Keeping the ‘Rain Book’ Alive

Leo Hetzel carefully opens the faded gray ledger.

The first entry, dated 1959:

Feb. 8 .85 (inch)

The brief notations are talismans of the past, watermarks left by a woman dead now for 10 years, yet still honored every time the rain falls.

Elefrida McArthur lived in a tiny, broken-down cottage at the confluence of Harding and Silverado creeks in eastern Orange County. For 33 years--132 seasons--she kept the “rain book” for Modjeska Canyon, a tightknit Santa Ana Mountains community named for Helena Modjeska, a Polish American actress of the late 1800s who reportedly packed up and left her canyon estate for a sunny isle in Newport Harbor after a particularly nasty rainy season.

It made sense for Mrs. McArthur, as she was always called, to be the one to keep the rain book. Her neighbors two doors down, who had kept it for decades, had passed away. Her house was perched on an embankment under an old concrete bridge, in the flood plain of the two creeks.

Why keep a rain book in sunshine-filled Southern California? First of all, it chronicles other things as well: drought, fire, quakes.

But mainly, it is because there are seasons here along the rural edge, where the waterways have never been encased in concrete. “Rainy season” and “fire season” dance back and forth across the peaks, scouring new terrain, threatening the tiny communities tucked below.

“Lord willing and the creek don’t rise” is a jaunty tagline from a hillbilly song. Until, that is, you have lived through the dark, pounding maelstrom of a storm-fed winter creek that rises in seconds from your waist to your neck.

One way to cope with the uncontrollable is to pin it down on paper--thus, the water book. Such a record also helps to keep things in perspective. When someone exclaims that surely this is the hottest, wettest, windiest, all-around worst such weather ever, the book can be consulted, the claim disproved--usually.

February is indisputably always the rainiest, sluicing great sheets across the narrow roads, dripping clammy fingers down your back.

McArthur began in February 1959, taking the reading at 8 a.m. First page:

Feb. 8 .85 (inch)

9 .04

11 1.44

12 .42

Page after page, month after month, she hoarded drops of moisture that fell into tiny, calibrated plastic beakers in her backyard.

For her, like everyone in the canyon, the seasons ran from July 1 to June 30, dry to drenched to dry again.

‘63-64 Nov. 20 2.67 inches Creek running

The day the creeks first run, canyon children whoop and shriek and slide down the suddenly muddy banks to the sweet, splashy water, tasting the raindrops on their upturned tongues. The peepers sing all night long--shy toads trilling bell-clear mating calls. The whole world is wet and slippery and joyful. New grass and tadpoles sprout overnight.

*

Hard frost one Christmas and mist on Mother’s Day. Snow in November on the peaks above. Mrs. McArthur captured it all in spare, cursive script. Shrieking Santa Anas are “that wind.” Months of parched, dusty heat are “very hot.” A bone-dry February brings mild amazement: “I’m surprised at this.”

68-69 Jan. 13 through 29

Worst flood in 50 years. Part of Foster’s house down. Much damage, all in canyons. Our sea wall held except corner.

Feb. 24 Killer flood. 5 houses down in Modjeska, scores more mud damage. Silverado 1/3 homes lost. 5 deaths. 5.75 inches in 24 hours.

Unwritten were the harsh details. Boulder-clogged creeks roared like runaway freight trains through the night. Ropes of windy rain lashed the steep, soggy mountain slopes. A giant live oak cracked and tumbled downward, unleashing 20 tons of mud and water onto the Silverado Canyon volunteer firehouse--perhaps the cruelest spot possible, as five dozen neighbors had gathered there seeking refuge. Marine helicopters worked through the howling darkness, airlifting the wounded, a young woman in labor, the dead.

Feb. 25 3.75 in.

Feb. 26 4.00 inches.

Feb. 27 Rain gauge gone down creek. could get no reading.

More than 30 years later, Leo snorts as he reads that inscription. “The reason she couldn’t get a reading is because her whole backyard was gone. She was an old-fashioned American farm woman. She didn’t panic easy. She was tough.”

