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| Wim's Weerelt, Summer 1996 Foto Maartin Hofman |
Dear Wim & Toke—Happy Holidays to you! November 22 - Dec. 30, 1996
Dec. 29: I’m so sorry I didn’t write to you sooner, it was such a delight and pleasure to receive your wonderful letter upon my return in mid-September, but the whirlwind of returning, the myriad tasks to catch up on, and the pressure to finish a large article on the Poetry International translation project took up most of my time, and here it is, nearly the end of the year, and I still haven’t sent this (somewhat fragmented) letter. (Bad dog!)
I loved the way you describe the events of the day, Wim, I loved visiting your family, and experiencing your hospitality, warmth and bone-deep kindness. It was like stepping into a precious jewel—if for only one magical day that will stay with me always, a day so much more than the mere measuring of hours, so, of course, it saddens me that you’re selling the house, for surely it is “the world.” I adore mussels but we have to wait for a month with an “R” in it (September) to eat them due to the Red Tide. Will I never be able to visit you in Vlissingen again?
Since I was able to spend some time at a friend’s dilapidated country house in France, in a tiny hamlet of Rogny on the Abbey Road (founded by Irish monks in the Dark Ages) between Marle & Laon, in Picardy, Ainse, I can also understand your urge for more land and a garden.
Charles (Bert Schierbeek’s translator) McGeehan’s exwife/girlfriend, Bertaijn’s farmhouse needs so much work, I’d love to stay there next summer in exchange for working on it—it reminds me of my grandmother’s house where I grew up in Forest Knolls. A certain angle of light, red roses splayed against a wall, farm machinery from another era strewn in every nook and cranny. Triggerpoints of memory.
Charles is an interesting character, a GI stationed in Germany in the late ’60s, on furlough, who never left Holland; he’d met a Dutch girl on a train: Bertaijn. Now he’s 60 years old, an expatriate, neither wholly Dutch nor American.
Bertaijn was Bert Schierbeek’s sister-in-law; we met at Bert’s funeral my first day in Holland in June. We were 500 strong, the coffin, a barge dressed in flowers and sheaves of poetry—including our own Mother Earth Journal. Bert used to spend time at Bertaijn’s farmhouse. My cousin Dave & I felt his presence there. . .
I’m in the process of applying for an Irish passport (my grandparents left before Ireland became a republic, so I’m the last generation allowed to apply for a passport.) My uncle was in Dublin this summer and got his inside of two weeks. The passport allows us to work in the European Community, an important consideration.
Wim, I guess I’m tired of having to always struggle to find work each year, with no future, retirement, or security—nothing at all, for this is the life of an “independent contractor,” outside the system, so to speak. This is life in America for the struggling artist. Brains and talent account for little in the land where the greenback dollar is God.
I think I’d like to work at one of the American schools in Europe—Poetry, English & Art. If you know of anyone who can help me, let me know as I want a life where I can spend time in Europe, as I am always unhappy to return to the states, where I need to earn money.
Did you get my Dutch translations of the children’s poems via the Internet? I was in Liessel (Near Eindhoven) visiting a photographer friend (Jan Bogaerts), we tried to send the document to both your son Maartin, and Toke. I’ve enclosed a hard copy for you in case you didn’t receive it.
As for the books I left, don’t worry about translating it if you don’t want to—only tell me what you thought.
From my meeting with the workshop leader, Henk van Fassen, I got the feeling we were diametrically opposed in our approaches to teaching children poetry. I believe in what is possible, he believes children are limited by intellect and scope.
I’m sorry I don’t have more poems for you in Dutch. Yes, I’ve been to those places in my poems, seen those sights, lived those experiences. All autobiographical. I can’t remember if I left you any Dutch translations of my work, so I’ll enclose another packet, if I’ve erred in sending you duplicates, please pass them onto someone.
A funny connection—the translator of my poems, a college friend (and former boyfriend) of mine, philosopher Vinz van Neerven, stayed at your house some 20 years ago with his then girlfriend, Judith Smeur—I think she was house-sitting for you while you were away? Isn’t it a small Weererlt after all?
I’m sorry I don’t have any pictures of your place, other than the scratchboard I did (I’ve enclosed a copy for you). I thought I took photos of you? Perhaps it was in black and white film—in which case, I have only the negatives. I don’t have a darkroom and have to set up a time at a photographer’s studio to make proofsheets. Yet another pressing item on my list of “things to do.”
