The National Weather Service warned Southern California residents to prepare for “life-threatening” flooding, which could overwhelm flood-control systems and other infrastructure. The storm is also expected to bring punishing winds that could topple trees and power lines. LA Times

“It’s been 84 years since [a hurricane] came ashore, so it’s a once-in-a-lifetime event. This is really an all-hands-on-deck effort.” LA County Supervisor Janice Hahn.

Way back when Michele had COVID – or was testing positive and feeling very punk – I left the Great Central Valley expecting to pick up Highway 178 from the north, but the highway was still washed out from the same Spring storms that had formed Lake Tulari. After detouring south, I got on Highway 178 under an increasingly cloudy sky.

I planned to stay in Lone Pine for a couple of nights and spend the days driving up into the Sierras on the roads that lead to trailheads so I could noodle around photographing. I got up in the morning to a beautiful day with an almost clear sky, and Mt. Whitney glowed in the early light.

When I looked at the LA Times website, they were getting hysterical over Tropical Storm Hillary. As I drove up to Onion Valley at 9,600 feet, I was starting to get a little nervous and I kept thinking, This is not like me to get anxious over a rain storm. But that fear – caution, whatever – is like me. I don’t like it, I want to deny it, but as I’ve gotten older, I’ve become more cautious. More risk-averse. Risks I routinely took as a young man – or even as a middle-aged man – now seem like real risks. Real risks I no longer want to take. Now, I kept thinking about the roads into the Sierras that had been washed out and how I didn’t want to be on them in the expected heavy rainstorm.

Hillary was reputed to be the biggest storm in a hundred years, and I didn’t want to be in it. Still, the eye of the storm hadn’t reached Baja California, and I was about twelve hundred miles north of that, so I figured I had a couple of days of clear sky. Then, coming back down from Onion Valley, where it was Spring and the flowers were in bloom, the sky was getting cloudier by the hour, and I was getting more fearful.

By the time I got to the Mono Lake overlook, the sky was looking threatening. The threatening sky convinced me to bail out on the 395 corridor and drive to Michele’s family cabin for the night.

By the time I got to Bridgeport, the sky was getting dark.

I started thinking about the speed at which a clear day became dark and gloomy and how this was the biggest storm to hit California in 84 years. Another way to say that is We had a storm like that before. But we are still pumping hydrocarbons into the atmosphere and approaching the day when storms won’t be like Hillary, they will be bigger and they will be like nothing we have had before.

Much of what is happening today has happened before, but we are heading for a time when heat domes will be hotter and last longer than ever before, and hurricanes and typhoons will be more voracious. The rains will be heavier than ever, and the floods bigger. We’ll try to adjust, humans are good at adjusting, but before we can completely adjust, it will get worse. Setting new records, hotest for forever or most rain in one day in history type records.

Driving towards Tahoe, I started thinking that Hillary is not a once-in-a-lifetime event, Hillary is the future. When I got to the family cabin in Olympic Valley, I unloaded the car, and went to dinner at Plump Jack where I had a glass of light red wine and an outstanding cioppino with the scallops and prawns cooked perfectly. It was a great way to end the day and, when I had a sip of wine, closed my eyes, and relaxed, I could almost hear Nero playing his violin.

Revised slightly after finding my old smartPhone.

Even Saying “I Lost My Phone” is embarrassing; is how I started this post when I thought I had lost it. How does somebody lose their phone, anyway? I still don’t know because, although I thought I lost my phone, I didn’t. I thought I lost it at home, but it turned out it was in the Hyundai driver’s door pocket, which both Michele and I had checked at least three times each.

The phone is an HTC, and for the last couple of years, Michele has been saying, “You need a new phone; this one is sooo old.” I kept telling Michele, “Why get a new phone when this one still works?” As a disclaimer, I probably don’t need to make, I am not a heavy phone user, which means that I am not a phone connoisseur or even a reliable judge on whether a phone is working well. I use the phone as a phone – only occasionally and somewhat reluctantly – use the night sky object identification app, the What Mountain Is This app, read the news when I’m standing in a line or waiting for a doctor, and use the timer all the time. Oh, I am also a heavy user of Google Maps and Ways.

I rarely use the camera, although that might change. While the phone was hiding from us, and we both thought it was lost, Michele bought me a Google Pixel 7 Pro. The Pixel is a much better tool; it fits my hand much better as a phone and is almost infinitely more intuitive, and I already miss my old HTC (but not enough to charge it). It reminds me of my second car; like my second car, the THC was almost unbreakable. And quirkily reliable.

Years ago, many, many years ago, when I was about 16 -17, my parents wanted me to buy my grandparents’ car because my grandfather had died and my grandmother didn’t drive. The car sat in their driveway, exfoliating in the hot Santa Rosa sun. The car was a 1948 Pontiac Chiefton 4 door, with faded blue paint and perfect, grey, velour upholstery. It had chrome stripes on the hood and an orange hood ornament that lit up when the lights were turned on. Still, this was back when Pontiac was just a slightly more expensive Chevrolet so it was far from delux. The car was eleven years old, and I paid three hundred dollars for it. On the way home from my grandparents, the car stopped on the highway; it just stopped. It turned out there was rust in the gas tank because the car hadn’t been driven in years, so the opening sequence was getting it towed to a shop nearer home. I did not think it was a good omen.