“My mother was very much a person of duty,” said her son, Floyd McArthur. The rain book “was something she took quite seriously. She was a person who always liked to read things, and learn things, and discover things. When she took a job, she was quite faithful.”

*

1979-80

No rain 191 days. Very bad.

Nov. 24 Fire. Trabuco. Almost to Modjeska. 28,090 acres. Indian Truck Trail start. 6 fires around Orange, Riverside, LA, San Berno.

Walls of orange flame hissed and crackled over the mountain flanks, urged on by 80 mph Santa Ana winds. Three cabins and four outbuildings were destroyed one canyon over. Choking, acrid smoke burned the eyelids of those trying to sleep. Suspected cause: arson. Damage to the watershed totals $7 million.

Dec. 4 and 5 First rain of season

Jan. 28 Water very dirty and black from fire--1.15 inch

*

1977-78

Jan 15 my big oak in back yard fell down. 2.50 inches

Feb. 10 creek up 2.50 inches

I lost 15 feet of my backyard + all the trees along the back to high water

April Leo and I put in gabion baskets, wall across our backyards

It is Leo Hetzel’s entrance into the journal. He and his wife, Marija, eight months pregnant with their first child, had moved next door in July. It was a broiling, buggy month, Marija recalls: convoys of ants and dust everywhere. “A real Modjeska special,” she says with a laugh.

In January hard rains fell, and 200-year-old live oaks crashed to the ground.

Leo and Mrs. McArthur won FEMA loans and put in metal baskets filled with rocks to reinforce their backyards’ ragged edges. They are there today, barely visible, clogged with dried leaves and earth, holding fast.

Jan. 1-5 I was gone. Leo took reading.

Jan. 4, 1982. I got butted by the goat. Hurt my back, stayed with [daughter] Jean for 10 days.

Mrs. McArthur had two very good friends in the canyon: Mrs. Mary Hunt and Mrs. Roberta Smith. Mrs. Smith rode to church in Mrs. McArthur’s big old Dodge, the two of them quarreling about whether the overarching oak and sycamores should be pulled out of the wending road so it could be straightened. To this day, the trees stand, and neighbors slow down to wave each other by.

One January day, Mrs. McArthur went to visit Mrs. Hunt, and Mary’s goat butted her. She went down and had to leave the canyon for 10 days. Leo was entrusted with the rain record.

“It was an honor,” he said. “Besides, it had to be done.”

In less than two weeks, Mrs. McArthur was back on the job.

*

Oct. 1, 1987-7:42 a.m. We had a severe earthquake, center Whittier area (6.1). Here it shook up and down. I had to hold onto the kitchen water faucet to keep from wanting to fall down.

To keep from wanting to fall down. As if to admit that she was falling would be to give in.

After 79 pages of fire, flood and wind dancing uninterrupted through the columns, there is a single entry on top of Page 80:

1992-93 july 13 .50

Then, END OF MRS. MCARTHUR’S MESSAGES in Leo’s square capitals.

“Every time I see that page, I feel sad,” he says.

Mrs. Smith was in the late stages of Alzheimer’s disease, but her family brought her to the church in Silverado Canyon for Mrs. McArthur’s funeral. She sat in the back keening for her old friend up front.

Mrs. McArthur’s son gave the rain book to Leo.

“I left two pages blank before I started mine,” Leo says.

1992-93 December 7 Rained all night 2.15 inches

Santiago Creek started running good.

Why continue the pursuit of a simple woman begun in the middle of last century, when the seasons have been sterilized, blanched out of the planned communities with their “earth tone” stucco and airtight windows? Because every whisper of a Santa Ana, every lick of fire, every slick suburban street after a storm remind us that nature still holds sway.

The driest year on record since Elefrida McArthur started the Modjeska rain book was 2001-02: 6.92 inches. Deer and cougars crept down from the mountains to canyon backyards, desperate for the water they smelled in sprinklers and hoses.

The last week of September, after days of triple-digit heat, Leo took the book from its shelf and turned the pages slowly. Within 24 hours, a long, black cloud blanketed the peaks of Saddleback. Shortly before 8 p.m., a steady, cool rain began. A benediction.