We wander back through flower gardens and tree lined walkways of the JPL science and engineering complex and I learn that our host is from one of those eastern European countries that has been “consolidated” in recent years. He has been in this country for about fifteen years and is responsible for designing some important, but obscure bits of space hardware. His English is not very good, but that isn’t too important because— after brief introductions and a polite handshake— he and my wife are wrapped up in talking about something more mathematical than linguistic. As for myself, I am more interested in the model of the Mars rover than anything else.

The bright, young, perhaps prominent, scientist or engineer has just finished explaining to me that the green box connected to the purple box has a too-complicated-for-me-to-understand thing in it which makes the whole widget do thus-and-so.

“If you had studied programming, Sir,” the young engineer says, innocently, “you’d be able to understand how this box controls the direction the sensors tell the wheels to turn.”

Behind me, the Project Director asks my wife if she can help them write their proposal for project “Q”. “No money, of course, but think of the contacts you could make,” he says. Lydia’s hand brushes my back.

I point to the bi-directional interface chip on the edge of the exposed printed circuit board and ask the junior team leader, “How many levels of interrupts are guaranteed to provide reentrancy into to your control subroutines, taking into consideration the transfer function of your digital interface?” The engineer inserts her finger into the corner of her mouth and sucks on it.

It isn’t fair, and I’m not an expert, and I don’t know everything about her design, but I do know the right question to ask, because that’s the question I’d want answered if I were responsible for turning loose this fifty million dollar little gadget on the Martian surface. Behind me, the Project Manager, who has heard this little repartee, shifts gears.

He’s good; I give him credit for that. He has seen me look over his pictures, schematics, nod, and look interested, and he thought I was being polite. “Of course,” he continues, “ there may be some funds for outside consulting in the areas of information support services. Perhaps we could interface in that area.”

“Yes,” I hear Lydia say, “that would certainly work for both of us.”

But, this morning is JPL, and they are the good guys, aren’t they? These are the children that make those weapons systems that are supposed to go bang and knock missiles out of the heavens. Good luck.

I am passing a pleasant morning, even if it does give me some weird flashbacks to be in a large government research facility. I think back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee and the National Laboratory jammed into narrow valleys in the limestone hills near the town. Except for the atmosphere of hushed self-importance, there is little to compare between this palm shaded paradise and ORNL . If the thought police are listening, I hope I don’t hurt their feelings.

In my many visits to the Oak Ridge National Laboratories, I learned early-on that the folks there are “real” serious about their mission. Sometimes there was a slip in this otherwise unyielding facade. In an unguarded comment, an administrator was heard to say: “We only put men and women past child bearing age in this wing because the level of radiation is a bit high.”

As I say, to those listening in to me, there’s not much to compare between Camelot and “that other place”. “Here”, it is perpetual spring. warblers whistle, finches fuss, the ivy is green, the bottle brush is filled with humming (what else?) hummingbirds, and the dogwoods are in full bloom. “There”, it is gloomy, cold, and damp. “There”, the grass is the same color as the limestone rock, and water is most often found in its solid incarnation. “There”, women are bundled in thick wool coats and trousers. “Here”, they are in light silk dresses that stir with every motion. This, of course, is the male perspective.

Lunchtime comes far too quickly. I am not yet finished with my examination of the Titan landing vehicle and the receptionist’s hemline. Our host has an important meeting— not more important, he has hastened to add— and furnishes us with detailed directions to the cafeteria. The idea of starvation occurs to me. My wife’s stomach growls, delicately.

We need only a snack. We have a lunch waiting for us in Anaheim, and that lunch is prepaid. There I go again, with that free lunch thing. I find a table to inhabit with Lydia’s briefcase. She spins the cylinder in her .45 and goes foraging among the steam tables. She returns with two diet cokes, a bagel with cream cheese, and a croissant. My tongue feels around inside my mouth and I choose the croissant. Why take any chances with a loose tooth?

One the way out I am surprised that they don’t search the briefcase. Civilization has definitely penetrated paradise. Either that, or the Cold War really is over. Under the care of our giant oak, our van remains in deliciously cool shade. There is a very anxious lady waiting in her Jeep Cherokee to replace us as I back out of our space. She will have to wait while I get the bird droppings off of the windshield. Even the guard looks friendly as we drive past his security booth without stopping. My wife waives at him. I look in my mirror and watch him waiving frantically at us. Could it possibly be that he is looking for our parking pass?

