Flooded In Paradise For Two and a Half Months
I am acutely, embarrassingly aware that the conventionally sane might consider it questionable real estate timing to buy a remote 41-acre ranch which requires two ephemeral water crossings a week before a historic flood begins, making the property inaccessible to any but experienced swift water rescuers. But the operative word here is “before.”
I didn’t know that the worst drought in local recorded history would suddenly end, stranding me in my new home and allowing me about 67 days (longer, one might notice, than even Noah had to endure) to contemplate how I wanted to Green what I was starting to call The Funky Butte Ranch, or the FBR.
The name came from the rather Funky Butte above the noisy Great Horned Owl’s nest on the East Side of the property. Right from the night I moved in, I liked to climb the Butte at sunset, overlooking as it did the Former Mimbres Kingdom and the creek flood plain of my first ever property. I was home, and had a mortgage to prove it.
Legs dangling over the top of the Funky Butte, I’d sit amongst deer pellets and survey the drought-stricken landscape, hoping the cottonwood and live oak below could survive a couple of thousand years of climate change. I’d come from an Alaskan rainforest, and after nine months in New Mexico, I couldn’t remember what rain felt like. Being a sun guy, I didn’t miss it.
Amazed every morning on my run, if I saw anyone I’d say genuinely, “What a beautiful day!”
And the person would like at me with an expression that said, “Um, it’s a beautiful day every day here.”
But I did wonder if I’d ever see rain again.
That was the end of July.
By the beginning of this month, I found myself, my terrified new puppy Sadie, and the LOVESubee, my fossil fuel-powered vehicle for 12 years and 203,000 miles, trapped between two channels of the usually tame Mimbres river, which was rising visibly on both sides of me by the minute.
I had to call my neighbor Mark Orton for rescue. In rural life, there are few secrets, and generations of reputation can get cemented from a few early encounters. So you generally don’t want to be pulling out the cell phone and whining about drowning a few weeks after moving into a remote, Libertarian ranch ecosystem.
Mark took it well. He wound up towing me, Sadie and the stranded LOVESubee across the raging far channel of the crossing. In fact, Mark came barreling right down after I’d made the panicky cell phone call to him. I remember I was so scared that I had trouble with the phone at first.
I dialed from the driver’s seat it and blubbered, “Um, I made it through the first channel, but the second one – the one that was mellow yesterday – is raging – I mean like Grand Canyon raging. I just saw an entire black walnut tree go by. Now I’m on this island in the middle and I think I can see it disappearing. Do you think you can swing by and offer me some advice, or a tow, or maybe the Kaddish?”
“Que?” an old lady’s voice said. “No deseo ninguna solicitación. Estoy en el Do Not Call List.”
“Oh, sorry, wrong number.”
After redialing and re-explaining the situation to a sympathetic Mark – one of several of the world’s great neighbors who happen to live along El Otro Lado (our dirt access “road” is for more than one reason appropriately named “The Other Side” – of the River, of Normal American Life) — I had 12 minutes to kill, and I didn’t want to just watch the water rise on me and my puppy and car. So, though I felt a bit silly, I pulled out my book (The Once and Future King) and started reading to Sadie.
“I dunno about getting you across or back,” Mark said first thing as he bumped to a halt on my Island. He said it in a tone of voice that held decades of experience in these situations. “This far side has become the fast channel.”
I had made the same observation.
“You’ve got rocks in your grille, just from the first channel,” Mark added, prying one out. It was the size of a softball.
Then he relented a little, hovering in ambivalence as he scanned the whitewater we would have to cross if we went for it.
“I do always like to see someone willing to lose a car to the River,” Mark said. “And many have. It takes gumption.”
Me, I was out of food and had to make it across by any means necessary.
“Well, this LOVEsubee has 200,000 miles on it, and I’ve driven every one of them,” I said. “Every start now I think of as a bonus.”
“What is it you write about, anyway?” he asked, checking under my bumper to see if there was a place to strap my Subee to his Ford.
“How this stuff is all worth it,” I said, gesturing to the raging Mimbres a few feet away and shouting over its seasonal roar.
“Compared to working in a cubicle. And because we’ll be the ones who survive if the Shit All Comes Down.”
I didn’t even believe this yet – that all the Other Side hassle was actually a good thing. That would come when I was mid-River two weeks later. But Mark knew what I meant. His family apple orchard was a hundred yards behind us, and bursting with fruit. I had eighty pounds of those apples in my freezer already, and hadn’t even made a dent in one tree. I had never tasted golden delicious apples that so poetically meshed sweet, juicy and crunchy. There is simply not an apple that tasty in any store, anywhere, and I would be keeping the doctor away on them all winter long. And let me tell you, if you’ve never picked apples in a wet desert dusk with crickets trading licks all around you, do it, and you’ll know what it is to be alive.
