Slip sliding away

Topanga Canyon, after the flood

My mom is pounding on my bedroom door, shouting “Get up! Get dressed! We’ve got to get out of here!”  My first thought is that we have overslept and I am going to miss the bus. Then I wake up enough to remember it is Saturday. 

“Why?”

“Just look out the back door and come on!”  The back door is just outside my room. I peer out into the rainy dawn to see half our backyard is just gone.  I am dazed, unbelieving, frozen in place, and yet somehow I am dressed in moments and we are heading down the front steps to cross the street. I look back to see our house is now hanging over a slope of mud. What woke my mom was the sound of our trash can tumbling down.  

It is late January of 1969 and I am halfway through my 13th year. My dad is on one of his trips, back in North Carolina to see his mom. It has been raining all week. A few nights before my parents had talked on the phone. My dad said “If the house starts to slide down the hill, for heaven’s sake, bail out!”

We cross the street to our older neighbors, Mr. and Mrs.Trindle, and soon we are warming by the fireplace. Power and phones are out, but we all have gas stoves and big propane tanks. We are warm and dry, safe and fed, and thankful we are alive. It is still raining. 

As the dark day passes, news starts to trickle up and down the hill. Our road is blocked by the mud that used to be under our house. We hear that all the roads in and out are blocked by flood damage. 

My mom also somehow has the courage to go back into our house to get some of our things. She always did the week’s shopping when she left work on Friday, so we have a pretty good supply of food. A neighbor with a freezer full of meat starts to distribute it before it thaws. Our house doesn’t move.  It is still raining. 

We are completely stranded for a week and it continues to rain some each day. We get news, word of mouth, that people died that Saturday morning, washed away in their sleep. We live. 

We begin to get some days of less rain. Wendy and I walk down the hill to see the slide blocking the road. It looks like it is only about a foot or so deep, but it covers the road where it loops around below our house. One full week later, a bunch of us grab shovels and start trying to dig out.

When we hear a helicopter, we run out from under the trees and wave our shovels as it flies overhead. Within an hour a bulldozer appears. Recovery has begun. 

The next day my brother is able to drive up to check on us. We still don’t have power or phones in the canyon, but he lives in Venice. Sam has a big roll of plastic sheeting. He had called dad, who told him to “get up there and throw some plastic over it.” He looks at the house dangling on the edge of a chasm in wondering confusion.

 “Throw some plastic over what, Mom?”

This one event changed the whole course of life for me. It took weeks to know the death toll. It took months to know the extent of the damages, to move away, to move on.  It is like the mud that slid that night continued to slide me right away from every future I had ever hoped for. I still sometimes have dreams of being back there, trying to live in a house that could fall down the hill at any moment. I still wake up sometimes, heart pounding, in a panic, because of the sound of rain. 

Note: its been a hard week for writing, so I pulled this from my memoir class.