But, it turned out, it was a very good car; it was simple, rugged, sort of reliable, simple, and easy to fix. I put a lot of miles on that car on dirt roads and learned the value of good tires and driving fast enough not to get stuck. One time, on a dirt road north of Chester, California, we ran into a group of three jeeps parked next to a shallow creek with a small bank on the other side that other people had oviously driven up. The drivers were strategizing their creek crossing, and we stopped and talked to them – rolled-down window style – for a couple of minutes. Then we just backed up, drove across the creek at the high end of a reasonable speed, and bashed up the bank on the other side, leaving them still wondering if they should get their jeeps wet. The Pontiac was that kind of practicle vehicle.

When I went away to college, I sold the car to a friend for $25.00 and a Heathkit stereo. A couple of years later, he sold it to another friend for $25.00, and after a couple of years of banging around Colorado back roads, it broke down on a road near Long’s Peak. Our friend says he walked out, but he probably hitched. I like to think that the Pontiac is still there, slowly rusting back into the landscape.

My now-defunct HTC was a lot like the Pontiac. Anyway, the point also is that, when I got the car from my grandparents, they had covered the soft grey velour upholstery with a thick, clear vinyl covering. I never understood that. When I got it, the paint was shot, the car rattled driving down any road that wasn’t very smooth, and the windows noisily leaked air at any speed above thirty, but the upholstery was brand new. And I’ve since transferred that non-understanding of my grandparents’ vinyl to not understanding putting bras on the front of cars – mostly Porches, it seems -to putting covers on smartphones. At first, I followed the social pressure and put a cover on my HTC, but I liked how the phone looked – it has a beautiful, rounded glass back – so I took the cover off. Over the last couple of years, the phone had been dropped on hardwood floors, sidewalks, and even the street once. The day I thought I lost it, the phone still looked almost new. It still does.

Throughout its history, the conservation movement had been little more than a minor nuisance to the water-development interests in the American West. They had, after all, twice managed to invade National Parks with dams; they had decimated the greatest salmon fishery in the world, in the Columbia River; they had taken the Serengeti of North America—the virgin Central Valley of California, with its thousands of grizzly bears and immense clouds of migratory waterfowl and its million and a half antelope and tule elk—and transformed it into a banal palatinate of industrial agriculture. Marc Reisner, Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water

I have no apologies. I was a crusader for the development of water. I was the messiah: Floyd Dominy, Former Commissioner the Bureau of Reclamation.

Before Michele got Covid, we planned to go down to Lake Tulare, which used to be part of a vast wetlands fifty miles – plus or minus – north of Bakersfield at the southern end of California’s Great Central Valley. It used to be is the operative phrase here: Lake Tulare started disappearing in the 1880s when the local White farmers started diverting the creeks and rivers feeding the lake. At the time, an estimated – very roughly estimated – 10,000 to 15,000 members of the Tachi Yokut tribe lived around the lake, and, depending on your point of view, they were either driven out or left because the lake was going dry and they couldn’t make a living (I’m going with a combination of both, BTW).

As the lake and wetlands were reduced and the Native Americans left, White farmers turned the former lake area into a farming area. Now, the lake has, at least temporarily, returned – without the accompanying tulle-filled wetlands – flooding the field. Michele suggested I go alone while she was quarantined at home. Ironically, the best place to stay near the lake is the Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino, which is owned by, you guessed it, the Tachi Yokuts. I’m ambivalent on the question of Native Americans being given the right to fleece people by way of reparations for them being cheated by other people. On one hand, we did take their land away and are not going to give it back, so we do owe the Native Americans something, but saying you can have legal gambling seems a little out of left field.

I say that with very little data; I’ve only been in two Native American Casinos, one in Bishop and this one out in the middle of nowhere. The Wanaaha casino in Bishop, owned by the Bishop Paiute Tribe, was almost empty the time I stopped by, and it occurred to me that Bishop is probably not a good place to build a casino. It is out of the way, and there are too many other attractions.

However, It turns out that the middle of nowhere is an excellent place to build a casino. The Tachi Palace Hotel & Casino is a stellar success story; the Tachi Yokuts paid off the original construction loan in seven months and now use the money generated to pay for youth recreation programs, college scholarships, and the construction of homes on newly acquired land. I arrived at twilight, checked into a lovely room, had the worst Manhatten I’ve ever had with a mediocre dinner, and…

I checked out the next morning to look for Lake Tulari.

For years, I have been quoting John McPhee, who quoted geologist Eldridge Moore in Assembling California when he said that California’s Great Central Valley is the largest flat place in North America. I believed Moore, but not as viscerally as I would have liked. After driving around looking for the lake, I now believe it. The farm roads in the area run north-south or east-west as if the lake were not even there, which, of course, it wasn’t when the roads were put in.

When I had checked in the night before, I asked how I could get to Lake Tulari, and one of the young women said to drive to the end of Nineteenth Street, which I did the next morning. That was the first and last time I actually saw the lake. The lake had partially evaporated – but only partially, even in the high temperatures -but was now partially refilling because of the late spring thaw in the Sierras.

I drove around for a while, trying to get a better view of the lake, but I kept running into roadblocks at intersections. This is not an area of family farms or what I think about when I think of family farms; this was an area of corporate farms. When I got up in the early morning, the temperature was in the low 80s; now it was about ten, with the temperature climbing past 90 and scheduled to rise to 115. I drove back to Tachi Reservation for a quick look around…

…and left to drive east to Big Pine through the Sierra foothills, where I surprisingly found an old oilfield being reopened.

It was getting very hot, and several of the roads were still blocked by last winter’s storms and the whole trip was starting to feel like a boondoggle.