Enough details. Our arrival at the Hilton Hotel in Anaheim is uneventful. Rotarian Marty illustrates the process of check in and registration. I find her enveloped in an overstuffed chair “indistinguishable from the lump of soft luggage piled near her feet”, waiting for her room. Yes, I’m tired and sleepy, also. By some miracle, our room is ready to occupy. We don’t celebrate too loudly, as no one else within earshot seems to have a room.

The guard is dressed in the combat blues of a private security force and looks vaguely like George C. Scott’s Patton character with his sun glasses. Official badges are pinned in impressive arrays beneath the gold braid of his lapel. The radio microphone stalk that snakes over his shoulder makes me think of a breathing tube described in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”. It’s either that, or it’s a tube of liquid meat kin to the type the astronauts suck in their space suits. I decide pass up the gate and see if there’s a back way into the promised land.

I circle the west entrance, but someone has placed an inconveniently large concrete block across the center of the drive. They have also added some reinforcing bars that look too high to clear the bottom of our van.

Back at the front entrance, I see that the guard has become occupied with protecting a group of blue suits who are crossing the three main traffic lanes at the official security gates— but not in the clearly marked pedestrian walkway. His whistle shrieks threats at nearsighted motorists. His baton beats a short drum roll on the side of one delivery van, and his radio crackles with more instructions for someone, somewhere. Perhaps he speaks directly with God.

“This way, Sir. Watch your step, ma’am. The wheelchair ramp is behind you.”

“Thump. Move one foot more and I’ll remove your side mirror.”

“Have a nice day. Damn fool scientists…no, I don’t know where Dr. Smartz is…ask the receptionist.”

Our van pops through the unguarded lane alongside the security shack and leaps into the only available space beneath a giant oak tree. Shade! So what if our van is in the compact space. We can use the sliding door. My watch says 7:55 A.M.. Perfect timing. My wife smiles.

Check the briefcase, put on the coat; straighten Lydia’s collar on her red cashmere jacket. We’re off to see the wizards. Use the marked crosswalk.

Bong, ting…the entrance chimes are hushed in the carpeted foyer. Glass doors silently glide to either side of me. Lydia moves forward to reception, I hang back and study a picture of a shuttle launch. A group of visiting corporate types are shaking hands as they attempt to jockey for position at a round meeting table. Tough sell. The executive assistant is backing away from the host so that he won’t intercept the hosting scientist ahead of his boss. His strategy does not work. The host scientist extends his hand to the man who must either grasp the extended appendage or seem rude. The woman in the expensive wool dress behind him smiles, but not with her eyes. I wonder what perfume she wears.

“How nice to see you this morning, Dr. Smartz,” the receptionist says. She smiles and handles the silver haired senior engineer with the consummate skill of someone who takes care of the absentminded and cantankerous. “Your party is waiting for you over there.” She points to a small group of young Japanese in black suits and ties standing at rigid attention near a fake palm tree. My wife moves to the head of the queue.

“I’m Dr. Lydia Frenzel, here to meet with Dr. Karma.”

Diane looks down at her list. “He’s on his way over,” she returns with a genuine, not plastic smile.

The bed seemed a bit hard. I recall saying that, somewhere. Both shoulders are as sore as if I had slept on a marble slab. “Quiet as a tomb,” the manager had said.

Superhard beds surely can only be useful to people who either sleep on their back in kingly fashion or on their stomach. In these years, I sleep on my side in order to keep the plumbing working. I come awake to the monstrous noise of my wristwatch pinging in my left ear.

My right hand remains asleep. I keep shaking my paw and trying to punch the little button on the side of the watch case with a finger that has no feeling whatsoever. The alarm goes into supercycle and emits four continuous, rasping cries before returning to its deceptively docile mode. Behind my back, my wife yawns peacefully and stretches. I roll over on my back and the chiropractic mattress straightens out my spinal curvature. Ufffh…

Daylight filters through the opening between two opaque curtains that almost, but not quite blocked the yellow sodium arc from a nearby streetlamp during the night. I fumble around with my left hand and grab my mechanical pencil and notebook off of the nightstand. I punch the button on the tip of the pencil to extrude a millimeter of new lead into the finger tip which I had been using to try and shut off the watch alarm. The finger is no longer numb.

“Awake and alive,” I scrawl on a fresh page, followed by the date and time. I find this a useful reference later in the day. Lydia moves across my field of vision, going to the bathroom.

