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.