To Feel the Anger of the River

You wake before dawn, stirred by a sound, a low rumble, like a truck straining to crest a steep grade. Outside, you search the horizon but find blackness, nothing more. The ground vibrates as your cats slink nervously through your legs. They know what’s coming. They can sense it. The water.

There is not much time. You pack the children in the car, grab what you can. The photo albums, your mother’s wedding dress, an antique clock. One cat is loaded, the other can’t be found. He’ll climb a tree, you promise your weeping son. Perhaps he will, perhaps not, you tell yourself.

Pulling out, you glance back at the horses pacing their pasture, heads high, eyes ringed with white. You have no trailer, no time to lead them out. Flinging open the gates, you say a silent prayer: Horses can swim. Help them get out.

The sky lightens as you drive away, and the world turns still more surreal. The roads you drive every day prove impassable, their broken yellow lines vanishing before you in a rippling sea the color of bad meat. Scores of jack rabbits leap along a railroad trestle. Sirens and the plaintive bellow of cows--immersed in water up to the gut--crack the air.

It may be a flood, but it feels like the end of the world.

A flood is a pushy creature, bold and intrusive like a daytime burglar. It upsets the order of things, flaunting its powers, leaving pain, uneasiness and an ungodly mess in its wake.

A flood bursts in and tosses the innards of a house like mixed greens. A flood sweeps rattlesnakes down from the foothills, depositing them--still alive, their rattlers quaking--in suburban backyards.

A flood grabs your child’s Christmas bike and tosses it into a tree, 10 feet up. A flood topples your grandfather’s tombstone and turns your beloved rose garden into a flattened heap of smelly goo.

A flood is a mannerless brute, whose path you want to avoid.

These days, that is not always possible. Northern California’s historic flood plains have become popular home sites, exposing their residents to disaster, no matter what the developers say. Thousands of people sat in the way of the 1997 New Year’s Flood, which has yet to complete its course. Innocent the victims may be, but the waters don’t care.

Fed by torrential rains that unleashed record runoff, the state’s northern rivers this month have flowed at or near all-time highs. They have tested the dams and jumped their banks and crumpled dozens of levees, some crafted by California’s brainiest engineers.

Until the river rises up to remind them, people tend to forget about its might. Most of the time, a river is a scenic backdrop, a soothing place to fish, to hike, to swim. But when certain forces collide, as they did last week, a benign waterway can turn beastly.

The flooding has claimed six lives thus far, uprooted more than 100,000 people and produced losses that may top $2 billion. But the drama only begins there. Freed from the confines of levees and banks, the rivers have shown their awesome strength by spreading across vast stretches of land that have been dry for 50 years or longer.

Look at the San Joaquin farm belt, where, in an instant, desert became marsh. Ducks preened in swampy fields where raisins had dried just a few months before. An endangered Tipton kangaroo rat--his burrow flooded--surfaced only to be swept to death by great muddy slugs of water.

Many, many other animals suffered a similar fate. The scenes were ugly. There were sheep pinned against fences, unable to free themselves in the raging current. There were hundreds of cattle killed, including an Angus steer named T-bone who washed up on his owner’s front lawn--and lay there for two days.

Birds lost their nests--and with them, their unborn young. Some horses marooned in the churning brown waters were saved by rescuers in boats who grabbed their halters and hauled them to the shallows. Often such efforts came too late.

Exhausted by hypothermia and their panicky struggle to stay afloat, many horses succumbed; they were found slumped against railroad berms when the flood waters dropped.

Animals that survived coped with a landscape as foreign as France. Five miles from the state Capitol dome, coyotes chased from flooded parkland along the American River dodged traffic and prowled the outskirts of town. On the narrow shoulder of Interstate 5, jack rabbits lined up like garden statues, peering at the black flood waters that overran the fields that were their habitat. There were scores of them--trapped between the water on one side and speeding traffic on the other.

At an outdoor shelter, hundreds of dogs, cats and chickens--flood refugees all, some rescued from rooftops--huddled in cages, awaiting a reunion with their owners. Many dogs wore brightly colored sweaters, supplied by volunteers hoping to keep the anxious pets comfortable in the January chill.

One man hoped his brother’s boxer, Frazier, was among them. Frazier was up on the Feather River levee when it broke one week ago today in Yuba County. His bark hasn’t been heard since.

*

Days pass and the waters inch back from whence they came. It is safe, the authorities say, to go home.

The journey is bizarre, offering a look at the flood’s determined path--and at what it has gulped and coughed back up.

Caked with pudding-like mud, the two-lane roadway is littered by fragments of people’s lives. There are barbecues and laundry baskets, real estate signs, box springs and bikes. In a vineyard, once-barren grape trellises now bear fruit--muddy clothes and twigs and other debris dangling in the breeze.

Cows graze placidly in a pasture, but something is wrong: A fishing boat is amid the herd, lodged in the crook of an oak tree’s trunk.

At home, five-foot chunks of asphalt gouged from the driveway have been tossed about the yard. Out back, an ugly catfish swims in a pond that had no fish before.

Inside, the scene is not easy to comprehend. You fight to keep your wits. Your stomach churns. Things are so topsy-turvy that it looks as if a giant bent down and blew in a window, sending it all askew.

There are small miracles, which are discovered and celebrated. Your daughter’s goldfish bowl was lifted off a dresser and but then deposited--upright, its inhabitant still alive--on the bedroom floor by flood waters in retreat.

There are mysteries left by the water. Why were the cars totaled when a favorite painting did not get wet?

The neighborhood returns to life as people push up their sleeves and muck out. Frontyards are crowded with triangular mounds of ruined dresses, pillows and books. The drone of rented fans drying walls and carpets fills the air.

Repair crews circle like vultures, offering “big flood discounts” and “long-term financing” on drywall, foundation and fence repairs and flooring. What will insurance cover? You can’t bear to worry about that now.

Donning gloves, you grab the bleach, take a deep breath and begin to scrub. Bacteria from sewage and who knows what other contaminants have invaded your home--your ceilings, your walls, your floors and your chairs. There is much to be done.

The real work, however, may be the emotional kind.

Like the furniture, spirits are warped. There is no heat and the water from the tap is not safe to drink. The whole place stinks unbelievably of mold and sewage and soggy debris. It is a smell that makes you think of death.

The children resist going to school and are vaguely depressed, feeling cheated--or punished for an offense they didn’t commit. Adrenaline gives way to physical and mental exhaustion. You lose track of time. You fight to feel normal again.

In the end, it’s not the smelly sofa, the toppled china hutch or even the lost TV. It’s just that after the flood, nothing feels the same.