She wears one of my cotton pocket T-shirts, the purple one. I wonder what I look like lying in bed sucking my finger. She looks rather terrific. I laugh.

“What?” she growls and continues her feline prowl towards the bathroom.

Up and at ‘em, I always say, but never loudly enough for anyone to hear me. My wife’s meeting at Jet Propulsion Labs awaits. I am the guest, in these matters. JPL has its eyes on my wife’s Ph.D., not on me. My wife and I play these as “cat and mouse” games. I go as the mouse; I play with the yarn. I do my best to look puzzled and as interested as any layperson might look while my wife takes care of her business. Then, if the going gets rough, or a diversion is called for, she signals me and I ask a question.

I pull my favorite tie (narrow, black, and hand painted silk) straight, then follow my wife down to the breakfast set in the lobby. The smell of fresh coffee gives me hope. I choose the donuts without cream filling, she chooses a tough looking bagel. Wait until she has a loose tooth! Around the pleasingly decorated lobby a variety of mostly-young, well dressed business men and women chatter quietly with each other (or with their cell phones) over coffee, orange or apple juice—the men seem to favor orange, the women apple— and a favorite pastry. A sleepy waiter in a well pressed hotel uniform strains something from the grapefruit juice.

Back in the room, waiting for nature to complete one more morning cycle, I stand at the window and see what I can see.

If I look straight out, I see mountains. The slopes have been blessed with spring rains, but very little green shows up against the rust colored stone. Slanting my gaze downward across the alley, I can see the green shingled roof of a small house lost in a sea of old Volkswagens, a corroded RV, and three or four travel trailers of ancient origins. A half dozen stacks of sunbleached timbers and railway ties form a maze within which a shed roof of battered tin snakes its way from the house to the sagging roof of a potting shed. I wonder what grows in there? There are heavy electrical cables from a box bolted to the top of an old Airstream. The wires crawl through nooks and crannies from one pile to another, eventually connecting to the shed. The rumble of a jet taking off from the airport seems a couple of generations out of place.

She bows to us, and offers us Jasmine tea. The tea is both genuine and delicious. We smile at each other.

The first dish is a seafood soup made with coconut milk and various herb barks and woods. The particular spice balance is unique to our experience, and after determining what is there for spice and what is there to eat, we find this soup to be perhaps the best that we have ever had, including our travels in Singapore.

The other dish that we find an unusual treat is the delicately broiled octopus in a dill sauce served over a bed of thinly sliced bamboo shoots and peppers. Both Lydia and myself love squid and octopus in almost any form, and this is very hot, yet flavorful. We both agree that this rivals or exceeds anything we have eaten, and we don’t say that lightly after our years in New Orleans.

Returning from our dining experience, the manager seems relieved to see us. I wax eloquent over the peppered squid, but he seems to turn a bit green. Perhaps he really is a fan of Denny’s mashed potatoes and English peas.

As they say, if the squid don’t return or the coconut milk doesn’t ferment, tomorrow will see me out at JPL.

The sun has moved down to a comfortable position on the horizon as we pull off of the 210 Freeway, make a U-turn by some mimosa trees, and drive back west bound on Colorado Street in Pasadena. Pasadena still has a faint fragrance of charm from its early days. I turn across two lanes of traffic without anyone honking at me and careen into the parking lot of a Ramada Inn that is hidden behind a small shopping center. A breeze rustles some palm leaves overhead, bottle bushes are in bloom; the air smells reasonably smog-free, and there is no roar of traffic, I am content. The oriental manager speaks English, “praise be to Allah”. Our non-smoking room turns out to be small, but newly decorated and clean. The bed seems hard, but right now we are more interested in a hot shower and some supper. I find that the difference between the ecstasy setting and well done turkey on the shower lever is a matter of micro inches. Please don’t flush the toilet while I am in the shower.

Some people carry their own soap and shampoo. I hate to do this, as my ancient travel kit only has room for things like a toothbrush, deodorant, a miniaturized can of shaving foam; and my bottle of antacid pills, aspirin, preparations for relief in case of constipation and doses of the opposite sort. The only problem I have is that without my glasses I cannot read which is the bath gel and which is the shampoo. Both smell nice. I choose the green bottle. Lydia tell me later that the blue bottle is the shampoo. She mentioned that my chest hair seemed soft.