I’m so relieved to be finished with my Breytenbach essay on translation. I can’t believe it took so long to write, but I didn’t have the background or knowledge necessary to quickly write something.
Besides, if I knew what I was going to write, I wouldn’t write at all. What’s the point? The essay & footnotes (nearly 10,000 words—verbose), was very difficult for me. I hope J.L van Schaik Publishers (South Africa) will use it!
You said you had several computers. . . do you want to get rid of any of them? Charles McGeehan desperately needs something more modern than his 15+ year old (DOS) IBM clone and doesn’t know much about modern systems; he needs a more recent model CPU(with 20 - 40 MB storage space, 4 - 8 MB memory? I’m guessing), a worprocessing program with simple graphic layout capabilities and a letter quality printer. I think he’s using one of the very first versions of WordPerfect (on floppy disks). His address is Rustenbergerstraat 66 huis, 1074 EX A’dam 020-675-0778.
Though Charles may have severe disabilities (a serious brain tumor was removed several years ago), he actually accomplishes more work—primarily poetry translations—more than most people I know.
In August, my cousin Dave Dinsmore came over to Amsterdam to visit me—he works for United Airlines—Dave, Charles McGeehan and his girlfriend Bertaijn and I went to France for a few days—We took the coast route from Rotterdam to Zeeland islands—dunes marsh and grey sea—and the ferry at Vlissingen to Belgium.
I saw the windmill and had that curious sensation of collapsed time, remembering our mad walk to the train station, wanting to come visit but we had so little time, having stopped overlong in Middleburg.
Dave was so amazed, we wound up staying overlong, and had to hurry to Brugge—which was even more amazing—we were so exhausted, we spent the night (in an inn) beneath the tower on the main square.
We got caught in horrible traffic in Lille—no road signs on the freeways, so we circled and circled the countryside for hours trying to avoid the toll roads and navigate our way east by following topographic clues and a certain slant of sunlight until dusk overtook us.
Lille, a real hellhole. Dunkirk ever to the west. The Battle of the Bulge was fought somewhere near here. You can still feel the ghostly reminder the blood-soaked fields at sunset when the light is right and the fog rises up like apparitions.
We wound up several times in a village where Reblais was born, Proust too. Closet hysteric Charles McGeehan forgot his passport (and his epilepsy pills) so we didn’t want to get caught up in a immigration control lines. Dave and I, having no French money, didn’t want to take the toll roads.
Asking a Frenchman directions in a village square was a farce worthy of a Monty Python comedy sketch. Only Bertaijn spoke French.
A 6-hour trip from Amsterdam to Laon took us nearly three days. Kafavy said the journey, not the destination, matters.
On the way back, we stopped off in Antwerp; sat in the afternoon sun in front of that glorious Gothic cathedral quaffing strong Belgian beer. We earned the sight of spires piercing the blueness of sky. Odd, Laon’s hill fortress Gothic cathedral has no spires, just stumps.
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NOV. 22: It’s been raining steadily for a week, a slow, gentle rain, drumming fingers of rain on the moss-green scalp of my cabin roof nestled beneath live oaks. I’m cozily curled up in bed with the flu, playing with my computer.
There are flash flood warnings in Northern California, Oregon and Washington and record feet of snow has fallen in the mountains. I’ve been lax about writing to anyone since I’ve been back home. A kind of lethargy creeps over me. I do what’s necessary, read, and little else. Perhaps hibernation. . . Of course, it doesn’t help that I have an injured wrist.
Before I left Amsterdam, I got into a bicycle accident. As I was returning home to Oetgenstraat from Westerpark, some idiot took a curved wrought-iron flower trellis (the arch that goes over a gate) out of the back of his double-parked car on Prinsengracht (near Utrechtstraat), and swung it in front of me, cutting my right hand.
I tried to protect my face but smashed into a parked car, bruising my left wrist when I hit the back windshield. It was either smash into a parked car or fly into the canal—which to choose? It was raining, the bike’s brakes were no good on wet cobblestone & brick.
I’ve been ignoring my wrist for the past 2 months—until it hurt so badly (I was smashing a clove of garlic with the flat of a knife; the little bones in my wrist made a crunching sound like potato crisps!). I went to the doctor who put it into a splint to rest it—a bad sprain with injury to the ulnar nerve.
