Flash Flood

The recent flooding in central Texas has left me thinking about my own idyllic stream-side existence in New Mexico, and the nature of human consciousness. My El Rito adobe home stands next to an arroyo that was diverted by Spanish subsistence farmers sometime in the 1800’s to protect their irrigation ditch from being inundated and filled with sediment. With shovels, they built a modest berm that sent the arroyo flow sideways and out into a field down the way, past my neighbor John’s house. Topographically speaking, the flow coming off the ridges behind my house wants to run in its old channel that runs by my house. The berm has held up to this day, not because it is some kind of engineering marvel, but because we haven’t had one of those rainstorms like they had in Texas the other day.

Two days after the disaster in Texas, the New Mexico town of Ruidoso, 250 miles to the south of me, got one of those rainstorms, and the little creek around which the town was built turned into a raging monster, taking out houses and killing three people. Last summer a violent storm hit much closer to home, in the nearby Jemez mountains. Floodwaters roaring down local arroyos hit the Chama River, a major tributary of the Rio Grande, with such force it changed the course of the river, washed away multiple residences and carved off acres of arable bottomland and left a plug of sediment in the old riverbed 100 yards wide, 5 feet deep and more than a mile long.

So this sinuous V-shaped weed-choked ten foot deep ravine running by my house, mostly inactive for the past 200 years, tells a story about the landscape that I don’t really want to hear, in the same way that all those Texans living and going to summer camp along the Guadalupe River didn’t want to hear. It’s a story that calls into question that comfortable feeling of permanence we humans naively impute to our surroundings, to the point where we ignore the stern warnings carved into the landscape. In Texas they even had a nick-name for the Guadalupe River basin, “Flash-Flood Alley,” which is literally what the arroyo running by my house is. The Guadalupe River, like my arroyo, has been behaving itself more or less for years now, leaving locals with the impression of permanence, that this riverside - or arroyo-side - life is just going to keep on going as is for the foreseeable future.

My stream-side idyll is also threatened by the stream itself, which is fed by a hundred narrow arroyos along its ten mile course through the high country above my house. I have to cross this stream to get to my house, on a bridge I constructed by dragging a seven-ton flatbed railroad car down my driveway forty years ago. We’ve had some “gully-washers” or “turd-floaters,” as the cattlemen say, over the years, even one of those “Biblical” rainstorms in 1980 that did flood me out of a little dugout house I was living in nearby (flash flood waters flowed into my house), and turned my placid creek into a raging orange torrent. But when you see what these more recent storms are doing to the landscape, you understand that we aren’t talking about the storms of yore. As Elizabeth Kolbert wrote in the New Yorker last week, “It can be said definitively that in a warming world, flooding of the sort that occurred in Texas will become more common.”

When I see those images of destruction in Texas, or of houses in southern New Mexico washing down what was an hour earlier a narrow stream, or when I drive by the site of last year’s nearby flash floods, only twenty minutes drive from my house - you can still see a ruined mobile home dangling hopelessly over the edge of a raw arroyo bank - I can’t help but apply those images to my own landscape. In El Rito, just a few hundred yards upstream from my bridge in the placid creek is a catastrophe waiting to happen. It’s the accumulated tangle of years of drought-killed cottonwood trees that slowly floated down the river piece by piece in modest rain events and spring runoff and got caught up here. But in a big storm like we’ve been seeing, super-sized by forces related to climate change and thus incomparable to what’s passed before, that tangle of trees, and the many more further upstream, would push free into the muscular current and tumble downstream, grinding and pushing anything and everything in their path, including my bridge, toward the Chama River, toward the Rio Grande, toward the sea.

People live with risks to life and property all over the world, and almost always the danger is apparent, known to the many. In California, where I’ve spent much of my life, the threat of mass destruction and death from earthquake is omnipresent, and we’ve gone through several horrific episodes of wildfire, and floods, too. And yet we delude ourselves with a comforting illusion that the world is largely unchanging, that tomorrow it will be very much like it was today. I don’t like worrying about disaster, so I kind of just don’t do it. Much. Of course, this little piece I’m writing now is me worrying about my house or my bridge washing away and about profound changes to the landscape that might happen. I look warily at the incredibly beautiful thunderheads building up over the mountains behind my house. Is this gonna be “that” storm?

I think it’s interesting how we accommodate to these omnipresent risks. People build houses and run summer camps in flood zones, in fire zones, in earthquake zones. These little river floods are nothing compared to the risk of flooding from earthquake induced tsunamis along the west coast, and yet millions of us just go about our days blissfully ignoring the danger. It feels like the same kind of apathy that has lost us our democracy and our benevolent climate. The danger doesn’t seem real. Yet.

