El Nino Watch A Rain Log from the Russian River kept by Alton Hunsucker, Sonoma County, California

March 8. Five dry days in a row, the first time since January. I had forgotten what the hills look like with the sun on them. The river is down where it belongs, and I walked the whole yard this afternoon with a shovel and a wheelbarrow and came back in with about a third of it moved. Joanne's daffodils are coming up through two inches of silt like nothing happened. I'll add up the season, put in the last of February's notes, and tell about the cleanup next time.

Who's keeping this log

My name is Alton Hunsucker. I'm 62, and I climbed telephone poles for the phone company for thirty-three years before I retired. A good part of those years I spent out in storms like this one, putting lines back up after the trees came down on them, so I have watched a lot of rain from the top of a pole. Now I watch it from the kitchen window, which I recommend.

Joanne and I have lived on the lower Russian River since 1979. The house sits up on the bank, twelve feet above the river at its worst, which is the whole reason we bought this one and not the pretty one down by the water. The yard runs downhill from the house to the river, and the bottom of it is where the garden and my woodshed are. We have a canoe, a rain gauge on the fence post, and neighbors who know their way around a sandbag.

(I have not figured out how to make this computer put the little mark over the n, so it's El Nino on this page. My granddaughter says there's a way. She is eleven and knows everything.)

Why I started this page

All last summer and fall the weather people were saying El Nino every night. The water out in the Pacific along the equator has run warmer this year than anybody has seen in a long time, and a warm Pacific tends to steer one storm after another into California. They said this one was shaping up to be among the strongest on record. The last big one, in '82 and '83, gave my gauge a winter I still talk about. So in October I put a new tube in the gauge, started writing everything down in a spiral notebook, and my son-in-law set me up with this page so the family could keep up.

I read the gauge every evening at six. Those are my numbers, from my own gauge, in my own yard. The official ones are on the radio. An ordinary year at our place runs somewhere around fifty inches. You'll see we passed that the day after Valentine's Day.

The Gauge

The Daily Log

Every day with rain since New Year's, newest on top. Dry days left out. Inches are for the day; the season column is the running total since October 1. October through December are in the monthly table above.

The Sandbags

The county put out sand and empty bags at the fire station, free for the shoveling. On January 19 Roy Greear from up the hill, Glen Helms and his two boys from down the road, and I filled 140 bags in the rain in a little over three hours. Glen's boys did most of it. I supervised, which at my age is a skill.

Here's what the bags are for, since a few of you asked. They won't stop a river. Nothing stops a river. What they do is keep the water and the mud from going where you'd rather it didn't: across the garage door, around the well house, along the low side of the shop where the floor sits lower than the yard. You lay them like bricks, staggered, tamp each one down, and fold the open end under. A row two high around the well house kept the pump dry the whole month. I shut the power off to the shop at the panel before the first big storm, which is the lineman in me.

Lila Shouse next door has lived on this river since before the flood in December of '55, and she supervised the supervisor. She said our bags looked better than the ones in '86. I'm taking that.

Moving the Cars

The rule on the river is that when they say flood watch, the cars go uphill. Our driveway is fine, but the road out isn't: there's a low spot a quarter mile down where the river comes over first, and once it's over, you're not driving anywhere. On the afternoon of February 2 Roy let us park both cars in his turnaround, and I walked back down in the rain. Joanne packed a bag "just in case" and set it by the door, and then she made pot roast, because she has been through '86 and '95 in this house and she was not leaving for this one.

The Night the River Came Into the Yard

Monday, February 2, was the biggest day my gauge has ever seen: 4.86 inches by six o'clock, and still coming down so hard you couldn't hear the radio over the roof. The river had been rising all afternoon. By dark it had gone from brown to something closer to chocolate, and it was carrying whole trees past the house, roots and all, turning over slow like a log in a mill pond.

I tied the canoe off to the deck rail around nine, not because I thought we'd need it but because I'd hate to have needed it. Then I sat up with the big flashlight I used to carry on the truck and checked the bank every half hour. A river this high doesn't roar so much as hiss. You hear it in your chest.

At about three in the morning on Tuesday, I put the light on the bottom of the yard and the water was over the bank and moving through the garden. By first light it had come halfway up the yard, around both sides of the woodshed and up to the third row of the old grape stakes. A propane tank went by from somebody's place upriver, and a picnic table, right side up. The house stayed dry, the way it was built to. Joanne came out at six in her robe with two cups of coffee and we stood on the deck and watched it, and neither one of us said much.

It stopped there sometime Tuesday afternoon and started back down by evening. What it leaves behind is the part nobody tells you about: a layer of fine gray silt over everything it touched, like somebody sifted flour over the yard, plus a woodpile that's now a quarter mile downstream. The river came back up with the storms on the 7th and again on the 23rd, but it never got past the bottom of the garden either time. I'll take it.

We were lucky. A lot of folks lower down on the river had water in the house this winter, and for some of them it wasn't the first time lately. If you're one of them and you're reading this, I'm sorry, and I hope you've got good neighbors.

Season total and the cleanup: next update. The final number for the rain year, how it compares with '82-'83, and how a 62-year-old man and a wheelbarrow move a yard's worth of river mud. Also some pictures of the yard during the high water, when Joanne's roll of film comes back from the drugstore.