I’m slowly typing (two-fingered pecking) this letter wearing my stupid wrist brace which looks (& is beginning to smell) like an old gym shoe, and as winter’s chill creeps in, my bones ache (more snow in the Sierras); injuries don’t heal quite as fast as they used to.
It’s hard to say exactly how I’ve been wasting my time as I’m never idle. You know how it is, the life of a writer is a proverbial black hole. In Autumn I never have much ($) work: I’m teaching a poetry class to children, ages 6-8; I finished 3 “Elderhostel” classes (California history, poetry, art, etc.) to 60+ year-olds—and my strangest job yet—was as a naturalist leading a group of businessmen on a day hike to the headlands near Sausalito (& the Golden Gate Bridge) last Friday (probably when I caught this cold).
Here’s a journal fragment: 19 Sept., 1996 (midnight insomnia) Home, I am—and after a week of sunshine, I need dark shades—unused as I am to so much concentrated light. The weather’s turning cold. Fingernail moon (and a total eclipse on the 26th—the last one of the millennium—which I doubt you’ll even see, Dutch weather being what it is.
Still suffering from acute jetlag, tunnel vision & disorientation by late afternoon is typical (for 6 PM is really 3 am—and I wonder why I have no appetite for dinner!). Driving is excruciating (asleep at the wheel is a virtual reality).
My cousin Dave’s having the same symptoms. We may have jumped into this culture/time zone but the bio-rhythms aren’t yet shifting. He said “I have to keep moving around, flapping my arms, just to keep awake at work.” I laughed at the idea of Dave flapping his wings in an airplane hangar with all those dismantled planes.
At a lively Brazilian party in San Francisco, I made the mistake of sitting alone on the couch for a few minutes. My eyes may have been open, but that’s all. I couldn’t even speak, let alone understand the Brazilians’ Spanish (who speak with a Portuguese accent).
I drove Herman Berlandt & his girlfriend, Verona home to Novato in Marin County, north of San Francisco, literally cross-eyed, thinking “I’ll never make it home” (an hour and a half’s drive) so I slept on their couch. (Wim, do you remember Herman at Poetry International, the little old man who is the editor of Mother Earth Journal—I’ve edited some issues too.)
They say it takes a minimum of 1 day of suffering for each time zone. I remember how it took me weeks to recover from Russia. How long will I suffer this time? Someone said that in a Concorde jet, you travel so fast, you arrive before you leave—earlier, that is, in New York than when you leave Paris! Where’s Einstein when you need him?
My cousin Sínead and I went huckleberrying the last weekend before the Autumn Equinox out at our secret spot on a hill near Tomales Bay, where we used to go with my grandmother. (They’re like tiny blueberries with 50 times the flavor.)
From the isthmus, we could see Point Reyes in the distance, like a comma against the shining sea, separating Drake’s Bay from the raging Pacific—a misnamed ocean. Offshore fog rising up like a vast wall where tiny fishing boats disappeared into its maws, made me think of the painter, Turner.
The pine forest took a beating from last year’s severe storms—so many uprooted trees met an abrupt end—we used them as aerial pathways up the hillsides. Since it’s all part of the Point Reyes National Seashore, we’re not supposed to gather anything—even huckleberries, so I stole an antler.
We were hiding from the rangers but we had Sínead’s 22-month-old nephew, Séan to lug through the undergrowth. I had the odd sensation we were re-enacting an age-old ritual, gathering berries before the fall—no matter that our skin is white, not red.
My aunt will make pies and ice cream, our teeth will be indigo-stained for days (like my fingers). How Pictish! The berries are so labor-intensive (cleaning takes longer than picking) we make jokes, compare them to caviar. We went to a party at a local ranch (Albert Straus) & made gallons of huckleberry ice cream.
* * * * * * *
What struck me most about returning home is the sharp, aromatic odor of bay laurel, poison oak pollen, and sun-burnt hay, flavored with the acrid, thirsty dust—the smell of late summer making me nostalgic (like Proust and his madelines?).
Seeing all the lovely, steep hillsides against a cerulean sky, cloaked in tawny blond oatgrasses like sleeping lions, and the thick green-black oaks roiling in their crotches—so sexual, it surprises me anew each time I return.
I’ll never forget how the mirrored San Francisco Bay and Mt. Tamalpais (our Mt. Fuji-san) from the fire-ravaged Oakland hills takes my breath away.