The day after my house flooded back in 1980, I went for a walk up the riverbed. It had been transformed from a normal boulder-strewn creek into a broad flat expanse of pure white sand. Instead of disaster, it was magic. Yes, the soggy house was a mess, but the creek was totally transformed into a winding white roadway so smooth I could walk with my eyes closed. It only lasted a day or so before all the sand washed away and the boulders popped back up. I had a memorable moment of terror on that walk, when I stepped on what appeared to be solid ground and sunk instantly up to my crotch in a drift of hail ice.

This was so cool. And cold, too. Who ever heard of this phenomenon? The storm had begun with a big dump of hail (it had completely shredded my vegetable garden - all that was left of the corn plants was stalks and threads) which was followed by heavy rain which washed the hail into the stream. Floating on the current the hail collected in an eddy, mixing in with other floating detritus like piñon pine needles. The eddy was filling up with hail and pine needles until the river receded. Overnight the hail on the surface melted and disappeared, leaving the dark pine needles on top covering this pocket filled with hail. It looked like solid ground. I don’t think there’s a moral to this part of the story.

Post Script

I finished writing the above last Saturday. On Tuesday afternoon Wendy and I left El Rito for Santa Fe with a thunderstorm looming up in the hills behind the house. We heard a few rumbles of thunder, no different from days past, when promising (and incredibly beautiful) banks of clouds built up, made some noise, and then slid on by without making much fuss. A hour later, just as we were climbing the last hill coming into Santa Fe, we got a call from my neighbor, John. His voice sounded somewhat garbled, almost as if he were speaking under water. He was kind of shouting.

“Are you here? This storm is epic. It’s doing damage, the arroyo is running full tilt, I can’t even go outside, it’s almost continuous lightning, I’ve never seen anything like it, this is the big one……”

John sounded a mix of awe-struck and freaked out. He was looking out his window at the arroyo diversion flowing behind his house, and it was topping the berm and flowing in gaudy sheets into his vegetable garden right next to his house, while the main flow just blasted out into the open field below, carrying off his little foot bridge, carrying boulders and sand and tires from the neighbor’s yard. By the time the storm tapered off, he had a fresh five inches of sandy soil covering his garden, and a field filled with round rocks and sand.

A neighbor on the other side of the river recorded four inches of rain in his rain gauge, and he was nowhere near the center of the storm. A rain gauge half a mile down the road got a quarter inch. This storm was pinpointed over our backyard. Once the lightning had abated, John went out and checked the neighborhood, sending pictures of what he saw. The arroyo by my house was running more than a foot deep, but well contained within its steep walls, with most of the runoff being captured by the 200-year old diversion and rushing past John’s house and out into the field. John’s driveway was completely submerged, and the river had risen three or four feet and raged through it’s willow-choked banks carrying logs and huge rocks, leaving new thick banks of sandy silt and carving the riverbed a little deeper. It took out the huge beaver dam and pond at John’s riverside, and we later saw another beaver dam washed out upstream. But remarkably, there had been almost no damage to our infrastructure. The bridge over the river was secure.

A couple of days after the storm John and I went to look a little further up our nearby drainages. The next arroyo up had absorbed the brunt of the storm. Who knows how many inches of rain fell on those hills in that hour or two, but regardless the tally, the results were dramatic. Huge boulders littered what had been a smooth road, stumps and trunks of trees had been tossed about willy-nilly. Down where the outflow from the arroyo met the river we found a broad delta of sandy deposits spread out throughout the forest floor, a smooth mucky expanse hundreds of feet wide among the trees. Here the urgent pulse of the massive flash flood coursing downhill met the more level riverbed and had to wait for the river to drain, forming a burgeoning flash flood lake. The slowing floodwaters dropped their burden of sediment, before joining the river and flowing down under my bridge, massive and muscular, carrying logs and boulders that crashed and carved their way between the river’s banks, but somewhat tamed by the river’s moderate incline. The roiling waters remained well below the deck of my bridge.

John said this was the big one, and he might be right. That storm in 1980 dumped two inches and flooded my house, and this storm measured four, almost certainly the biggest storm in those intervening forty-five years. They call such storms “hundred-year events,” as if nature and storm systems go by a schedule. That’s the problem with climate change, it scrambles the actuarial tables. This could be just a warm-up for what’s to come. I guess I’ll just keep worrying. A little bit.

Flood photos by John Evascovich

Top photo by Eric Gent