So Long, El Nino; Please Come Again

If anyone was due to get hit hard or even wiped off the face of the map by the floods of this year’s El Nino, it was my family.

Just about all the long-term residents of our little corner of Southern California--Upper Ojai--will agree on that point.

“I wouldn’t want to be living in the old Titus place this year,” said one old-timer to our local school secretary last fall. The man who built our modest ranch-style home back in 1957 told me he might have made a mistake building it where he did.

“When I was going to build it, they tried to warn me,” Ed Titus said. “They didn’t want to hurt my feelings, but . . . .”

In truth, the old-timers are not wrong: We are in harm’s way, and should Sisar Creek, as it comes roaring down the Topa Topas, decide not to turn to the south but continue to the east--our house will be in grave peril.

This piece of local history is worth mentioning for one reason: The risk we take every year gives me the right to make the following argument: For the vast majority of us, El Nino is no disaster. On the contrary, if you care about Southern California’s air quality, or water supplies, or natural beauty, El Nino is a welcome visitor to our shores.

To put it in terms of natural history, for every tree uprooted and swept away by rampaging floods, a dozen others will spring up.

It’s not widely known, but Southern California has not just a fire ecology (a set of plants dependent on wildfire to thrive) but also a flood ecology. The same floods that tore tons of stone and dirt and roots from our banks have left behind little beaches of silt and tiny pebbles. In those soft banks a few of the millions of seeds left by alders and willows and other habitues of the stream will take root. Within two or three years, a few of the fast-growing alders will be 10 or 20 feet high; the willows and the nettles will gather at their trunks, and the floods of ’98 will have produced the habitats and the beauty of the next century.

(How do I know this? Because the El Nino-intensified “March miracle” floods of ’92 left behind scores of alder saplings along our local stream bank--some of which are now nearly 30 feet tall.)

With the heavy rain will come, of course, heavy blooms. Just as inevitably, they will be followed by clouds of gnats and mosquitoes and other less-well-known ephemera. Though irritating to homeowners, these will be a delight to countless other long-term denizens of Ventura County. Frogs and toads will make the night throb with their boastings; the days will be full of the chittering of juncos and scoldings of jays and bats will, we hope, return to their evening air shows of swoops and dives and loops.

All of which is very well, you may say, and wonderful if you wear feathers or speak in croaks, but what about those people whose homes on Cedar Street in Ventura collapsed? What about those people in accidents caused by downpours? What about the farmers who lost crops? Was not the weather of ’98 a catastrophe for those people?

I cannot explain away these catastrophes but I can point out a couple of compensatory facts. For one, provisions have been made for homeowners. Already the county has been declared a disaster area, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency has distributed more than half a million dollars in grants and emergency assistance.

An acquaintance whose family had to flee the Cedar Street landslide reports that the government gave fair warning of the danger. For that reason no lives were lost and, she says, the residents were warned in time to save most of their possessions. Even the woman who lost the most in this disaster seemed upbeat in its aftermath.

“It will be my easiest move,” Kathleen Michaelson told The Times.

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When it comes to automobile accidents, if were are to be fair to the boy child of ‘98, we have to balance the accidents caused by rain against the accidents caused by the carelessness or recklessness of other drivers. Some of the worst accidents of 1997 happened on bright sunny days: faithful newspaper readers may recall the story of a small car full of young people that spun out and crashed on Highway 101. Or the fatal accident on Highway 126 involving a young family returning home from a weekend outing.

Of course, we can’t blame bright sunny days for accidents caused by inattention or recklessness. What shall we blame then? Bad drivers? Sleeplessness? Speeding?

All of these factors may play a part in the loss of lives in automobile crashes but overlook the underlying cause: the physics of explosion-powered vehicles built mostly of steel, weighing two tons or more, traveling at high rates of speed. Because this form of transportation has become a crucial part of our way of life, we take for granted the hazards involved. This includes violent death, visibly polluted air and the unceasing roar of rivers of steel throughout our county.

In fact, by any statistical measure, these rivers of steel--roads and highways and freeways--are far more dangerous to the county’s residents than are the real creeks and streams and rivers. Even during an El Nino year.

(As if to punctuate this point, while I was writing this an emergency helicopter hovered over this area and settled down a quarter-mile away. Later we learned it came to pick up a 19-year-old who had died in a high-speed collision on Highway 150.)

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After the worst of the floods of this year, our little corner of Ventura County briefly was cut off from the world. The road to Ojai was closed by a threatened bridge; the road to Santa Paula was cut off by landslides. Although it cost all of us in some way, in convenience or in money, the residents I spoke to were mostly delighted. Not just because of the serenity caused by the absence of traffic, or because of the excitement caused by having to make arrangements for work or school, but because the disaster forced us to work together. To talk. To help each other out. To become a little more human and a little less vehicular.

Neither were we the only ones. If the reporting of this “disaster” can be trusted, many other residents in areas of natural beauty, such as Moorpark, Ojai and Big Sur, seem willing to trade the risk and tumult of more water for the peace and safety of less traffic.

For this reason, I say--El Nino, you are welcome here. Come again any time. Mi casa es su casa.