Today I set on a course of action that neither I nor my father before me ever dared to do in our seventy cumulative years as civil engineers. Today I begin an investigation of a disaster, unauthorized and on my own. How odd to use my professional skill as a matter of personal interest! As if a hobby, like a Victorian gentleman peering at the world through a brass telescope!
In many respects this will be the same as the past thirty years, performing autopsies for dams and
nuclear power plants, taking late night calls and hacking through the ruins and poison oak and rubble to
treat the aging Frankensteins when they became decrepit and ill. But always in the past there has been
the boss, the client, lurking in the background and paying my salary. They were courteous and
professional of course, often frightened too when things went wrong, asking for honest advice and the
straight answer. But always, as well, holding the check and having some rather specific needs and
worries. For when disaster comes, as it does from time to time, there is always the issue of
cause
, and following quickly behind, the matter of
blame
. The search for the wicked. And of course, the affluent. It made a person pause to think.
Leaving my tree-shaded Menlo Park neighborhood I turn off of Sand Hill Road, past the redwood facade offices full of venture capitalists (buildings underlain, as it turns out, by the restless remnants of old vulcanoes) onto Interstate 280 -- The World's Most Beautiful Highway , heading south through the redwoods toward Santa Cruz.
Now on this bright, bird-filled July morning, as I drive south through the San Francisco Peninsula's
forest green and gold-pated hills, up and over the Santa Cruz crossing, patches of bluegreen
Monterrey Bay sparkling in the sun below, California seems to be basking in the same sweet innocence
that I once sensed, reading
Cannery Row
and
The Grapes of Wrath
as a boy in the frigid New England gloom. In my mind I once traveled to this same valley, that I could
now see peeking through the gauzy coastal fog.
You can just squeeze the grapes over your head and lick the juice running down your face.
Exactly fifty miles and as many minutes from my home, I turn off at the exit marked Watsonville. I invite you now, as I approach the older part of town, Mission Street and the pretty little plaza with the pregnant mothers and the old white-hatted Mexican men conversing in the park, to join me in my attempt to solve this geomystery.
Why did the levee fail?
Later. Rode out toward Murphy's crossing about ten miles upstream of the town of Watsonville. Got thoroughly lost; the river twists and turns across the valley floor. At one point I find a section of levee that has been surely repaired but it is a long way from Murphy's crossing where the failure is said to have taken place. On the north side of the river I stopped at a farm, talked to Mr. N_______, a Japanese American strawberry farmer who tells me that he has been here since the forties. I wonder whether he was one of those deported to the camps during the Second World War. He says his land is in a low spot, flooded when the levee broke, they had to pump it out. He points out where the levee failed, says that they hadn't been maintaining it like they did years ago. "They weren't, you know, feeding those ground squirrels." Meaning poisoning them so they don't dig holes in the levees.
I ask him about the earthquake that occurred in 1989. He gestures to me to walk down a little bluff to see his barn.
I wonder whether 
he is going to show me his animals. The
farm is a neat trim little place. I am thinking of Dick and Jane visiting the farm in my grammar school
reader back east, reading about the ducks and the cows and the barn in the forties, when Mr.
N______ is setting up here. I hesitate to ask him about his past.
"The floor was cracked here," he says pointing to the barn floor. "And there were little sand boils all over."
"Out in the field, too?" I ask.
Some. But not like on the other side of the river. Some places there there was so much sand that they
had to go out 
there with a wheelbarrrow and haul it
away.
This is good to know. Recent alluvium getting riled up in the quake. Means soft ground here in this reach of the levee.
I thank Mr. N______, drive back into town. Hot dog at a little drivein on the plaza, talk to a travelling vegetable buyer. Buys peppers for Taco Bell. How appropriate. Downtown is supposed to be dangerous and poverty stricken but it looks quite the opposite, clean and orderly, with a lot of people on the steets, courteous older men with white hats and pregnant girls. Everyone Mexican.
By the high school there is a fine house with the local historical society, very well kept, for sale for $270,000. An older man, a retiree perhaps, finds a survey map twice as old as he is, 1853. I find Mr. N____'s farm. In 1853 the land was owned by Dunphy and Kelly and Casserly. Irishers from the famine.
The map has me stumped in some areas; I cant match the river to its contemporary course. A pleasant woman makes a xerox copy for me, and another older man, professorial, shows me a gazateer with a description of the origin of the word Pajaro.
footnotes
[1]. The western land of green and gold persists in Irish memory. The great famine of ireland occurred in the 1840s, and many Irish emigrants made it as far as California, some after deserting the U.S. Army in Mexico they chose not to fight their fellow Catholics.) There is an old Irish myth about fairys presenting pots of gold to mountain travellers in a shower of snow; some of the earliest wagon trains crossing the Sierra were full of Sullivans and Murphys. Those who were not rewarded with the legendary gold in 1849 found welcoming daughters of Mexican land holders and warm fertile valleys awaiting the plow. John Steinbeck liked to think of himself as part Irish, and he describes his grandfather coming to the Salinas Valley from Ireland in about 1870.
[2]. The origin of the name Pajaro is partially obscured in the murk of history. The Spaniards claimed to have given the name to the river after finding a heathenish stuffed bird in an Indian camp by the river in 1789. It is also said that the name comes from the fact that the sands in the river bed are so soft and unstable that only a bird can walk on it. The latter may be significant to our deliberations.