Tracks of Rain

 Last week, on the afternoon of Monday July 13th, 2026, I was hiking up the French Ranch Fire Road and saw rainprints in the road. It was 90 degrees, humidity was 30-40%, and it was cloudy and muggy. The next day San Geronimo's temperature would exceed 100 degrees for the first time in July (since I began keeping records in 2012).

But despite the hot dry air, there was evidence that raindrops had reached the ground that day. The rain prints were little pinpoints in the dust--some even looked like they were still wet, although I think that may have been just shadowing.

Heavy equipment has been working on the ridge daily, incrementally moving east, turning the fire road into a smooth superhighway for runoff to accumulate in new wider carefully-graded swales that drain off the road. It was hard to see this done to Willis Evans Canyon a few years ago, but it grew back and the road edges were once again covered in leaves and needles. Vehicles usually don't drive here, but the road seems like it is being readied for heavy traffic and heavy rain. Perhaps the Super El Nino has motivated the work.

Before road maintenance

After road maintenance

Because of the daily earth moving work on the ridge, trucks had driven down the access road since the rain. There were no rainprints in the tire tracks.

This meant that the rain had fallen earlier, before the workers headed home in the afternoon. Humidity peaked around sunrise and again around noon... both plausible times for the rain to have fallen to the ground.

The following Monday--yesterday--rain fell in Inverness. Today, Tropical Storm Elida, 500 miles southwest of Monterey, could bring more tracks of rain.

Come to think of it, there was a water truck working up on the ridge. It could have come down to refill, and splashed drops of water onto the road as it returned up the steep grade. Maybe it wasn't rain at all.

Tragedy

Growing up, I remember my dad telling the tale of how his aunt lost her arm in a nighttime train wreck. It was such a wild story, but without a lot of details, so my imagination filled them in. We still had her prosthetic arm in the attic or the garage--which was always kind of creepy. I inherited that arm and still have it stored in my garage... it seems like it could be useful as either a valuable historical artifact or a creepy Halloween prop. So far I've resisted putting it out on Halloween. My daughter says I should make it look like it is coming out of the ground.

Well, the scales just tipped toward the historical, when I found an old newspaper clipping:

When I saw this, I knew that despite the misspelled name, it was about "Mrs. Meek," my dad's aunt. I was so excited to learn the July 13, 1913 date of the "Vineyard train wreck" and the rest of the story. My entire life, I had always wondered about it--where, when, why, how--and I could finally learn what happened. And interestingly, to those involved, I'm sure it reinforced the concept of the number 13 being unlucky.