Green Earth

They sat there. Edgardo went and poured himself some coffee.

Anna said to Frank, “It sounded like you were telling Diane you would stay another year.”

“Yep.”

Edgardo came back in, amazed. “Will wonders never cease! I hope you didn’t give up your apartment yet!”

“I did.”

“Oh no! Too bad!”

Frank flicked that away with his burned hand. “The guy who owns it is coming back anyway.”

Anna regarded him. “So you really are changing your mind.”

“Well …”

The lights went out, computers too. Power failure.

“Ah shit.”

A blackout. No doubt a result of the storm.

Now the atrium was truly dark, all the offices lit only by the dim green glow of the emergency exit signs. EXIT. The shadow of the future.

Then the emergency generator came on, making an audible hum through the building. With a buzz and several computer pings, electricity returned.

Anna went down the hall to look north out the corner window. Arlington was dark to the rain-fuzzed horizon. Many emergency generators had already kicked in, and more did so as she watched, powering glows that in the dark rain looked like little campfires. The cloud over the Pentagon caught the light from below and gleamed blackly.

Frank came out and looked over her shoulder. “This is what it’s going to be like all the time,” he predicted gloomily. “We might as well get used to it.”

Anna said, “How would that work?”

He smiled briefly. But it was a real smile, a tiny version of the one Anna had seen at her house. “Don’t ask me.” He stared out the window at the darkened city. The low thrum of rain was cut by the muffled sound of a siren below.

The Hyperniño, now in its forty-second month, had spun up another tropical system in the East Pacific, and now this big wet storm was barreling northeast toward California. It was the fourth in a series of pineapple express storms that had tracked along this course of the jet stream, which was holding in an exceptionally fast atmospheric river, headed directly at the north coast of San Diego County. Ten miles above the surface, winds flew at a hundred and seventy miles an hour, so the air underneath was yanked over the ground at around sixty miles an hour, all roiled, torn, downdrafted, and compressed, its rain squeezed out of it the moment it slammed into land. The sea cliffs of La Jolla, Blacks, Torrey Pines, Del Mar, Solana Beach, Cardiff-by-the-Sea, Encinitas, and Leucadia were all taking a beating, and in many places the sandstone, eaten by waves from below and saturated with rain from above, began to fall into the sea.

Leo and Roxanne Mulhouse had a front seat on all this, of course, because of their house’s location on the cliff edge in Leucadia. Since he had been laid off, Leo had spent many an hour sitting before their west window, or even standing out on the porch in the elements, watching the storms come onshore. It was an astonishing thing to see that much weather crashing into a coastline. The clouds poured up over the southwest horizon and flew at him, and yet the cliffs and the houses held in place, making the compressed wind howl, boom, shriek.

This particular morning was the worst yet. Tree branches tossed violently; three eucalyptus trees had been knocked over on Neptune Avenue alone. And Leo had never seen the sea look like this before. All the way out to where rapidly approaching black squalls blocked the view of the horizon, the ocean was a giant sheet of raging surf. Millions of whitecaps rolled toward the land under flying spume and spray, the waves toppling again and again over infinitely wind-rippled gray water. The squalls flew by rapidly, or came straight on until they hit in black bursts against the house’s west side. Brief patches and shards of sunlight lanced between these squalls, but failed to light the sea surface in their usual way; the water was too shredded. The gray shafts of light appeared to be eaten by spray.

Up and down Neptune Avenue, their cliff was wearing away. It happened irregularly, in sudden slumps of various sizes, some at the cliff top, some at the base, some in the middle.

The erosion was not a new thing. The cliffs of San Diego had been breaking off throughout the period of modern settlement, and presumably for all the centuries before that. But along the stretch of seaside cliff north and south of Moonlight Beach, the houses had been built close to the edge. Surveyors studying photos had seen little movement in the cliff’s edge between 1928 and 1965, when the construction began. They had not known about the storm of October 12, 1889, when 7.58 inches of rain had fallen on Encinitas in eight hours, triggering a flood and bluff collapse so severe that A, B, and C Streets of the new town had disappeared into the sea. This was why the town’s westernmost street was D Street, but they had not paused to ask about that. They also did not understand that grading the bluffs and adding drainage pipes that led out the cliff face destroyed natural drainage patterns that led inland. So the homes and apartment blocks had been built with their fine views, and then years of efforts had been made to stabilize the cliffs.

Now, among other problems, the cliffs were often unnaturally vertical as a result of all the shoring up they had been given. Concrete and steel barriers, ice-plant berms, wooden walls and log beams, plastic sheets and molding, crib walls, boulder walls, concrete abutments—all these efforts had been made in the same period when the beaches were no longer being replenished by sand washing out of the lagoons to the north, because all the lagoons had had their watersheds developed and their rivers made much less prone to flooding sand out to sea. So over time the beaches had disappeared, and these days waves struck directly at the bases of ever-steepening cliffs. The angle of repose was very far exceeded.

