the century.”

To which the peanut gallery added: “This week’s flood of the century, that is.”

No matter how compelling, this new flood still was just the latest calamity. Monday I found it difficult to find a reason to rush to the scenes of devastation. This was not, I prefer to believe, as much a failure of compassion, a callousness, as it was a failure of creativity. What fresh insights could be gained beside the roiling river, on the porch of the muddied home? Tell me the societal lessons to be found in this flood that have not been preached before--after canyon fires, or quakes, or even in the last deluge, just last January. And what words of comfort would not at this point sound like boilerplate?

“At least you got out alive,” I heard myself consoling a good friend on the telephone Monday afternoon. Part of a hill had come down in Brentwood. His house had stood in the way. The loss was total.

“Yeah,” he said, as if by rote. “That’s the main thing.”

“You’ll find another house.”

“Yeah, I know, but we lost everything we ever worked for.”

“Well, keep your chin up.”

“Right.”

Everything we ever worked for. Keep your chin up. A script for zombies.

*

Well, I suppose even the Hallmark poets run low on pith every so often. In any case, people burying relatives or un-burying homes don’t have time to read newspapers. And for those not in the middle of the mess, it’s simply one more disaster, easily forgotten. For them, it suffices to repeat the chants of old. God isn’t mad. It’s still a beautiful land. At least we’re not living in Bosnia, or even Nevada. And this too shall pass.

That last bromide perhaps is the most difficult to swallow, in this, our present bleakness. There seems almost a cyclical quality to the disasters, one event begats the next. The floodwaters will nourish the grass that will fuel the fire that will denude the hill that will unloose the mudslide. The rebuilt shopping mall is but an invitation to the twitching fault line below.

This is not a good way to think, of course. It spirals downward toward self-pity, and self-pity has no place in the California script. Pluckiness! That’s what is called for here. Right now, our pluckiness is buried under a foot of mud. And that’s all there is to say about it.