Rio Nido Teeters in a Landslide Limbo

Which pieces of your life do you take when you have just 20 minutes to choose and two trash bags to haul it in?

Clutching a flashlight in one hand, a box of heavy-duty trash bags in the other, Linda Morales recited from the inventory of belongings she planned to grab from her landslide-threatened home once rescue workers let her back in.

“I want my daughter’s stuffed animals, my dog’s medicine, my son’s first edition Stephen King books,” Morales said. “I want dishes, clothes. . . .” Her voice broke off as someone called her number. Morales hustled off to meet her escort of exhausted sheriff’s deputies.

Their pickup shuttled her slowly up a mountain so saturated with winter rain that geologists say it will inevitably give way; they just can’t predict when, or how bad it will be when it happens.

The letup of fierce storms that battered the state in January and early February has offered no relief to Morales and her neighbors. They live in an excruciating limbo, unable to go home and unable to just walk away. All they can do is wait for the mountain to move.

Morales owns two homes that now could be crushed by the same towering redwood trees that drew her to this tiny, Russian River community five years ago. Both houses are among the 140 ordered evacuated by Sonoma County because they could be threatened by the expected landslide.

The empty homes represent about half the housing stock of a community that decades ago served as a sunny summer retreat for fogbound San Franciscans and later became a down-at-the-heels hangout for hippies, bikers, nature lovers and people searching for a quiet place to rear children.

If the landslide moves all 240,000 cubic yards of earth, trees and debris that geologists say could come crashing down on Rio Nido, “then you might as well kiss this town goodbye,” said Lee Witman, a 74-year-old retired electrician who built a cabin on the threatened hillside 46 years ago.

But neither Witman nor Morales were thinking much about Rio Nido’s future Wednesday. Neither were they particularly excited about Vice President Al Gore’s quick tour of the area and promises of $20 million in federal aid to evacuees. Witman had come with his wife, Ellen, to see whether their home still stood. Morales was on a rescue mission.

Once she was dropped in front of her home, Morales was told she would have just 20 minutes to rummage through its darkened rooms and stuff a pair of garbage bags with whatever she could carry by herself back to the truck. And, she was warned, this could be her last chance to retrieve anything.

Morales said she had considered her choices carefully Tuesday, as she sat in her junior college class and compiled her list instead of listening to the lecture.

“When they ordered you out, you didn’t think you would never go home again,” said Morales, who, together with her two children, is bunking with friends and searching for a place to rent. “We’ve lost all our rights. It’s become this military-style operation. We can only go to our homes with an escort. We can only use bags, not boxes. We can only have 20 minutes.”

John Obertelli shared his neighbor’s frustration with the teams of deputies, Highway Patrol officers and National Guard troops who now command the hillsides of Rio Nido and issue instructions to residents.

“I’m a commercial fisherman,” Obertelli said. “The things I need--the tackle, the fishing equipment--won’t fit in two garbage bags.”

Obertelli and his wife moved many of their possessions out the day before the evacuation was ordered, he said. Since then, he has trekked back every day, a three-hour walk each way because he has to negotiate the muddy landscape and evade the patrolling National Guard troops. He slips inside each day, Obertelli said, to feed his eight cats and reassure himself that his house is still standing. And to prove that he still has some control over his life.

“All of a sudden, the real and potential danger to us is coming from these people, not the slide,” Obertelli said, gesturing at the bustling emergency crews. “I think they should let each of us make a decision. We know this mountain. They don’t. They should let each of us decide whether we want to go home.”

Obertelli’s family bought his home in 1951, when he was a baby, he said, and used it as a summer retreat. In the early ‘70s, he bought it from his parents and turned it into his permanent residence. Even now, he says, he cannot imagine living anywhere else.

“No, I’m not even thinking about that,” he said, shaking his head.

Sonoma County Sheriff’s Deputy Gary Delfino has felt the anger and frustration since Feb. 7, when residents were ordered to leave their homes. Since Sunday, Delfino and other deputies have patiently shuttled more than 68 residents up the hill. Two from each family are allowed up--only the able-bodied and no children. Delfino has seen every reaction from the methodical to the paralyzed.

“I’ve seen folks come in very organized,” Delfino said. “They’ll have a list, and a map of where the things they want are. Others just grab anything. I took up one who grabbed a rope and dish soap.”

Most, Delfino said, reach for family pictures and other irreplaceable mementos. But some haul out 28-inch television sets or microwaves.

All are being told that they may never have a chance to return.

The tight time schedule is followed both because geologists fear that the slide might be massive and sudden, and because there are limited resources available to haul residents back and forth.

“If he says leave, you drop it and you go,” a grim-faced deputy told one couple Wednesday, before letting them jump in the truck. “If they tell you to leave, and you fail to, you can be arrested,” she warned another couple.

John Rousseau didn’t bother with trash bags. He and his girlfriend, Christina Johnston, are renters who had packed most of their belongings in suitcases the day they were evacuated, Rousseau said. Now they are living in a Santa Rosa motel, courtesy of the American Red Cross, “and there isn’t any place to put much else,” he said.

Rousseau came back Wednesday, he said, to retrieve photographs of his wife, who died 4 1/2 years ago, “because those are really important to me.” He planned also to bring out his VCR.

Rousseau, who moved to the Russian River area 2 1/2 years ago from Los Angeles, says he will leave this place now, whether or not the mountain ultimately takes the home he and Johnston share.

“I’ve had enough,” he said. “Last year, I was living in Guerneville and we left after it flooded. Now this. I thought I could deal with this. But this is really depressing. I can’t work. I can’t think about anything else, knowing my home is about to be covered with mud.”

In the end, Rousseau took only the photos of his wife.

“We got inside and it just smelled so bad from the food rotting in the refrigerator and the mold,” he said, after coming back down the mountain. “I just went straight for the pictures and then said: Let’s just get out of here.”

Diane Beyer counts herself among the luckier residents, the ones who live far enough from the threatened slope that they have been allowed to move back into their homes. But she too says she’s decided to move away.

“It has been tremendously stressful,” Beyer said. “My son’s best friend, who lives across the river, had an asthma attack during the storms and the flooding and died of cardiac arrest before they could get him out. The river threatened lower Rio Nido, and now this.”

Less than an hour after she started up the mountain, Morales was back, and some of the edge in her voice was gone.

Deputies helped her fill 10 garbage bags with her possessions once they reached her home, she says, her look one of sheepish appreciation.

“I walked in, and at first, I just stood there,” she said. “It was so cold and empty. You feel real weird. I just couldn’t move.” The deputies, she said, stepped up and divided the bags among them.

“They just said: You tell us where to go,” she said. “I started getting kind of teary-eyed. They picked up things I didn’t even think about or put on my list. I think if I had had 30 bags, they would have filled them.”

Her 5-year-old daughter Savannah and 15-year-old son Zachariah would be thrilled that she retrieved all their toys and books, she said. “I got everything on my list and more,” she said.

The Witmans too were sad but strangely satisfied that the home they built themselves was at least still standing. But so much mud has sloshed against it that they couldn’t go inside. They had to peer at it over the fence of their next-door neighbor’s yard. Deputies would not allow them to try to slosh through the 4-foot-deep mud that stretched from the fence to their front door.

Ellen Witman snapped Polaroid pictures of her house, a pile of boards and twisted metal that was the house across the street until two weeks ago, and bulldozers pushing debris and mud off the road.

“We put up new gutters and fixed the roof last summer,” Lee Witman said. Then, improbably, he laughed. “Guess that was just a big waste of time.”

* STORM DAMAGE AID: Officials move to secure state and federal aid to help repair storm damage as Southland braces for more rain. B3