Now let me tell you about the water. Pull up a seat, friend, because on this quiet road with the trees standing so peaceful, it is very hard to believe what I'm about to say — and every word of it is true.
December, nineteen sixty-four. Right at Christmas. It had been a hard cold December, snow up in the high country, and then came what they call a Pineapple Express — a warm, wet river of air out of the tropics that parked over Northern California and rained. Not for an hour. For DAYS. Warm rain, falling on deep snow, melting it all at once, and every creek and gully in these mountains dumping into the Eel. The river you've been driving beside — that pretty, shallow, green thing you can wade across in summer — rose, and rose, and did not stop rising.
And here's the part that gets me every time. In the town of Weott, back where we passed the visitor center, the water came up over the ROOFTOPS. Not into the houses — over the top of them.
Now, they put up a pole to mark it, and that pole plays a trick on people. There's a sign on it at about chest height that says High Water, December nineteen sixty-four — and nearly everybody nods at it and walks away, thinking, well, that's bad, waist-deep. That sign is not the mark. Look UP. The real waterline is at the TOP of that pole, better than thirty feet over your head — three stories of river, standing right where your boots are. Whole towns went under. Houses came off their foundations and went down the valley whole, turning in the current with the lights still on in some of them, until they broke apart on the bridges. Bridges went out. The roads went out. Mill towns simply ceased to exist and were never rebuilt — you have driven past their empty flats today and never knew a town had been there.
And the trees? The trees stood. That's the thing. The water went over the roofs of the houses and the thousand-year-old redwoods stood in it up to their waists and did not care — because they have done this before, a hundred times, and it is how they were built. When the water went down they simply grew new roots up into the fresh silt and carried on. The people rebuilt what they could, higher up. Weott moved uphill. So the next time you glance at that gentle river out your window, remember it is only sleeping — and that the giants beside you have watched it wake up more times than we have been a country.