Now the ferocity of the Hyperniño was calling all that to account, overwhelming a century’s work all at once. The day before, just south of the Mulhouses’ property, a section of the cliff a hundred feet long and fifteen feet inland went, burying a concrete berm lying at the bottom of the cliff. Two hours later a hemispheric arc forty feet deep had fallen into the surf just north of them, leaving a raw new gap between two apartment blocks—a gap that quickly turned into a gritty mudslide that slid down into the tormented water, staining it brown for hundreds of yards offshore. The usual current was southerly, but the storm was shoving the ocean as well as the air northward, so that the water offshore was chaotic with drifts, with discharge from suddenly raging river mouths, with backwash from the strikes of the big swells, and with the ever-present wind, slinging spray over all. It was so bad no one was even surfing.

As the dark morning wore on, many of the residents of Neptune Avenue went out to look at their stretch of the bluff. Various authorities were there as well, and interested spectators were filling the little cross streets that ran to the coast highway. Many residents had gone the previous evening to hear a team from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers give a presentation at the town library, explaining their plan to stabilize the cliff at its most vulnerable points with impromptu riprap seawalls made of boulders dumped from above. This meant that in many places the already narrow beach would be buried, becoming a wall of boulders even at low tide—like the side of a jetty, or a stretch of some very rocky coastline. Some lamented this loss of the area’s signature landscape feature, a beach that had been four hundred yards wide in the 1920s, and even now, the place that made San Diego what it was. There were people who felt the beach was worth more than the houses on the cliff edge. Let them go!

But the cliff-edge homeowners had argued that it was not necessarily true that the cliffside line of houses would be the last of the losses. Everyone now knew why the westernmost street in Encinitas was named D Street. The whole town stood on the edge of a sandstone cliff, when you got right down to it. If massive rapid erosion had happened before, it could happen again. One look at the raging surface of the Pacific was enough to convince people of this.

So that morning Leo found himself standing near the south end of Leucadia, his rain jacket and pants plastered to his windward side as he shoved a wheelbarrow over a wide plank path. Roxanne was inland at her sister’s, so he was free to pitch in, and happy to have something to do. A county dump truck working with the Army Corps of Engineers was parked on Europa, and men running a small hoist were lifting granite boulders from the truck bed down into wheelbarrows. A lot of amateur help milled about. The county and Army people supervised the operations, lining up plankways and directing rocks to the various points on the cliff’s edge where they were dumping them.

Hundreds of people had come out to watch the wheelbarrowed boulders bound down the cliff and crash into the sea. It was already the latest spectacle, a new extreme sport. Some of the bounding rocks caught really good air, or spun, or held still like knuckleballs, or splashed hugely. The surfers who were not helping (and there were only so many volunteers who could be put to use) cheered lustily at the most dramatic falls. Every surfer in the county was there, drawn like moths to flame, entranced, and on some level itching to go out; but it was not possible. The water was crazy everywhere, and when the big broken waves smashed into the bottom of the cliffs, surges of water shoved up, disintegrated into a white smash of foam and spray, hung suspended for a moment, then fell and muscled back out to sea, bulling into the incoming waves and creating thick tumultuous leaping backwash collisions, until all in the brown shallows was chaos and disorder, through which another surge crashed.

And all the while the wind howled over them, through them, against them. Even though the cliffs in this area were low compared to those at Torrey Pines, being about 80 feet tall rather than 350, that was still enough to block the terrific onshore flow and cause the wind to shoot up the cliffs and over them, so that a bit back from the edge it could be almost still, while right at the edge itself a blasting updraft was spiked by frequent gusts, like uppercuts from an invisible fist. Leo felt as if he could have leaned out over the edge and extended his arms and be held there at an angle—or even jump and float down. Young windsurfers would probably be trying that soon, or surfers with their wetsuits altered to make them something like flying squirrels. Not that they would want to be in the water now. The sheer height of the whitewater surges against the cliffside was hard to believe, truly startling. When they impacted the cliff, bursts of spray shot up into the wind and were whirled inland onto the houses and people.

Leo got his wheelbarrow to the end of the plank road, and let a gang of people grasp his handles with him and help him tilt the stone out at the right place. After that he got out of the way and stood watching other people work. Restricted access to some of the weakest parts of the cliff meant that this was going to take days. Right now the rocks simply disappeared into the waves. No visible result whatsoever. “It’s like dropping rocks in the ocean,” he said to no one. The noise of the wind was like jets warming up for takeoff, interrupted by frequent invisible whacks on the ear. He could talk to himself without fear of being overheard, and did. His eyes watered in the wind, but that same wind tore the tears away and cleared his vision again and again.