The Sonoma-Marin Coast Miwok Indian word for the shining golden gate, Yulupa. All that’s left of the Bay Area Ohlone Indians’ stories of this landscape is: Dancing on the brink of the world.
I love this landscape, but not the culture. I hate the vacuous American loudness, the lack of body awareness, the shallow chrome and Formica existence, the urban sprawl. . . the ultimate loneliness. I try to be somewhat tolerant, but I guess it’s not within my nature. And so I am alone, dancing on the brink of I know not what.
My 2nd night home, I was invited to a Sebastopol Arts Council meeting for the promotion of poetry in west Sonoma County, and I felt so jaded. “Been there, done that. Got the shirt. . .” Guess I should be glad poetry is so “in” but it just makes me bad-tempered and ornery—especially when they dream big, and haven’t a clue as to what goes on in putting on reading series and workshops, wanting more volunteer labor to make it happen. . .and I’ve got that shirt too—in several sizes. (And it’s got bloody holes in it by now!).
It feels a bit like a mausoleum here, in this poetry mecca of the world (and in my cabin too). I know I’ll grow used to it soon enough.
I saw a bizarre English movie, The Draughtsman’s Contract, by Peter Greenaway, the director of The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover. At the end there were all these Dutch references—someone speaking Dutch which I could almost understand. It had the peculiar effect of making me homesick for the wrong country.
They say you always leave a part of yourself behind when you travel. Does that mean there’s less of me returning home each time I go away? (Hemingway said: Travel broadens the mind. Writing broadens the ass. I write standing up.)
* * * * * * *
NOV. 22, continued: Today’s the anniversary of day President Kennedy was shot. The proverbial question: what were you doing, where were you? (Not on the grassy knoll in Dallas, I presume!) I was in 3rd grade, sick with a flu (like today), sitting with my grandmother with my feet propped on the warm sides of the stove firebox (we have a gas stove with a wood burner for heat in Forest Knolls—not that newfangled modern heating! She was sitting by the stove, I was wallowing around on the floor in my quilted robe like a red and yellow paisley dust-walrus. It was a dreary day, much like today.
My aunt Canice’s husband Bill (Dave and Sínead’s father—they were staying with us) told us the news. (At one time or another, my grandmother’s house was a refuge to three of her four daughters in various reincarnations of distress).
Fresh from the Nicasio Ranchouse bar, Bill Dinsmore came bursting through the front door, mid-afternoon—full of news. He was so excited, I mistook it for joyousness or frivolity. “The President’s been shot!” he shrieked. In retrospect, I think it was merely excitement and shock enhanced by the booze.
My grandmother’s reaction of anguish (she who had buried a husband, a son and several brothers and sisters by this time), such a bizarre foil to my uncle’s giggling, I didn’t know what to think, only that Kennedy was akin to being a relative in our household. The Irish have elevated him to secular sainthood.
When visiting my relatives in Ireland in 1973, I was struck by how every house had its altar niche with Jesus and/or Mary (rarely Joseph) and Kennedy illuminated by a (red) votive candle. The sacred heart. Later, in 1989, when I visited Peru, it was like being in Ireland—Kennedy’s half-mast eyes blankly stared out at me from every niche. What do the dead still see from the eyes of photographs?
Of course, lots of controversial stories about Kennedy have surfaced since then. But, regardless of his politics and womanizing, he truly represented something as intangible as hope to so many oppressed peoples the world over. I can’t think of another American president that had that kind of global impact. Certainly not the Roosevelts, nor Eisenhower (course I wasn’t really politically savvy yet—born in 1952). Clinton’s been compared to Kennedy—but that’s a joke.
Clinton couldn’t even fill the shadows of the soles of Kennedy’s feet. Still, I wonder, what would our perception of Kennedy been like if he’d run for office now, more than 25 years after his death; how would the world view him now?
Weird to see Fidel Castro on the telly the other night, Kennedy’s embargo from the Bay of Pigs crisis still in effect here—we get very little news of Cuba. I saw him on a Mexican TV channel—no voice of James Earl Jones sonorously announcing in that rich baritone: This is CNN!
Remember those radio emergency broadcast tests when we were kids? The piercing tones followed by the announcement, “This is only a test. If it had been a real emergency . . .” and we thought maybe the Bomb was gonna drop? They’ve just eliminated them (I was surprised to still hear them on the BBC radio broadcast in Amsterdam). Now the new technology is just some computer chirps and clicks.
