San Francisquito Creek, (so called by forty six year old Gaspar de Portola when his miserable party of soldiers first came upon it in November, 1769), rises in a bank of grayish white clouds that hangs like a giant unbroken wave of surf, its base pierced by pointed firs and stately redwood groves that cover the mountainous spine of the San Francisco Peninsula between the valley of Santa Clara and the Pacific Ocean. In the climatic atlas these modest mountains is a little piece of Oregon, with its 40 inches of rainfall, source of the waters that flow across the floor of the valley:

For mountains and high places act like a thick sponge overhanging the earth and make the water drip through and run together in small quantities in many places. Aristotle, Meteorologica I, xiii, 10

Two years had passed now since the last big storm, February of eighty six, when a ten inch gush that raised the San Francisquito creek nine feet, three thousand five hundred cubic feet per second. This was still four feet short of the flood of December 22, 1955, when a record flow of five thousand five hundred cubic feet per second had gushed over the tree fringed banks into the lowlands near the bay. I remembered the details of storm of 1986; it had occurred in the midst of a drought and it had rained hard for ten days on the northern part of the state. The town of Guerneville up on the Russian River had been a disaster.

Even then the gays (as we later came to know them), led by a rich and fancy bridge player and an Air Force officer who declared that he was queer and got himself on the cover of TIME, were making Guerneveille into another Fire Island or Provincetown; people were wondering whether God had sent the flood to wash away this wickedness, Yahweh making the skies burst and the fountains of the deep open so that the waters crested and the gentrified houses were plastered with mud and debris and torn off their foundations and the silverware and china tumbled into the brown cataract. A levee blew on the Yuba River in that same flood of February, 1986, washing out half the county. You wondered what the farmers up there had done to deserve it.

Already that spring the California temperature, both winter and summer, had warmed about one degree centigrade since the turn of the century. Now such a small change, two degrees farenheit, hardly seems like much, though it is undeniable in a balmy climate where the monthly rise in temperature in the spring is of the same magnitude, that is, two degrees fareinheit a month, that the effect of such a change is to cut off the coldest month of the year, that being December (which month in the calendar year of 1987 had produced four and a half inches, or thirty percent, of the year's rainfall.) Compared to today the cooler weather of the late nineteenth century had added a December and subtracted a July, producing a decade of floods in Northern California, showers and fruit orchards and vineyards in Los Angeles. California, if not the world, was evidently getting a little warmer and a little drier.

But it was not the warming and drying, as I have explained it here, but rather those erratic character in weather (which in fact had obscured the overall trend) that seemed even more significant to me in the 20 years that I had lived in California. It seemed that there was a kind of bad tempered bitchiness that had grown into the California weather over the past few years.

We talk of the weather, we talk of the markets. A few months before the stock market had lost a third of its value in a day and now it was wiggling drunkenly again, brazenly upward. Conversely real estate along the creek had risen twenty four percent in a year. Money pured from stocks to real estate, back again. Frantic lawyer buyers streamed out of San Francisco to write offers on the hoods of their wives Volvos. Meanwhile drought singed the midwest, the worst since the dust bowl.

I made graphs. There was talk of an increase in earthquakes, more each decade; with the exception of the sixties, the number of damaging earthquakes in the state had increased ominously; of vague changes in the air itself. Throughout the filmy bubble of the biosphere global oxygen concentrations of carbon dioxide had now approached the unprecedented 350 ppm.

People had begun to suspect computer trading and Mexico smog and the radon that was causing 13000 deaths a year from lung cancer. Unsteadiness was on the land; in Texas John Connelly auctioned off his household goods to pay his bills; a million africans would die of AIDS in the next decade and a new book by a Yale historian said that that the United States was plunging into decline, which was perhaps not unexpected considererng the crack epidemic that was sweeping the cities. In the nation's capitol the president's wife consulted astrologers. By June it was evident that the year was going to be the hottest year on record, and perhaps the worst drought in fifty years.

If it weren't the jet stream slithering south it was the threat of global warming. New revelations were coming monthly now, of the past and of the future, some said the dinosaurs had been quick fried, others quick frozen, but it was agreed by all that a giant asteroid had knocked Gaia senseless and now a scientist named Michael Rampino was aying that it all had to do with one-celled ocean plants, calcareous nannoplankton.

It was with these thoughts I walked along the creek, thinking of the crack of time we had between peaceful oblivion and peaceful oblivion. I was about to turn a corner, seeking to know why the dog had begun to run.

The next few moments would change my life forever.

Copyright 1996 Kirribili Press. Return to Ignatius Donnelly and the End of the World | Index | Chronicle of the Late Holocene