Storm Totals, Storm Damage, Power Outages, Falling Trees, and Moving Logs

January 2023 will go down in the record books as one of the stormiest, snowiest, and rainiest months for many parts of California. As of January 16th, San Geronimo Valley had received 19 inches of rain--making it our second-wettest January in the last decade (after 2017). In addition, the wind, landslide, and flood damage has been widespread. And the month is only half over. Much of that was packed into the first 11 days.

The story starts in December, after a dry October-November start to the 2023 water year (following 3 dry years). Here in San Geronimo Valley, I measured 16.59 inches of rain in December, at 240% of average, the wettest December in 8 years and second-wettest in the last decade.

Logs began moving in San Geronimo Creek in early December, when a series of storms brought rare lightning and thunder, and enough rain to get San Geronimo Creek up to 200 cfs. This was not a large flow, but trees fell in the creek and rafted down to an engineered logjam that was placed in the creek in 2020. An October 2021 storm that peaked at 2,500 cfs had already moved around the logs connected to boulders in this logjam--logs that were designed to stay in place. Surprisingly, a log that didn't move in 2021 was scooted several feet downstream by the 660 cfs flow on December 27th, 2022. It stopped when the boulder it was anchored to bumped up against another log embedded in the creekbed.

Note the moving log bolted to a boulder at the lower right corner of the
photos on December 10th (left) and December 28th (right).

Two storms at the end of December were impressive. The one on the 27th dropped half-an-inch of rain an hour for six hours. Once again there was rare lightning and thunder. Read about "snow level bending" as freezing levels fluctuated near Lake Tahoe. Twenty-two foot waves towered along the coast.

On December 26th, 2022, seventeen-foot waves were oversteepened
and trailing banners of spray because of the east wind. They foreshadowed
the 22-foot waves that were forecasted on the 27th.

Inhabiting a fire-adapted land

The land used to be inhabited. People lived some or all of the year in almost every place in California, with exceptions of extreme high elevations and extreme desert. This made tending the land feasible--over 4 million acres could be burned each year easily, in areas where people were intimately familiar with the vegetation and weather, around people's homes, without traveling long distances to conduct the burns. Networks of trails--dense in inhabited places--would have been natural fire breaks under these conditions.

Today, much of the land is uninhabited, except temporarily by rangers and recreationists. The inhabited landscape has shrunk to a small fraction of California, and even there, outside of Southern California chaparral ecosystems where fire frequency has increased, most burning has been suppressed. So we have a build up of fuels in forests, a takeover of grasslands by non-native invasive weeds, and general ecosystem degradation.

Simply increasing the acreage burned each year would be a feasible approach to solving this problem if the land was still inhabited. But it is not. So people unfamiliar with the land (topography, vegetation, weather) must travel long distances to conduct controlled burns. This model is expensive, inefficient, and not scalable to the acreages that need to be burned each year--estimated to be over 4 million acres that burned in pre-European times and that is a sustainable level for maintaining California's ecosystems with a natural fire regime, and lessening the likelihood of catastrophic fires.

In addition, large areas of federal public land, formerly inhabited by Indians or patrolled by rangers, have been defunded by Congress year after year to the point where it is rare to see a ranger. The uninformed and uneducated public trashes these lands without guidance or oversight. And the neglected lands have a fire recurrence and intensity that is out of whack and getting wackier.

Hiring more rangers who actually manage and live and camp on the land is one way to solve this problem. Inviting indigenous people to live on and manage land is another. Both approaches should be used to get our public--and private--lands back in balance.

My great-grandmother was born in Mazatlan

Going through old papers, we had another family history breakthrough. Enough new information to make me want to revise former posts (see To Los Angeles in the 1840s), but I'll let them stand for now and put all the updates here.

A long-standing mystery has been where (and under what circumstances) was my great-grandmother born, and how and when did she get to L.A. We thought the Homestead Blog had answered the question August 24, 2019, when it stated:

"According to a genealogical source, the Bilderrains were living in Mulegé, Baja California, now a town of about 4,000 on the east coast of the peninsula along the Bay of California.  Based on somewhat conflicting census records (how many of these aren’t?), it appears that Ygnacio Bilderrain and his wife María Encarnación Martinez migrated to Los Angeles about 1847 or 1848 (a 1900 census listing for their son, Jesús, recorded his arrival in the area in 1846).

In the 1850 and 1860 censuses, there is no listed occupation for Ygnacio, so, whether he came north with some means is not known, but the family occupied the adobe house shown in the photograph and there were at least seven children.  Jesús, the eldest, and brother Guillermo and sisters Eduarda and Domitia, were all born in Baja, while three boys, Andrés, Refugio and Ygnacio, and a girl, Guadalupe, were born in Los Angeles."