The manager seems reluctant to give us any recommendations on the local restaurants. He mentions a Chinese, a Thai, and a Denny’s. His description of the Chinese place is “nice, American style”, of Denny’s it is “good, plain food”, and his remarks on the Thai place include “unique, original, spicy”. I can sense he is afraid we will go to the Thai place.

The fifty miles from home to Stockton, California take longer than usual. We pause on this morning’s drive while a farmer reloads a dozen or so bales of hay back onto his trailer. What is affectionately known as a CalTrans pothole (other’s would call it a sink hole) has caused a minor upset that has spilled part of the farmer’s load on the highway. A rancher has stopped in his chrome trimmed red pickup and assisted in this task with a portable lift which swings from a swivel on the rear bumper step.

The problem is that the lift can only get the bale up to a height which is about two inches lower than the bed of the trailer. Finally, the rural encyclopedia salesman pulls up- I recognize his vintage DeSoto- and solves this mechanical engineering problem by jacking the rear of the pickup truck by two inches.

We sit in the second row position in our Chevy van and watch all of this, quietly entertained by this demonstration of human cooperation. The young couple in front of us drives a Volvo. They are busy arguing over something. Their schedule is obviously more important to them than learning something about local agriculture.

We pull in to “our McDonalds” in Stockton for a late breakfast. Some say “our lawyer”, some say “our Doctor”, we say “our Burger King” and “our McDonalds”. Our affection for this particular place began ten years ago when we were on our way to our new home in California. A bright, cheerful young woman greeted us at the door, asked us what we needed to drink, and warmed our hearts with her role as the charming hostess.

Today, Sheri comes up to us, as she has done each time we stop here, and greets us, smiling as she asks us how we are and if our journey has been pleasant. Definitely an unusual McDonalds! Even if the eggs are a bit plastic, the muffin too oily, and the potatoes crusty with salt, the coffee is good the service is lightening fast, the restrooms are spotless, and I love the friendly atmosphere.

I stop at the next service station because the gas is cheap and I need to add a quart of oil to the engine. Others with these kinds of vans will sympathize with me as I struggle to work the cap off of the oil filler tube. The cap, instead of unscrewing or unsnapping, is a compression fit like a cork in a wine bottle and requires both a strong grip on a narrow lip and a twisting motion to work it out of the tube.

Another pet peeve of mine is that the filler tube is nearly horizontal, so even when I do manage to get the cap off, unless I pour the oil very slowly into one of those little paper funnels, the oil runs back out of the tube and onto the hot engine block. Holding a slippery plastic bottle of oil over a hot engine block does not help me to pour slowly.

Nevertheless, fed and watered and somewhat behind schedule, we are on the road again. Soon we are on Interstate 5, moving south at a steady seventy miles per hour following the flood of traffic which flows unabated, twenty four hours a day, between Sacramento and Los Angeles. At Tracy, we are joined by the stream from San Francisco, also moving south to Los Angeles.

To my left, the morning sun glints off of the great canal which carries water down the valley; to my right, the foothills of the coastal mountains are green with winter showers. Wild onions and blue lupines stretch far across the rolling grasslands, but the snow covered peaks to the east are obscured by haze. Too bad.

Just before noon we pass the Harris Ranch complex. To east side of the highway is a giant feed lot from which a cloud of dusty manure rises and is visible—and smellable— for miles. No one would ask the question “where’s the beef”, here. A few miles later, there is a beautiful, quiet oasis where English sparrows chirp and the meal on the hoof is served with properly chilled wine, crispy green salads with crunchy croutons, and finely steamed vegetables. I came here once as a guest. My wife was invited to speak at a seminar, so I could eat for free. Today, we push on south to a Carl’s Junior. Where’s the chicken?

February 22. Dense fog conceals the valley, but in the foothills the grass has turned emerald green. Lydia goes with me to the lumber yard and I get a sheet of tempered masonite cut up into small pieces so I can paint some more church pictures. Kate comes by to send some Fax’s and Steve’s been up to feed the horses. There was a band concert in Sutter Creek last night, but no security, so some of the crowd got out of hand after drinking too much beer. Apparently, our city council hired the band without checking to see if they furnished security.

Monday’s highlight seems to be:1. the announcement by IBM that the Vatican Library is now on line;2. Burger King is switching from propane to natural gas;3. there will be a limited menu, today, due to the switchover, which will bring enormous hungry crowds of student seeking burgers. I finished a church painting this morning, and at this rate, I could turn one out every other day.