My good Rawhide attitude seemed to further soften Mark’s opinion on the prospect of towing me across the flooding River. The water was definitely in surge mode, still rising as we talked. It occurred to me how quickly the word “drought” can disappear from a sub-culture’s vocabulary. It’s like the way no one talks about Bill Gates’ profligate house anymore now that he and Melinda throw money at vaccinations in Africa. No one even talks about his crappy operating systems, either.
“Tell you what, you make it across on foot, I’ll watch the depth, and if you make it back, I’ll give it a shot.” This essentially marked my appointment as the Community On-Foot Riverbed Exploration Point Man, a position I still hold.
Mark watched while I waded into the current, nearly losing my footing twice. The water at this point, not as cold as an Alaskan river but not generally of a temperature in which you want to immerse your Carhartts, went up to my thighs and was muddy and full of debris.
“Well, your car might get taken by the current,” Mark proffered while I drip-dried. “But my truck’ll make it.”
I looked downstream, shivering.
“Well,” I conceded, “I probably won’t die today.”
“You probably won’t,” he said, eerily emphasizing “probably.” “The worst that’ll happen is you’ll have to upgrade your vehicle.”
All I could think about was stocking up on a month’s worth of sustenance, to wait out a flood that was genuinely approaching Biblical. People were converting, repenting, preaching. Right in the organic co-op. Churches and synagogues were spontaneously springing up like mushrooms.
“I’d rather not,” I said, imagining the cost.
“Could be good,” he said, eyeing eleven years of dents and rust on the LOVEsubee, while Sadie sniffed out a bankside snake.
“Your insurance paid up?” He accented “insurance” Western style, on the first syllable.
“I reckon,” I murmured.
We strapped the rigs together in an exercise Mark had evidently used in Rawhide situations just like this since the Reagan Administration. He was, essentially, the El Otro Lado AAA.
We climbed into our vehicles, and I thought I had a minute or so – the way a pilot has to clear things with the tower before taking off. I expected at least a hand wave, or a thumbs-up. So I started to tuck my iPOD into my backpack in the event of a water-landing. But Mark had already started forward, and behind his apparently 49,000-ton vehicle I was already in motion, too – with the parking brake on. I whistled to hustle Sadie into the front seat, in case we needed to use the emergency exit, which would be whatever window faced up when the LOVEsubee became the LOVEboat. I disengaged the break and fretted over whether to put my seatbelt on.
Exciting and New.
As soon as I parked, whooping, on the far bank, I saw what appeared to be a furry black head floating fast downstream along the same insane channel we had just forded. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that it was Roscoe, the Orton dog. I called out his name, ready to launch a Canine Rescue. Sadie barked excited greetings but knew better than to join the flume.
“Ah, he loves a good flood,” Mark said, without looking up as he undid the tow strap.
Rapids-surfing dogs, uprooted ancient trees; whatever happened, I wasn’t gonna be stuck again. I took to parking on the far bank and wading the river with my supplies. Who knew what the weather would do? People like Other Sider Charlie Beggy, a retired military jet engineer and current solar power aficionado and peach farmer, pretty much lived to predict what the weather, and thus the River, would do. But the weather, I find, only reads the weather report about 50% of the time.
Two weeks and several near-tragedies later, Mark Orton’s father, Don, was venting on the anti-Useless County Government theme while I squeezed out my river booties. We “Other Siders” tended to gather by the riverbank every day or two to stare at our river and speculate on the duration of our stranding.
“We should all organize and refuse to pay our property taxes until they provide us services. I mean, how could an ambulance even get in here?”
Even more than the three flipped trucks and near-drownings over the past couple of weeks, this was a particular bone of contention in our stranded Otro Lado minds at the moment. The wife of the Valley physician, Shelby King, was one of us. She was sick and needed to get to town for oxygen treatments. Many of us thought the County should build us a bridge or something.
(It feels worth noting that even mentioning this throws half the community in a rage. “The river channel is too varied to build a bridge!” they scream. My take? Smart humans have figured out how to build a bridge across the Mississippi; we can build a bridge across the Mimbres. But then there are right-of-way issues too arcane to go into now. Suffice it to say anarchy reigns in Southwest New Mexico, and sometimes floods happen.)
“I think we should draw up a petition, demanding representation if they want taxation,” Don inveighed, stamping his foot on the shaky bank.
This was a Refrain, by Day 15 of the Great Flood of ‘06, so I had a question ready, just as I heard the day’s first clap of thunder.
“OK, Don, you’ve been here for almost 30 years. Based on all that experience, is there something special about this year — you know, the way people are all up in arms after losing all these vehicles and nearly all these lives? Or is it always like this at monsoon season?”