This was fantastic information, pushing our knowledge forward (or more accurately, back). Mulege, an oasis near a desert sea, is a pretty cool place to have ancestors from--I spent an afternoon and a night near there and have fond memories of that area. So for about three years now we've assumed our great-grandmother Domitila was born in Baja.

Well, it turns out she was born in Mazatlan on January 1st, 1845 while the family was on a business trip. According to a "Vital Statistics and Historical Record" filled out on March 5th, 1947 by my dad's aunt, Lillian Caroline Orr:

"Father was of German descent. Came with his brother to California in their youth, from Ohio during the Gold Rush. Both located in Los Angeles in 1850 where my father and mother were married June 11, 1868. Mother was of Spanish descent, born Jan. 1st, 1845 at Mazatlan, Mexico while her father was on a journey with his wife and children and a stock or [sic] merchandise from Mexico to Los Angeles where in due course they established their home and business. Mother died in Los Angeles in 1942."

Henry Starr-Domatilda Bildarrain marriage license
and certificate, June 11, 1868, Los Angeles, CA.
My great-grandmother died on the
74th anniversary of her wedding at age 97. 

As always, new information raises new questions. What was her father's business, and what merchandise was he bringing from Mazatlan to L.A. on January 1st, 1845? Why were they living in Mulege and why did they relocate to L.A. just as the U.S. began to invade California? Gold was first discovered in California in 1842, and the U.S. declared war on Mexico in May 1846, so there were a lot of reasons to migrate (or not migrate) in the late 1840s.

On a side note, Aunt Lillian's vital record also records very interesting historical information about her late husband, Oscar Owen Orr:

"...at the time of our marriage my husband was associated with the Banning Company and the Catalina Island Company in Los Angeles, Calif, and so continued until February 1903, when he entered the business of Life Insurance. From July 1907 to February 1939 he was Gneral Agent for the Prudential Insurance of American first at Denver (1907 to 1910) and then at San Francisco from 1910 to 1939."

The house on Hobart St. in L.A. where my dad lived with his mom, aunts, uncle, and his grandma Domitila Bilderrain during her last decades.

The IRS really could make this easier on us

It usually is a simple process to file our federal taxes each year, copying more or less what we did the previous year. Free Fillable Forms generally works well, but it is always apparent that the instructions are written from the point of view of the IRS and not with the audience in mind. This year, I started running into confusing things right away--kind of ridiculous no one noticed and fixed these problems--and I decided to keep track here of all the confusion and how much extra time it took. 

Bob's Trees

About six years ago, I wrote a blog post called "Bob's Trees," after one day, my neighbor Bob told me about the trees near his house. He had lived in that house for a long time, and passed away on November 8th, 2015, after living close to 100 years.

Unfortunately, as I tried to upload a photo of a ginko leaf, the browser crashed and the entire blog post was lost.

Since then, I had always hoped that I'd remember any of the stories enough to write them down, but now six years later, I'm pretty sure I won't.

But the trees are so amazing, especially in autumn, and I want to tell their story. The story of the ginko, in front of the house that Bob said used to have a truck regularly parked on the front lawn/steps. The story of the Japanese maples. The story of the birch. But I don't remember.

What I do remember slightly are his stories of working at a bank, and of San Quentin (where his dad may have worked?). I remember they were often humorous, at times offensive or inappropriate, but interesting stories that only a 96-year old can get away with telling. Even those stories are now lost--surprising details I was sure I'd remember are now faded--something about the trunk of a car and San Quentin. Because I stopped to listen, and he took the time to share, I felt almost a responsibility to share the remarkable stories.

So I saved this draft blog post with a few notes, and every time I scroll down far enough to see it, I think I'll finally write something about Bob's Trees. Well, this is it.

A note I made here about a dumpster--I don't remember the story I wanted to tell when I wrote the abrupt note six years ago, but after Bob died, his house was so full of unwanted stuff that a dumpster sat out front for a while, and free books sat on shelves in front of his house until the winter rains finally ended the drought and soaked the books. There was probably something really interesting or funny about the dumpster, but then I had a child and four years of new daddy brain plus two years of pandemic brain. I've been unearthing pre-pandemic layers in piles of paper, and it is striking how unfiled papers mimic geologic strata--and how quickly two years can go by, and be buried by more current matters. Like unraked ginko leaves in autumn covering organic material from last year's leaves.

100 Years Ago This Weekend

100 years ago this weekend my dad was born. The end of World War I and the end of the pandemic were recent memories, and the Roaring Twenties were just getting started.

