Hell & High Water

In December of 1996, I was living in a guest house in Reno, Nev., my friends were afraid to visit. It was a room with a stove, sink and my belongings crammed in sideways. The commode was down the scary hallway. I rented it in October dirt cheap: $200 a month. My friend, Katharine, told me the building was part of Reno's former Black Town, an area betwixt downtown and Washoe Medical Center that had been home to black people during WW II. Having just come off a four-month stint as a wildland firefighter, I wanted to put my feet up and teach myself screenplay writing. I drew a pathetic $600 a month in U.I. and rarely drove my Ford F-150.

Right before New Year's 1997, I got some late fire pay from the Forest Service. It was enough to get me over the Sierras and down into Cali to visit a friend for the week. I would trade Reno's bitter winter winds for California's balmy rains.

I got to my friend's on the 28th. Her father came over for his birthday on New Year's Eve. It had been drizzling throughout my visit and that night -- while we drank discount champagne and ate canapes -- it started to pour.

The next morning I left for Reno. We had heard tiny highway 49 through American River Canyon was partly flooded and there were reports the river(s) along I-80 might breach the highway.

I drove through water up to the door panels on my pickup. When I got home on New Year's Day, it was surreally warm. The surrounding desert was soaked, rain washed the snow on Mt. Peavine down into the housing development below it. Exhausted and coming down with a bitch of a cold; I took some NyQuil and went to bed.

I woke up at 7 p.m. to the insistent deep, thumping noise outside my flop house. I opened the front door and looked up at a National Guard huey hovering 75 feet above my 2-story building. A cop car was in the street with their P.A. system blaring in Spanish. They were urging everyone living immediately south of the Truckee River to evacuate.

Calmly, I walked through the dingy slum three blocks to the 7-11 on the corner of S. Wells and E. 2nd, just a half block from where Wells Ave. bridged the normally sedate Truckee. There was a half foot (12 centimeters) of water everywhere except the 7-11 which stood on a sort of little mound several feet above the streets. The parking lot was full of cop cars. I saw one of the SWAT SUVs full of what looked like manila folders and office gear. Nobody paid any attention to me as I wandered into the 7-11 and bought a cup of piping-hot decaf.

I walked back outside and headed toward the walkway that runs under the Wells Avenue bridge. When I got to the lower bridge that runs straight over the Truckee, the frothy brown water was level with the pavement. A Mexican family with a baby in a stroller was hooting excitedly and leaning out over the railing to take pictures of the roiling water. I walked part way out on the lower bridge and stopped when I felt the river water shaking and snapping the concrete bridge like a dish rag.

Back at my hovel, I called my friend Katharine and asked her if she could spare a room and a sofa. She lived north of the Truckee and I-80 on a hill off Keystone Ave. in a 100-year-old house made out of river stone.

I loaded my computer, etc. into the cab of my truck, and went to her place. An hour after I got there, the police closed all the bridges between north and south Reno.

The next day, we listened to radio reports of Red Cross shelters in the suburbs overflowing with people. On the TV, news stations showed dozens of stalled cars in downtown area where casino workers had tried to drive through the flood to get home. Ambulances sat stalled in intersections with the syrupy mess lapping at their door panels. Police Search & Rescue crews waded into the edges of the icy river to fish homeless drunks or stupid kayakers out. The cop's faces had that pinched, annoyed no-amount-of-money-is-worth-this look.

The waters receded the next day when the water master ala Sierra Pacific Power Co. closed the release flumes that run out of Lake Tahoe and form the Truckee. Later we would learn, a lot of the flooding had occurred in Reno to "prevent" luxury homes being flooded along the shores of Lake Tahoe.

Two of the main bridges were opened and I drove back home. Ironically, the firetrap I lived in, had been built flush to the ground but on a slightly elevated pad, like the 7-11 store. The water stopped bare inches from the back door to my room.

I took my clunky 35mm camera and walked to the police station and downtown. The temperature had plummeted from about 55 to 28 degrees Fahrenheit. Everywhere a tarry mess of mud, sewage and motor oil was frozen slickly to the sidewalks and streets. The police station was boarded up, with a couple of SUVs idling in the parking lot. There was a vast wall of branches, trash and muddy debris stretching across the station parking lot.

Shivering, I got to where the vacant Mapes Hotel then stood, adjacent to the Cal-Neva, a dive casino that never, ever closed it's doors for anything; not presidential assassinations, not wars, nothing. It was closed.

At the S. Virginia St. bridge, a large propane tank, probably washed downstream from Verdi, bobbed dangerously in the surging current against the old cement and metal bridge along with hundreds of tree branches, trash and a dead cow.

The smell coming not just from the river, but from the awful black mud covering everything was unbelievable. It was like a cross between a septic tank, a dead cat and burning motor oil. The stench would stay in downtown Reno, in it's tacky red casino floor carpeting for the next year. To this day, if you stand in the Cal-Neva when the A/C breeze isn't blowing right you can still catch a whiff of the New Year's Flood of 1997.

By 2000, the city of Reno still had not completely re-built after what could be described as a moderate flood in a modest-sized town. FEMA money for the re-building of parks which lined the river and the repair of warehouses took years to get and just as long to utilize.

I've been in one medium-sized flood, numerous wild fires, three knock-ya-down temblors and one bad wind storm that imitated a tornado. But, the scariest thing I've ever seen were those roiling, filthy waters on the Wells Ave. bridge that night. It was as though the river water had grown teeth and it was chewing its way relentlessly through the cement of the city.

In cultural myths, it's not earthquakes or fires that destroyed the ancient world but a flood.

Please help the victims of Katrina

-- Mz M.