“Oh, it’s always like this,” Don replied in a softer tone, studying his boots. “Everybody gets all worked up, people nearly die, and then the River goes down and everything returns to normal.”
I decided not to argue the very choice of the word “normal” amidst a community of twelve families who paid mortgages on properties they couldn’t get to or from; who lately risked electrocution every time they stepped out of their doors. As if to accent this point, I watched a gorgeous indigo lightning scar score a direct hit on a hillside transformer behind Don’s shoulder (further motivation to get my new property converted to solar). I was used to such celestial attacks. Earlier that week, I had woken to a lightning-sliced cottonwood reclining not 20 feet from my main house. A 75-foot, mature tree. I carved it up and used it to fire the hot tub, which was wood stove-heated.
Meanwhile, I could feel the perimeters of my own sense of “normal” broadening to quite El Otro Lado standards – this is also known as “freedom,” “happiness” and “love.”
Let’s face it, we El Otro Ladoans would throw any Gallop pollster for a loop. We weren’t normal. To those who insist on pat categories, we are disconcertingly individualistic. Among us were Republicans on solar. UN-haters who plant organic. Shaggy Subaru drivers who do yoga with their goats but unleash firearms at wild mammals. A pagan or two. That kind of thing. I can’t even print what some modern Mimbrenos do for a living.
The first storm of the day was closing in. I plopped down beside Don and our dogs alongside the Riverbank. Instead of getting into the “normal” issue or once again promising I’d brainstorm about possible ways to approach a County that by this point had 450 years to bring new meaning to the phrase, “Laissez Faire,” I shifted to another favorite Otro Lado topic: our options for flood solutions should the County or the State actually change its tune and fund us in its transportation plans. This was incredibly unlikely, since the County didn’t consider El Otro Lado to be an official road, and dry-side landowners wouldn’t let us widen it to county specs.
Still, my preference, since the River’s breadth varied from five feet to 250, making a bridge smaller than the Golden Gate unfeasible, was the hand-operated tram option. It was something I saw outside McCarthy, Alaska, near Wrangell St. Elias National Park. Sort of a cable suspending an elevated cage big enough for a family plus gear, stretched above the River to the furthest definition of “bank-to-bank.”
I was explaining how even a child could pull him or herself hand-over-hand via the overhead cable, when along ambled Mark Orton, my river AAA guy, strolling the far bank. Dad and son shouted plans to bring in some sort of monster bulldozer from the local Boss Hogg with the intent of ramming the river into understanding how we wanted it to flow to allow our escape. It was hard to hear Mark above the rapids of a river running, at last count before the gauge washed away, at 1,090 Cubic Feet Per Second. Average for this time of year? 23 Cubic Feet Per Second. The previous record for August? 250 in 1988.
“Before you do that,” I shouted across the River. “Wait a couple hours. After breakfast I’m gonna bring out my Shop Vac, which has the wet vacuum option.”
“You sprung for the Wet/Dry Option? I saw that on sale at Wal-Mart and almost bought it myself. Tell you what, do it upstream of our spread so we can cross there,” Mark requested, cupping his hands over his mouth. I liked these people. The Ortons seemed to be a happy family full of grandchildren and pie-baking.
”I aim to,” I screamed.
“Need a lot of ‘em though, unless you bought the deluxe model,” Don observed.
“Oh, I dunno,” I said, examining the raging River. “The thing sucks about a gallon a minute – how long could it take?”
“A million of ‘em might be the cheapest way to solve this problem,” Mark observed in a bellow.
That’s when I put my new role as a born-again minimal input Cowboy into practice.
“Is there a problem?” I asked, gesturing to the World Heritage Site of a river valley around us. Half the world was bruise-blue, the wrong, North half. Closer-by, a blue heron roosted on a cottonwood limb.
“There’s only a problem if you’ve got kids you got to get to school every day,” Mark pointed out.
“Catapult?” I suggested. “There’s got to be a way.”
I couldn’t tell from across the River if Mark thought I was serious, or just believed catapulting his offspring might be a good solution for getting his son, Matthew, to the school bus at the paved Highway 35 a half mile further along the dry side of El Otro Lado. He didn’t smile, and looked contemplative. I decided to keep talking.
“I’ve already got all my best R&D people on the Teleporter project. Typical red tape stuff is holding it up — there’s issues with permitting and whether it’s in FAA or NASA jurisdiction. “
This time Mark smiled. We bitched about the latest imminent deluge with a Western understated reticence, but we all loved it.
How could we not? Myself, having just purchased a property not only with essentially no ingress or egress. but with a second flooding creek on the property itself, I had to be at peace with the situation or else abandon all vestiges of self-respect.
People are so trained to treat Biblical catastrophe as though it’s a BAD thing.
Here’s the LOVEsubeee stranded between two rising river channels:
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