February 26. I’ve printed the first sixteen prints of the limited edition of Lydia’s portrait on the new card stock. Except for the tendency to be smear slightly, I believe the process will work successfully. Lydia’s in the post office buying two hundred stamps for a post card mailing advertising one of her water jetting conferences. I hope to get that back to the post office, today. To complete the uninspiring picture, clouds have moved in from the east, opposite to the usual weather pattern, and now we are wondering if the weather will break before Friday so we can go to Tahoe for the Tahoe Club’s fiftieth anniversary celebration—and that reminds me, I need to get the button set over on my dress shirt.

I’m loitering in the B.K. while Lydia does the “cooking”. As a matter of fact, Lydia has been driving the car because I feel so poorly. My temperature has been running subnormal, and as much as I want to go to Tahoe for the anniversary party, tonight, I think I will have to go to bed for more rest. After all, the Anaheim trip is next week and I definitely will have to be “up” for that. I recall with pleasure the speech my good friend Jerry gave the Rotary Club in Ione yesterday (Thursday, lunch). He called it a “concrete epiphany”. I wonder how many of the club members got the pun. Jerry is a artist and a contractor who stains and sculpts concrete (among many things), and his speech was both humorous and educational. I could use a little cheering, myself, at the moment.

The first of March find me writing the following in my journal. Sick, today. Lydia gets back from Tahoe at two in the afternoon, Katherine is trying to do captions for her photos. Nevertheless, we are out of toner for the laser printer—there is much to print—and I need to get the slides from the processors in Stockton, so we circle from Stockton to Sacramento and back. Sears is having a sale on men’s clothing beginning on Sunday, so I know we’ll be driving back tomorrow. I have only one pair of dress slacks and we’ll be in Anaheim a week. Now, having got back to the house, I’m completely exhausted.

Sunday morning. Lydia has decided to get new lenses in Sacramento and not wait for our optometrist. The new glasses might not be ready in time for Anaheim. So, off we go to the big city again. I might as well get that new pair of slacks at Sears.

The one hour lens place on Madison says they can make her new lenses in chroma-sensitive, graded glass. The technician is an attractive woman, probably about thirty, wearing the uniform of the day—black skirt, blazer, and white blouse. She has impressive personal skills in making people feel comfortable. She takes the necessary measurements and release us for an hour to wander about the shopping center.

We walking into a small frame shop and I observe a picture of a subway and Marilyn Monroe with a skirt glued to the canvas. The sounds of a train play for about thirty seconds, then a cylinder of gas blows the skirt up over her head. Cute.

We’re getting hungry, so we stop in a place advertising Philly Cheese Steak. There’s a crowd of people smacking their lips and gobbling up this stuff, but we think it’s inedible. I leave most of mine on the plate. I should know that Californians wouldn’t know good food if it were given to them.
A great piece of luck and a terrible bit of luck strikes on March 4.

The great bit: Lydia calls the Airport Hilton in Los Angeles to check on reservations and finds that we have none. Imagine, we could have driven all day tomorrow and arrived with no room for us! Now we can take another day to get ready for the Anaheim trip.

The bad bit: our laptop computer refuses to work, so we dash over to Sacramento to purchase a new one to replace the old Toshiba. While we are about it, we visit our favorite Schlotzsky’s and have the “original” on rye bread. This puts us in such a good mood we go back and purchase a small, portable color printer to complete the travel ensemble. Now we’ll have complete remote access to the office as well as being able to print out reports on the road. I can hardly wait to try it out.

Lydia picks up her new glasses, today. You may recall that she broke one lens in New Orleans during Mardi Gras. Lately she complains that everything looks crooked. When I examine the new lens, I get the impression that the graded glass—she uses graded bifocals—was ground off axis…considerably. No wonder she is getting nauseous. She digs out an old pair of safety glasses to use.

Meanwhile, the day is clear-blue perfect, warm, apple and fig trees are in fuzzy with blooms, and the smell of warm earth permeates the air. Daffodils are poking their heads up, everywhere. A late freeze would be very damaging to the nut harvest.

Skipping ahead to Thursday, we escape into the Schlotzsky’s on Arden Avenue in Sacramento—hungry for another “Small Original” on jalapeno bread, a bag of vinegar flavored chips, and drinks. Ah, here comes the owner bringing us our usual dish of crisp, pickled okra.