1 Dec. Sun. Well, a friend (a student’s mother) whisked me away to the beautiful tourist town of Carmel-by-the Sea for the weekend, so I turned 44 beneath a full Gemini moon by the Pacific Ocean (we were 2 houses away from the beach, a painter friend of hers’ rented a house for a full month).
I no sooner returned home (Tues.) and left again to spend Thanksgiving (Thurs.) in Novato with Herman and Verona (his actress-girlfriend) and her 2 children, a Brazilian artist, and a Scottish actor from Glasgow played guitar in a kilt; we sang for our supper on full stomachs.
My innards are still unhappy, so I spent the weekend back in bed reading after nearly a week of socializing. I’ve been reading up on my ancestors, the Celts—I discovered that Laon (where I was in France) was an Irish monastery until ca. 1500 to 1700 AD.
My favorite mystery scholar whom I know little about, a founder of many of the continental universities, was Johannes Scottus Eriugena (or John, the Irishman b. 810). He taught 25 years at Laon and at the Paris Court School for Charles the Bald (when he wasn’t being accused of heresy—which was often—for his radical doctrine preached the concept of free will. Note: this was long before Luther was a gleam in his great-grandparents’ eyes).
Here’s a little story about Eriugena: An emperor (Charles the Bald?) made a playful pun on two similar sounding words in Latin: sottum and scottum, and asked John what’s the difference between a fool and a Scot (Irishman) to which John replied, “Only the table.” (In Latin, of course: Quid distat inter sottum et scottum?). The king must’ve been seated across from the Irishman. I bet he was flabbergasted by the answer—talk about turned tables!
But then it is said in our myths, satire was the first art form invented in Ireland. I found this gem in my friend Vinz’s flat: Adversus stultitiam pugnare nil est laboriusius nulla enim auctonate vinci fatetur nulla ratione suddetor. Which goes something like: nothing is more laborious than to fight against stupidity for it won’t bend to any authority and it won’t be convinced by any reason. He must have had some very challenging students at Laon University! If I don’t send this soon, it’ll be Christmas!
* * * * * * *
Weeks later: This is just to sat that I’ve obviously failed my first attempt at a quick Christmas Greeting Letter, a generic form which I find impersonal, lacking in the very juices that makes a letter a letter. It got me thinking about various forms of writing—why the epistolary letter written to one person and available to all, is more interesting than a shopping list or the dreaded Christmas Letter.
And I realized part of the problem of the Christmas Letter was a dearth of anecdotal details and the metaphors we writers so preciously cling to. There’s no place for interaction for the reader unfamiliar with those mundane facts that comprise our lives. . .
I used to think those self-absorbed Christmas Letter scribes, like Scrooge, must live the most thoroughly boring and mundane of lives, but when all my writer friends began sending me generic letters, I had to rethink the genre (if you can call it that).
At least writers tend to add in a few lovely bits of human dross. When we reduce our lives to statistics, what’s left to ponder? No magic conjuring up or acknowledgement of the other. On the flip side of the coin, we live such a frenetic lives, stacks of unanswered letters haunt us like ghosts of Christmases past.
To wit, the lowered literary standard of the Christmas Letter at half mast, or no communication at all? Dog-eared choices. Though I dislike the Christmas Letter, or any generic letter, I’ve come to the conclusion I’d rather hear some news than no news at all. This longwinded missive, a strange hybrid of journal entries and letter, I hope you haven’t found too tedious to read. The alternatave is either no news at all or generic Christmas Letter! So please forgive the amount of time I took to reply to your letters.
Dec. 30: Well, to paraphrase an olde English song: Christmas has come (the goose—well, actually, the turkey— is come and gone), all our pennies are in the merchant’s hats while we haven’t even two half-pennies to rub together—and your package still sits on the floor waiting for me to finish this letter.
Though most of the pieces were assembled, I forgot to finish this letter, so now I must make another feeble attempt before year’s end. When I started this letter over a month ago, it was raining; would you believe it’s still raining! We had two clear days: Christmas eve and day.
I think we got our entire 1997 rain allotment in November and December of 1996!
We’ve just had both a flash flood warning at 2 p.m. (right now—wherever roads and creeks or culverts intersect, the water can rise several feet within minutes because the ground’s so saturated with water, and the rivers are so full, they can’t carry all their water to the sea.)
