When Water Rose

I could have told Chuck not to crawl out the car window, especially  not  with  that wooden leg of his.

Telling Chuck anything, especially when he was drinking, was like trying to stop a freight train with a popsicle stick. He had this overblown sense of authority over nature, a misinterpretation of God’s word. He confused dominion with domination. He thought he could command the wind. Reason for the water. That kind of self-importance could drown us both.

Raised on the Boloney Trail, I was used to men who couldn’t resist the chance to audition for village fool. My father was no different: “Hey y’all, hold onto yur diapers!” he yelled out as he took curves twice as fast as the sign warned.

Just past dusk, Chuck and I were on Occidental Road, where it meets High School Road, right over La Laguna de Santa Rosa. Well, technically, those roads run through the laguna. La Laguna is a sprawling 22-mile wetland that drains over 250 square miles of watershed—a sacred, soggy artery running through our corner of the world. But all Chuck saw was a shortcut.

The county had put up big yellow flood signs. Chuck ignored them and my protests. He drove his white VW Bug straight into the water like Chuck rolled down his window and started to lift himself up, but he couldn’t get his prosthetic leg past the steering wheel.

Moses parting the Red Sea. Only this wasn’t the Red Sea. It was La Laguna, three days into a heavy storm, and it was hungry.

There’d always been debate about whether a VW Bug could float. Tonight, the crowd lining the shoulder was ready to find out.

Halfway in, the car began to float. The headlights dipped below the surface. From the far side, I could see silhouettes waving frantically in front of headlights and hear faint yelling “Go back! Go back!”, but it was already too late.

He had crashed his 1948 Indian Chief Roadmaster into a bridge one foggy night somewhere between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Santa Rosa, California.

Water started seeping in through the heater vents. Within minutes, the car began to bob. The wheels had left the road. I watched Chuck fight the steering wheel like it was possessed, but it was no use. We were drifting toward a field.

Chuck rolled down his window and started to lift himself up, but he couldn’t get his prosthetic leg past the steering wheel. He grew angry and started cursing—not at his own recklessness, but at the drunk doctor in a one-horse town who had amputated his leg just below the knee. Chuck had crashed his 1948 Indian Chief Roadmaster into a bridge one foggy night somewhere between St. Paul, Minnesota, and Santa Rosa, California.

When the window proved impossible, he shoved the door open, letting the laguna water rush into the car. Now sitting in waist-deep muddy water, I glanced into the back seat and gasped. My schoolbooks were bobbing like buoys.

“Get out and help me push!” he barked.

Rolling my eyes, I muttered, “What the hell, I’m already wet.”

My door was too hard to open against the water, so I rolled down the window and slid out. My feet dangled into water deeper than I expected. I kicked off, reached for the door handle to keep from drifting away, and began paddling, pushing the car forward. That’s when my dress caught on something sharp.

Barbed wire. We were closer to the field’s fence line than I’d realized. I twisted and kicked, found a fence post with my foot, and shoved hard. My dress tore loose.

We somehow managed to get the VW back on the road. The crowd on the higher ground had grown. Folks were pointing, some laughing as they watched the water pour out of the car door. Leaning against the fender, Chuck pulled up his pant leg and unfastened his prosthetic, dumping out the floodwater like it was the most normal thing in the world. A collective gasp rose from the crowd—half in awe, half in horror.

Then I heard someone call my name. George. Algebra class. Camera strapped around his neck. Just my luck.

They were too busy waiting for God to clean up their messes.

The car wouldn’t start, of course. Waterlogged carburetor. Chuck tried to push-start it by himself – I sat that one out. But the Bug wasn’t having it. Finally, a man in an old truck hooked up a chain, got us moving, and when the timing was right, Chuck popped the clutch, and we sputtered to life.

When we got home, dinner was cold. Or gone. My mother was having a meltdown. She had just mopped the floor, and now we were dripping wet and covered in laguna muck.

She started yelling the second we walked in. “Look at what you’ve done to your dress! I don’t know why I bother sewing clothes for you!”

I stared at her in disbelief. She was more upset about the floor and the dress than the fact that her husband had nearly drowned us.

“Don’t look at me,” I said, backing toward the door. “Wasn’t driving.”

I retreated to my room—the trailer pulled up next to the house. My sanctuary.

Later that night, alone in the trailer and wrapped in the smell of mildew, something shifted. I started thinking differently about the laguna. Not as a nuisance. Not as a flooded mess that almost killed us. But as though it were the victim in the whole ordeal.

The Laguna de Santa Rosa had been used and abused for over a hundred years. Poisoned. Ignored. Taken for granted. Long before I was born. The Pomo tribes had lived with reverence for the wetlands since at least 2000 BC. They knew its rhythms, its plants, its creatures knew how to live with it, not over it. They honored the fish, the birds, the thick reeds, and the quiet, sacred life it held. And here we were, drowning it in pesticide runoff and ego.

I couldn’t change people like my mother or Chuck. They were too busy waiting for God to clean up their messes. But I wasn’t. And maybe, just maybe, I could convince a few people to see what I saw.

Later, when the Sebastopol Co-op Cannery was in full swing, I loaded my 35mm Mamiya Sekor with a macro lens and started documenting everything: the algae blooms, the floating fish, dead birds, the discolored water. The cannery was washing pesticide- coated apples and letting the runoff flow straight into the laguna. I saw orchard workers hauling huge plastic barrels of chemicals behind their tractors. Living in an apple orchard, I breathed that poison every day. But the laguna? It was drowning in it.

When I had enough slides, I packed them into a Kodak carousel, grabbed my projector, and headed to a Sebastopol City Council meeting. I was nervous but determined.

They barely let me speak. Polite smiles. Sideways glances. I could tell they thought I was just a dramatic teenager with a camera. I left deflated.

A few weeks later, I told my civics teacher what had happened. She didn’t laugh. She didn’t belittle me. She invited me to share my slides with the class.

And to my surprise, it worked. They got it. They saw what I saw. Something clicked. And I felt rewarded in a small way.

I don’t know if that moment made a significant difference. The laguna is still fighting for its life, but it seems to have adopted a few caretakers. Regardless, the laguna changed me. I learned that speaking up isn’t about immediate results. It’s about refusing to go under quietly.

Not long after, I read in the paper that the Sebastopol Cooperative Cannery, once the largest apple processor in California, had gone under. Its assets were seized by its major lender. I’d like to think the laguna felt a little relief.

And as for George? I saw him again a few years later at an Earth Day march in Berkeley. Still had a camera slung around his neck. He remembered the flood. Said he’d never forgotten it. Neither will I.