Ojai Creek
A creek near the Rev. Jim Burklo's home is flooded from recent rains. (Courtesy Photo)
The old gospel hymn said it would be fire next time, but it appears there’s been a change of plan. Clouds boiled shades and tones of grey over Nordhoff Ridge above Ojai. Then came the deluge. On this parched land, years worth of rain fell in days.
On the roof the pounding of rain, sweeping in heavy sheets, echoed through our house, night and day. Outside, our donkeys, Sespe and Sisar, stood soggy and bewildered in their muddy corral. The drywash behind our house turned into a roaring torrent of muddy water; a chaos of tumbling boulders, uprooted agaves, and broken irrigation pipes. An acre of tangerine orchard next door was carved away, calving four-foot-high blocks of dirt, one after another, into the flow. Later, farther down San Antonio Creek, we saw the bright specks of fruit on the drowned and broken trees wedged into the detritus. All three roads in and out of Ojai were closed by mudflows and slides.
So far, with another arm of the atmospheric river coming from the Pacific soon, our house is intact. Flocks of birds gyre above, seeking worms driven out of the sodden earth. You can almost watch the grass growing in its sudden burst of green. Across the valley, near the top of the huge mountain looming above, a stream drops down three steps of falls in a steep ravine. It is as if Ojai morphed from the Mojave into Kauai overnight.
The storm inspires awe, in forms both of holy wonder and fearsomeness. At moments like this, nature in beauty and power puts us in our puny place in the cosmic order. But on further reflection, it becomes clear that at least on this little planet in this obscure swirl in this nondescript galaxy, we humans are shaping nature in profound ways we didn’t intend. Storms always have come and gone. But the intensity of this one, and of others in recent and imminent time, is surely factored by human-generated carbon emissions. Our neighbor lost a big slice of land due in part to my consumption of gasoline in my lifetime of driving cars. This mighty storm that blew in from the west is, in no small measure, a consequence of karma that I and my fellow humans actively accrued.
I wish it were not so. But alas, I’m one of the feckless deities churning the mists and blasting the wind over the mountains. I’m one of the drunken stevedores recklessly rolling barrels of rain out of the bowels of the colliding clouds. We used to be subjects of nature, but now we’re becoming its bumbling masters.
Such were my sobering sentiments while standing near the crumbling banks of San Antonio Creek yesterday."We are as gods and might as well get good at it,"Stewart Brand, the futurist, wrote in 1968. We have a long way to go.