We also have a major river flood warning for this afternoon: our Russian River is to crest at about 36 feet above its summer banks at Hacienda Bridge—just 2 miles from my house. I’m above 100 feet; thank god for small favors called mountains. Of course, they’re the reason who we’re getting so much rain.
I imagine this equivalent would put most of Holland underwater (we crossed that Zeeland dam, saw the flood photos of’54? Unimaginable.) The power’s been threatening to go out all day, flickering on and off; my computer’s not a happy camper. We’ve had terrible winds. Small branches falling on my roof and the hood of my truck. Another storm due in New Year’s Eve.
Think I’ll practice growing webbed feet and feathers, or build an arc! In today’s newspaper, a photo of ice skaters in Holland and in the Midwest—South Dakota, I think; -40 (that’s Fahrenheit, not Celsius) in Montana where I just got a two week poetry job at a school in Feb. Brrr!!! Luckily the post office is nearby, though I may need a snorkel to get there! Or devolve.
Jan.7-15, 1997, Little Christmas aftermath: Our New Year’s storm is officially the worst recorded storm in California’s history, and the worst storm of the century, a warm, tropical storm, they call it the Hawaiian Punch. The Russian River crested at 46 feet above its summer banks (about two stories high? 32 feet is considered to be flood stage, but 1986 at 49 - 51 feet, and 1995 - 6 at 49 feet were much worse).
When the rains moved east, they restored ancient shorelines of the Great Central Valley Laguna that once extended 700 miles from Redding near Mt. Shasta to the Tehachipi Mountains near Los Angeles, to its original pre-1850s goldrush state (before hydraulic placer mining in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada range silted the Delta, and land reclamation drained the Delta).
How soon people forget the land was reclaimed, thought “reclaimed” isn’t exactly the right word, since they claimed land for the first time within the past 100 years. The Delta region is flooded: most of the “islands” (they’re really polders) are 15 feet (I’m 5 feet 2 inches) or more below sea level, then 7 foot tides and high winds created 28 breeches along 1000 miles of levee (dijk); the ungirded rivers: the Sacramento, the Feather, the American, the Mokelumne, the Stanislaus, the Tuolumne, the Merced, and the San Joaquin mingle and wander where they please.
Each day, a new catastrophe. From Lake Tahoe, the tentacled Truckee River in Reno went gamboling into all the casinos at once. The streets had rapids! Yosemite is a lake, not a valley. Whole campground have floated off, the bears wakened early from hibernation, are partying on food abandoned by fleeing winter campers.
Meanwhile, on the coast, the Russian, the Eel, the Gualala, and the Napa rivers have meekly climbed back into their beds after a few days’ freedom. The Russian River has now had three 100-year floods within one year’s time—January 1996-1997.
As one man put it, “How many 100-year floods can we have within a decade?” The theory, of course, is that the river only floods disastrously once every 100 years on the average. We’ve had nearly a dozen floods since 1950, 1955, 1964, 1981 - 2, 1986, 1995, 1996 - 7.
This year (1997) Santa Rosa got 20 inches of rain in 7 days, 2/3 of its annual rainfall. In 1996, a very wet year, it received 9 inches. We get nearly double the rainfall in Forestville averaging 40 - 60 inches, only 12 miles away. Cazadero, near the coast, at 90 - 100 inches, is an official “rainforest” receiving more than double our annual rainfall.
Remember the scratchboard drawings I showed you of the flooded river? I’ve added some new ones this flood season. Did I leave you a copy of my flood prose-poem? Building an Arc in the Dark of the Year.
They now estimate the damage at $2 billion; 44 of our 58 counties called disaster areas; more than 200,000 acres underwater. After 40 inches of rain in 1 week (14 inches in one day), the Feather River crested an amazing 70 feet above its banks, carving a new channel (or reclaiming a prehistoric one) across the Great Central Valley. Boulders the size of micro-buses boomed and clattered down the Feather River Canyon sounding like giant pool, or bowling balls. The canyon vibrated all night long.
Hydrological numbers are staggering. They estimated the river at the Oroville Dam flowed at nearly 100,000 gallons a second (imagine filling six Olympic-size swimming pools every second), and downstream it was even faster!