This was purely a physical reaction to the gale; he was basically very happy to be there. Happy to have the distraction of the storm. A public disaster, a natural event; it put everyone in the same boat, somehow. In a way it was even inspiring—not just the human response, but the storm itself. Wind as spirit. It felt uplifting. As if the wind had carried him off and out of his life.

Certainly it put things in a very different perspective. Losing a job—so what? How did that signify, really? The world was so vast and powerful. They were like fleas in it, their problems the tiniest of flea perturbations.

He returned to the dump truck and took another rock, and then focused on balancing it at the front end of the wheelbarrow, turning the wheelbarrow, keeping it moving over the flexing line of planks, shouldering into the blasts. Tipping a rock into the sea. Wonderful, really.

He was running the empty wheelbarrow back to the street when he saw Marta and Brian, getting out of Marta’s truck at the end of the street. “Hey!” This was a nice surprise—they were not a couple, or even friends outside the lab, as far as Leo knew, and he had feared that with the lab shut down, he would never see either of them again.

“Marta!” he bellowed happily. “Bri-man!”

“LEO!”

They were glad to see him. They ran up and gave him a hug.

“How’s it going?” “How’s it going?”

The two of them were jacked up by the storm and the chance to do something. No doubt it had been a long couple of weeks for them too, no work to go to, nothing to do. Well, they would have been out in the surf, or otherwise active. But here they were now, and Leo was glad.

Quickly they all got into the flow of the work, trundling rocks out to the cliff. Once Leo found himself following Marta down the plank line, and he watched her bunched shoulders and soaking black curls with a sudden blaze of friendship and admiration. She was a surfer gal, slim hips, broad shoulders, raising her head to the wind and howling back at it. He was going to miss her. Brian too. It had been good of them to come by like this, but the nature of things was such that they would all find other work, and then they would drift apart. It never lasted with old work colleagues, the bond just wasn’t strong enough. Work was always a matter of showing up and then enjoying the people who had been hired to work there too. Not only their banter, but also the way they did the work. They had been a good lab.

The Army guys were waving them back from the edge of the cliff. It had been a lawn and now it was all torn up, and there was a guy there crouching over a big metal box, USGS printed on his soaking windbreaker. Brian shouted in their ears: they had found a fracture in the sandstone parallel to the cliff’s edge here, and apparently someone had felt the ground slump a little, and the USGS guy’s instrumentation was indicating movement. It was going to go. Everyone dumped their rocks and hustled the empty wheelbarrows back to Neptune.

Just in time. With a short dull roar and whump that almost could have been the impact of a really big wave, the cliff edge slumped and disappeared. The crowd let out a shout that was audible above the wind. Now they could see through space to the gray sea hundreds of yards offshore. The new cliff edge was fifteen feet closer to them.

Very, very spooky. Leo and Brian and Marta drifted forward with the rest, to glimpse the dirty rage of water below. The break in the cliff extended about a hundred yards to the south, maybe fifty to the north. A modest loss in the overall scheme of things, but this was the way it was happening, one little break at a time, all up and down this stretch of coast. There was a whole series of faults parallel to the cliff, so that it was likely to flake off piece by piece as the waves gouged away support from below. That was how A, B, and C Streets had gone in a single night. It could happen all the way inland to the coast highway.

Amazing. Leo could only hope that Roxanne’s mother’s house had been built on one of the more solid sections of the bluff. It had always seemed that way when he descended the nearby staircase and checked it out; it stood over a kind of buttress of stone. But as he watched the ocean flail, and felt the wind strike them, there was no reason to think any section would hold. A whole neighborhood could go. And all up and down the coast people had built close to the edge, so it would be much the same in many other places.

No house had gone over in the slump they had just witnessed, but one at the southern end of it had lost part of its west wall and been torn open to the wind. Everyone stood around staring, pointing, shouting unheard in the roar of wind. Milling about, running hither and thither, trying to get a view.

There was nothing else to be done at this point. The end of their plank road was gone along with everything else. The Army and county guys were getting out sawhorses and rolls of orange plastic stripping; they were going to cordon off the street and shift the work efforts to safer platforms.

“Wow,” Leo said to the storm, feeling the word ripped out of his mouth and flung to the east. “My Lord, what a wind.” He shouted to Marta: “We were standing right out there!”

“Gone!” Marta shouted. “Gone like Torrey Pines Generique!”

Brian and Leo shouted agreement. Into the sea with the damned place!