We drop off more slides of steel plate surfaces and the undeveloped pictures Robert took at Jill’s wedding. Also, we pick up some beautiful paper, gray with random weaving, to print the “Rotary Path” calendar that I have created and reproductions of Lydia’s portrait that I have finished. We’ll slip cards with Lydia’s portrait on one side and the “path” on the other side into special envelopes and give them away at the conference in Anaheim.

Lydia dictates some personal notes into her tape recorder as we drive around Sacramento. She records some thoughts on her childhood in highly analyzed terms—so little emotion expressed, so much pain described.

While driving through the neighborhood the next day, I return the waves of some of my neighbors. I get along with my neighbors as long as their guns remain locked to their racks in their pickup trucks. Their wives smile hopefully at me. Do they want to escape from their prisons and their ever-alert wardens?

She complains that some of the President-elects left the recent president elect training seminar in San Jose early, believing (apparently) that the only sessions remaining—the question-and-answer periods—were less important. Well, how else can you learn if you don’t ask questions?

For some wild and spontaneous reason, I ask for a job application at the bank, this morning. Both Linda and Carolyn look at me strangely. I tell them I need something useful to do. Here I am at age fifty seven and I’ve never actually applied for a job by filling out a piece of paper. I’ve been a CEO, a President, teacher, and mostly an scientist-artist, but I’ve never just applied for a job in the most ordinary of ways. I extract the piece of paper from my coat pocket and scan the questions.

“Major reason for wanting to apply for this job.”

“I want to work in the office with four attractive women and learn how to print money?” I fold up the application paper and shove it into the trash can.

Over at home port, the local B.K., the atmosphere is filled with familiar chatter of Amadorians—citizens of Amador county. I recall that the people, young or old, in the McDonalds in Gonzales, Texas, were not so exuberant. Perhaps they were more reserved?

Lydia tells me that the line ran out of the door and down the sidewalk last Sunday because of the exceptionally large ski crowd. Well, nothing like that in Gonzales, Texas. Maybe a good fishing day when the spillway opens at a local dam brings out the crowds? My father used to get excited about dam openings. Boxes of lures, poles, and buckets of minnows would be stuffed into the trunk, and off we’d go fishing. Gonzales was the best dam fishing in Texas.

Water has come across the parking lot behind the civic center in Sutter Creek and has flooded the city records department. I now understand that all of the spare police radios and equipment have been trapped below the water line and are out of commission or ruined. Volcano and Pioneer have been cut off with more than thirty inches of rain above Pioneer last night. Down in Ione they are sandbagging along the river in town and bracing for high water all along the banks down there.

We are eating lunch when we hear the news that Mel and Fay’s restaurant in downtown Jackson has been evacuated because of rock and mud slides on the slopes overhanging the cafe and Safeway.

That night the news comes that the levees have broken and water has crossed the highway going in to Sacramento. Reporters on the television are airborne in every available helicopter as levees begin to fail elsewhere and residents are driven from their homes in the early hours of the morning by walls of cold, dirty flood waters. Some people are missing and presumed drowned.

In the morning, the Channel 31 folks become marooned on a bridge south of Yuba city and watch helplessly as more homes are flooded by water pouring through new breaks in the dike system. By now, the earth is so saturated with water that driving near a levee may cause water to work it way through mud and silt and result in failures. I learn that many of these critical levees don’t have pilings to support them, but are simple earth works.

On the third day of January, the sun has peeked through and although waters continue to rise in the valley, especially south of Sacramento, the high mountain creeks and rivers are beginning to subside. I’m happy to report that our bridge in Sutter Creek has weathered the storm. The Rotary meeting Lydia was to have in Reno has been cancelled due to massive mud slides on all major highways crossing the mountains. The slide on highway fifty is so extensive that the American River flow stops for an hour or so. Everyone holds their breath on this one, as fog has prevented an analysis of this critical situation from the air. News from some ground observers filter in. They believe that a slide over a quarter of a mile wide and hundreds of feet deep has buried or carried away whole sections of route fifty and destroyed an unknown number of structures and homes. On the television, the damage in downtown Reno looks unbelievable. Sacramento has escaped total disaster by mere inches as the flood waters reached to the very top of the big levees in the downtown section.

On a mundane note, Sutter Creek may no longer look like a disaster, but it sure smells like one. The smell of raw sewage is so strong everyone at the Post Office is gagging and holding handkerchiefs over their faces. Raw sewage from the flood is everywhere. How will this mess get cleaned up? Thank goodness we live up on the hill!