Within the first seven days of the New Year, the Sacramento River, at 500,000 fps carried enough water to meet the needs (89,600 acre feet) of the entire city of San Francisco for 33 years. One acre-foot equals the equivalent of one football (soccer?) field flooded one foot deep; a family of 5 uses less than that a year.
All rivers have either reached or exceeded their highest recorded flood levels recorded in modern times. Needless to say, most of our major highways across the state have been closed at one point or another. The smaller mountain highways may be closed indefinitely. Highway 50 to Tahoe lost 39 miles of roadbed.
Row crops washed out to sea: asparagus beds, wheat, rice—gone. The orchards & vineyards will probably survive. After the water receded in Forestville, cabbages & “yuppie designer” lettuce floated across Guerneville Road at the Santa Rosa Laguna; like dense mats of colorful leaves, unharvested red chili peppers and enormous yellow squashes floating atop the orchards & vineyards on River Road; you could mark the high water mark by the chilies dangling in the treetops on this last day of Christmas!
Massive livestock losses. The surviving cows refuse to leave pastures and spend their days looking like spotted hippos in a chocolate sea. No way to milk them, creatures of habit, they resist rescuing. The legs of the unlucky ones pluck strands of barb-wire fences until they drown. Or hypothermia kills them. No arcs or hot tubs in sight.
Now ironically, we have blue skies, sunny days, and an Arctic cold snap, black frosts, snow on the way (very rare by the coast). It was 18 degrees Fahrenheit (-5° Celsius) one night; my outside plants survived summer drought & winter flooding only to die from frost. My fingers numb, this time from the cold. You might not find it cold, but we’re not used to such weather in this “Mediterranean” coastal climate zone.
California reminds us that it’s still a wild untamed animal, a sometimes dangerous land of extremes. Important reminder as we continue to mindlessly grow (31 million) develop and build on fragile land that should be better left for agricultural use for that very reason.
Once again I’m under the blankets, this time just to keep warm! The kitchen heater doesn’t heat this part of the room, it escapes through the uninsulated knotty pine walls of the summer cabin, never meant for year-round habitation, nor severe winter cold spells.
Unfortunately only my poor refrigerator freezer is warmed by the heater’s valiant efforts, and keeps melting faster the colder it gets. If only I could train the hot air to enter through doorways and lay low like groundfog instead of uselessly rising to the ceiling like the floodwaters.
Sometimes I stand on a chair to reach the heat just to and thaw my hands and nose! (I over-exaggerate! hyperbole thins the blood. I’m never too sure where one paragraph should end, and another begin, I fall victim to runaway sentences and ideas, switch thoughts mid-stream. . . all this coupled with a miserly compulsion to fill every page.)
And I never even mentioned the event that derailed me from finishing and mailing this letter: the rain falling in sheaves New Year’s Eve practically on the stroke of midnight! It was as if the sky had opened a vast drain, water flooding the roads so fast.
Driving home from a friend’s in Santa Rosa (I left at the stroke of midnight, as a severe thunderstorm began voicing a warning of more rain, the Russian River was already at 36’ above flood stage, any new rain meant getting stranded in Santa Rosa). I nearly went off into an embankment twice, skidding out of control when I hit invisible pockets of water.
My New Year’s resolution was to find my driveway, which became an impromptu creekbed; I think we had something like 7 inches of rain. A 20 - 25 minute drive took me nearly an hour to get home. I went down to the river, it was about 40 feet above its banks and rising. I knew we were in for a big flood, but I had no idea the Central Valley would fare worse than us. A big surprise.
I understand you too have had your share of cold weather. When we haven’t been preoccupied with water, we’ve seen photos of frozen waterfalls in Hungary, skating festivals in Holland, some 200 dead from the cold? Welcome to 1997? Dare I ask how you’re faring? I’d best send this soon or I’ll feel compelled to report on yet another catastrophe of biblical proportions like pestilence or famine.
Note bene: (2/18/2012) apparently my missive and care packages laden with poetry never arrived to De Weerlet, a house built in 1606, with De Weerlet and clamshell stucco over its door lintel—in Vlissingen, Netherlands, as Wim had moved. Sixteen years later, Wim found me on the internet via an article I'd published on Antarctica on RedRoom. Small weerlet indeed. So for the first time, I've got a photo of me painting Wim's garden, and the image on the same page. Circles colliding. A gift. It's rare that one gets closure, a circle of time completed like this.
Here's a Wiki entry on Wim.
Wim Hofman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
