Going With the Flow

On the fifth day, there was mud.

Of course there were also storms and floods and fallen trees, and gnashing of teeth on highways suddenly turned into terrifying thrill rides. Still, after nearly a week of meteorological mayhem, many county residents reacted with typical Californian aplomb, recalling disasters that were really disasters.

As the ordinarily dry ditch called Coyote Creek roared past his house just downstream from Lake Casitas, 85-year-old Roy Scuitti could barely conceal his zest for a close call.

“Bring it on, bring it on!” he cried with the twang of the rodeo rider he once was. “It don’t worry me one bit!”

Just three years ago, the creek washed out his two horse corrals--which this time around were high if not quite dry, he pointed out. And as of Tuesday, nobody had yet dropped by his place with an evacuation order, as officials had in years past.

“Once my wife woke me up and said the cops are here and we’ve got to leave,” Scuitti recalled. “I rolled over and said the hell with it!”

Yet the creek that exhilarated the old cowboy exasperated Cathy Koster, who knocked on his door to use the phone. Koster, a legal secretary in Ventura, couldn’t get to her home up Camp Chaffee Road and called a friend.

“Well, how am I supposed to get to my house and my animals when all the roads are closed?” she plaintively asked.

The answer was the same one given to thousands of motorists Tuesday as they tried to make their way over impassable roads: You can’t.

Koster headed back to Ventura.

Others on Tuesday were staying home, recovering from a battering that had started five days before.

Benton and Marilyn Lane waited in vain for their insurance adjuster, who had driven up from San Diego but was foiled a few miles from the Lanes’ Solimar Beach home by a roadblock on Highway 101.

The couple’s house was smashed by huge waves Friday. Their $10,000 Tibetan rug was ruined and their furniture was drenched--but it couldn’t be moved until the adjuster arrived. Everything was starting to smell like low tide.

“Aside from that, we’re back to normal now,” said Benton Lane, a 63-year-old wine dealer. “The waves are big and dirty--not threatening now, but one day to the next, who can tell?”

Who indeed?

On Monday, house painter Tim Lebel had looked out from his El Rio frontyard onto a formidable puddle on perennially flooded Cortez Street.

“There’s a few sandbags over there by the fence but I’m not sure what good they’ll do,” he said.

By Tuesday, the puddle had turned into a bog 3 feet deep. The cars that didn’t stall in it crashed right through, shooting waves under his front door. Lebel fortified his house with 82 sandbags.

“This is the worst I’ve ever seen it,” he said.

However, many people buoyed themselves with memories of times that were even worse.

“Come on! I lived in Malibu, with fires and mudslides, for 11 years,” said Melissa Wood, who Monday had sandbagged her house by San Antonio Creek near Oak View. “When I lived in Santa Barbara, the house I lived in there ended up falling off a cliff. So what happens now--we get a little wet?”

Carol Moynahan sounded the same note in her trailer at Hobson Beach, where she and her husband, Jim, run a county campground right on the ocean.

Riffling through a pile of photos in her trailer, Moynahan remembered when the ocean shuffled slabs of Pacific Coast Highway like playing cards. She pointed to devastated houses from the great storm of ’82 and spoke of seeing dead cows washed up on the beach, their feet in the air.

In storms past, the ocean surged around the Moynahans’ trailer. This time it stopped a couple of feet from their door.

“Comparatively, this one’s been a pussycat,” she said.

Still, the sheer force of what will be recalled as El Nino ’98 inspired awe.

At the observation point atop Casitas Dam, all was peaceful. A few ducks dived for fish and a couple of county workers ate their lunch, watching a drizzle over the lake.

At his home nearby, Dwight Clements, the dam’s tender since 1978, talked about “the amazing power of water” and said the lake was still 5 feet from being full.

“It’s impossible to predict when we might spill,” he said. “We haven’t since 1995.”

A few miles away, 78-year-old Ed Miller sat in his brown pickup, giving the high sign to friends driving past a grocery store near Lake Casitas. A retired railroad switchman, he has lived at Lake Casitas Mobile Home Estates for 30 years and he has seen a few floods. He wasn’t too worried.

“If the dam stays where it is, we should be just fine,” he said.