The Road Back From 9/11 to Small-Town Worries

In early September, several wildfires burned across the California Gold Country. One of them, called the Darby Fire, roared up a river canyon and destroyed a 19th century wooden flume. Known to locals as the “three-quarter-mile flume,” this antique artery still carried water from a reservoir over the hills to thousands of residents of Angels Camp and neighboring towns in Calaveras County.

“Everybody always asked what would happen if we lost the three-quarter-mile flume,” an old-timer told the San Francisco Chronicle. “By God, we are gonna find out.”

That was on Sept. 10. The next morning, I was in my car at dawn, bound for Angels Camp. As I headed out, I turned the radio to an all-news station, hoping for an overnight update on the fires. Instead, I caught the tail end of a report out of New York, something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center.

Within minutes, the San Francisco station had given way to its New York affiliate. For the next 90 minutes, I followed the events, one unimaginable development after another. It was, to understate, a strange listening experience. The panting dispatches from field reporters, the calm but slightly incredulous interjections by the news anchors, the background noises of rumbling buildings, of thousands of shuffling feet and nonstop sirens--all of these combined to give the broadcast an almost over-the-top feel, something akin to Orson Welles’ “War of the Worlds” program.

I never did make it to Angels Camp that morning. I drove over Altamont Pass and across the floor of the San Joaquin Valley, stopping at a coffee shop in Oakdale. In an adjoining bar, two televisions had drawn a small crowd--a few men in business suits, a San Francisco woman headed for Yosemite, a couple of busboys.

As we watched the buildings come down, again and again, the men screamed profanities at the television screen. The woman decided not to go to Yosemite after all; she began to map out a route that would take her back to San Francisco without having to cross any bridges. I turned on my cell phone and waited for the call from Los Angeles summoning me to help cover the story.

The perils of Sierra wildfires no longer seemed quite so pressing. Indeed, given the chaotic new world that had boiled out of my radio that morning, the very idea of musing in print about California now struck me as off-key, a luxury to be suspended for the duration, a plaything to be put away for a better time.

I drove to Los Angeles that afternoon and, for the rest of the year, worked on projects related to the terrorist attacks. From time to time, I wondered how Angels Camp had made out. I assumed that the town had not withered up and died, but if there had been any follow-up reports, I missed them.

And so, in the spirit of closing a circle, I found myself last Wednesday aimed, once more, toward the Gold Country. It rained hard the whole way, and on the radio were reports of 13 more bodies being pulled, all these months later, from what had been a World Trade Center lobby.

Vern Pyle, general manager of the Utica Power Authority here, was surprised to see a journalist at his door. On Sept. 11, he said, there supposedly had been a flood of television crews and newspaper types rushing toward soon-to-be-dry Angels Camp. None of them ever made it.

“It was a strange time,” he said. “It was, like, here we have got our own big problem, and now the whole country has a problem.”

For Pyle and the small crew that tend the waterworks here, there had been no time to become transfixed with the television imagery of Sept. 11. They worked 15 hours a day, 20 straight days, beginning before the fire was even out. They rebuilt as much of the flume system as possible. Where damage was too severe or the terrain too steep for quick repairs, they rerouted the water through a temporary system of pipes and pumps.

The work was done in a climate of community angst and acrimony. Public meetings overflowed with residents worried about losing gardens and crops. Some of the newcomers, part of a broader population shift that has seen masses of urban Californians move into the foothills, expressed outrage over the fact that their water came to them via uncovered wooden channels, circa 1880.

“I had one guy tell me,” Pyle recalled, “that if he knew his water was coming from a ditch, he wouldn’t have moved here. I said, ‘Well, that’s California. That’s how a lot of water gets moved in this state. I mean, go look at the California Aqueduct.’ ”

The crisis passed. Later this year, permanent repairs to the flume system will be completed. Angels Camp still will receive its water via “a ditch,” but one with metal footings and other concessions to 21st century engineering.

There have been other adjustments as well, ones that have nothing to do with the fire.

“We’ve got ID cards now,” Pyle said. “We’ve got locked gates.”

And the flume is inspected more frequently, and not just for leaks and cracks, but for tampering by terrorists. “We’ve changed a lot of things,” Pyle said, “since Sept. 11.”

Who hasn’t?