Year of the flow

Lest anyone wonder (as I often have) whether the monotonously vine-ridden vistas of rural Sonoma County, California are entirely devoid of fabulous cutting-edge public art installations, I am pleased to present a photo snapped a few weeks ago while riding my bike along the banks of Sonoma Creek. I call it “The Hamburger.” What is it? Well, it’s a painting of a hamburger. Most likely acrylic, on an 18x24” masonite board. Artist unknown (it’s signed, but the signature was illegible). It appeared amongst the blackberry brambles and vincas and other unnamed underbrush on the creek side of the road a few weeks ago, just propped up casually against a trailing branch from an escaped grapevine, and I stopped to document the occasion. It was there for about a week, just long enough to inspire a pact with a friend to install more of this type of art around town this year, and then it disappeared.

It’s a good thing I took that photo when I did. Because even if nobody had stolen The Hamburger, it would definitely be gone by now, as the whole road and many of the houses facing it spent most of the weekend under several feet of rapidly rushing water. It's been raining for days. It's still raining. Old timers are calling it “the worst storm to hit the valley in a hundred years – maybe ever.”

So it’s been an exciting several days, what with the storm and the flooding and the holiday and the busted up water main and the bridge next to our house having to be shored up with giant boulders brought in by the county, thanks in part to those weasels who’ve been stealing rocks out of the creek for all these years. Plus, I went to my first professional sports event!

I’ll start with that. Mr. A's old boss invited us to go to a San Jose Sharks game with him and his family on Friday night. I'd been to a few minor league hockey games in Salt Lake City in the 80s and was expecting nothing more than a big fluorescently lit frozen arena full of drunken mulletted hockey fans and possibly, if I was lucky, a little blood (and/or a few teeth) on the ice.

The Sharks were a class act from the get-go, however. A few impressions:

1. I hadn't expected such a highly produced, multi-sensory, multimedia experience. There was a psychedelic light show, an apocalyptically loud heavy metal soundtrack, video monitors everywhere you looked, an air horn worthy of a cruise ship that made my whole body vibrate every time they honked it, and a giant shark's head suspended above the arena, with glowing red eyes that lit up every time something exciting happened.

2. The shark's head actually started out on the ice, though I didn't notice it until I saw the players come shooting out of its mouth onto the rink! Very dramatic. After that, invisible cables raised it high into the rafters where it hung for the rest of the game, flashing its eyes and occasionally releasing an ominous drift of white smoke.

3. The kid next to me was eating blue cotton candy. It smelled so good I almost bought some for myself. Almost.

4. A few people heckled when the national anthem was sung. But when the singer came around to the part about "the home of the brave," the entire stadium shook with applause, whistling, yelling, stamping of feet, and other signs of patriotic approval.

5. Many, many times during the game I found myself laughing uncontrollably with delight over the pure spectacle of it all. I had not expected to enjoy it all so much. I loved the way the energy would rise and fall through the stadium as the whole crowd "oohed" and "aahed" at the same time. I loved the thunderous (no other word for it) applause. I loved watching the players zoom around on the ice. Best of all was that song they play when the home team scores – I don't know what it's called but it goes something like this: da-DAdaDAdaDA (YAY!) daDAdaDA (repeat)." Got that?

I loved yelling "YAY!" with all the other hockey fans!

After the game we wandered around for awhile in the strangely secular Christmas carnival that was still set up in downtown San Jose. Hundreds of animatronic elves, teddy bears, and Santa's workshops, but not a single manger to be seen. We also watched some toddlers riding the miniature carnival rides, like a baby ferris wheel with only six seats, the "Jumpin' Star," in which the tiny passengers are raised to the dizzying height of about eight feet and then dropped suddenly and thrillingly to a height of oh, about seven feet ... and my favorite, "The Bear Affair," which featured giant carved-out bears that you sit inside of as you twirl gently around and around in circles. I love watching little kids having fun.

There was a great picture I could have taken, had I remembered the camera, of a haggard-faced bleached blond woman with big black mascara lashes leaning her chin on her hand under the harsh lights inside the ticket booth. The ticket window was mostly closed so only about half of her face was visible. Everything outside was so cheerfully, vividly colored, reflecting the blinking lights of the carnival and all those happy toddlers' voices, and then in the middle of it was this still, stark black and white slice of pure boredom.

Moving on, and stepping up the pace a bit: It took us almost two hours to get home because of the storm, and when we turned onto our road it was obvious that the whole street had been under water not long before. We got out of the car to look at the bank I was worrying about last summer. It had finally eroded all the way up to the edge of the asphalt and fast-moving little brown waves of flood water were lapping up over it even as the rain continued to fall. After we got home we walked back to see what the creek was doing at the back of our property. It had gone over the banks there too, and then had gone down several feet, and was in the process of rising again. On our way back to the house Mr. A noticed water pooling up in the back yard, so we spent another hour digging trenches to prevent the whole lake from flooding into the garage. It was 3:30 before we finally got to bed.

The next day we returned to the creek and saw that it had flooded again, even higher than it had the night before. The grass was plastered down and big swirls of mud and sand reached ten to twenty feet up into the field. The creek itself is utterly changed – it's more than doubled in width, cut the banks back several feet on our side and almost 30 feet on the other side, filled in old channels with rocks and sand, and chewed into the neighbors' field to carve new channels twice as deep as the old ones. There's now a new island out in the middle, with somebody's rotted old blue and yellow plywood boat marooned in a pile of rocks that weren't there just a few days ago. We spent several hours checking out the changes and it felt so good to be out in the air and the water and the rocks and plants and soil, that I made my only new year's resolution for 2006: I want to spend more time exploring the world outside this year.

On New Year's Day we got up at five and drove down to watch the sunrise from Mount Tam. Then we drove back down the mountain and went hiking at Rodeo Beach for a couple of hours, then had breakfast, then ran various errands, then took a long bath and a long nap. Then dinner, then sleep, then back to work.

As of this morning, the storm has let up temporarily, though the creeks are still high and it's supposed to start raining again tomorrow. Despite the destruction, I'm taking all this water as a good sign. Time to honor the flow, baby!

Happy 2006, all.