He was an only child, living with his mother and father in Torrance. His father, Charles G. Reis, born 140 years ago in St. Paul, Minnesota, moved to L.A. in 1894, and worked for the Pacific Electric Railway (PE) as a carpenter... until, the story goes, due to anti-German sentiment (racism and nationalism), he was beaten and spent the rest of his life in the hospital. 

There was a long history of racism affecting his family--his great-uncle Refugio Bilderrain resigned from the L.A. Board of Police Commissioners in 1889 in protest of firing Latino officers; another other great-uncle Jesus Bilderrain was shot during the Chinese Massacre of 1871.

The violent incident that took his father from him occurred around 1924 when my dad was 3 years old. He and his mom, Ida C. Reis, moved in with his grandmother and aunts and uncles in L.A. He was taken care of by his Spanish grandmother, Domitila Bilderrain de Starr, while his mother worked as a secretary for the P.E. 1924-43. They got free passes on the railway and my dad spent his childhood riding electric trains around the greater L.A. area. Here is a 1926 map of the PE railway system, when my dad was 5 years old.

The last 100 years was an interesting century, and my dad had some interesting times. He was 8 years old when the 1929 stock market crash triggered the Great Depression. This period instilled an attitude of fixing everything and not wasting anything.

In 1941 the attack on Pearl Harbor brought the U.S. into World War II. He worked at Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica during the war, and then was drafted into the Army just as the war ended, spending most of his time in the Army at Fort Lewis, WA.

After leaving the Army, he got an A.A. degree in Electrical Engineering. About a year after his mother died, he had a nervous breakdown and was in a mental hospital 1952-1958. While there, he had electric shock treatments that erased his memory. He came out of the hospital, and rediscovered his life, his friends and cousins, and began piecing together his lost memories. He moved back to Torrance, and in the late 1960s met his soulmate, my mom. They married, and had my sister and me. 

He had his last ride on the Red Cars in 1961. He built a wooden railroad train car capable of carrying a couple of kids at a time that ran on tracks made from galvanized pipe along the side of our house, called Reis Valley and Mudville, that was the highlight of our birthday parties. He built a play house, a treehouse, and repaired almost everything himself. He had a ready laugh and a great sense of humor. He was always interested in science, outer space, and followed the Apollo moon landings closely.

He was an electric motor repairman who worked for M&W Electric for 27 years, and was recognized by his colleagues as someone they could rely on, capable of solving technically difficult problems. He was an inventor, and applied for a patent. He was a devout Catholic and interested in theology and the history of the church. He loved to go hiking in the mountains. He loved to ride trains, and explored the old PE rights-of-way and wrote letters to the Metropolitan Transporation Authority advising them to build new light rail lines in the same places where the PE once ran. He was often reserved, but once you got him talking about trains or electricity you couldn't get him to stop.

He was laid off in 1986 when the City of Torrance condemned his employer's land to make way for the expansive front lawn and parking lot of the future American Honda headquarters. He then worked for the City of Torrance for over 20 years as a Senior Aide cleaning up the garages where buses and police cars are repaired. He rode his bike to work every day until he was 84 years old, when a head injury forced him to retire. He died in 2008 after being run over by a car driven by an unlicensed driver with Alzheimer's Disease.

He lived an incredibly full and eventful life, filled with love and joy and family and friends.

Happy 100th Birthday, Dad.

So why doesn't California just divert water from the Great Lakes?

Several years ago, The Economist magazine held an essay-writing contest where you were supposed to answer the question: "Do we need nature?" The question was abhorrent and offensive, much like the question in the title of this post is to me.

But many people are so disconnected from nature, and ignorant of where their water comes from and the impacts of those water-gathering activities, that these horrifying questions might not sound unreasonable. In fact, the Great Lakes question, or some other silver-bullet sound-bite water solution like ocean desalination, always seems to come up in casual conversations about California's water problems. An overwhelming problem must require a big overwhelming solution. The ironic thing is, the very thing causing the problems--too much water demand, satisfied by imported water from far away, with destructive impacts on ecosystems in both the supply areas and the delivery areas--is the very solution that people want to try in order to solve the same problems. Another helping of expensive destruction, please. Bigger, more expensive dams, bigger canals, usually paid for by the taxpayer and often benefiting a few wealthy agribusiness interests, while ignoring the cause of the problem, with mitigation after mitigation enabling the problem to get supersized beyond the point of reversing course. Not to mention the farmers in the wetter areas of the country who could grow the same crops sustainably, but can't compete with California's water-subsidized unsustainable agriculture (that their tax dollars helped fund, until the ecological and groundwater disaster eventually puts a stop to it).