The Road to My High School Fell Into the River.

It was Freshman Year. It stayed closed until I left for college.

Standing in front of the Merced River and Yosemite Falls during non-flood conditions.

Please Note: This post briefly mentions suicide, and describes in detail natural disasters including floods, fires, and rockslides.

On New Year’s Day, 1997, my family was staying in Salinas, California with my aunt Beth. I’m guessing we’d had Christmas at my family’s small house in Yosemite Valley that year and decided to go to Salinas afterward for New Years. If you know Salinas, you know it’s sort of a non-place. Gray and agricultural. Suburban and depressed.

My parents both grew up in Salinas and I still have family that lives there and other places on the Central Coast. My mother and father met in high school, during which they lived in adjacent planned communities in what was then the outskirts of Salinas on a road that led to Monterey, Pacific Grove, and the higher-end, more picturesque parts of the Central California Coast. My parents met and began dating at Salinas High school, the same school John Steinbeck had attended (many) decades before.

Salinas is a decidedly un-affluent place. My cousins who lived there spoke of it in a self-deprecating, “get me out of here” kind of way. It was in many ways like the town where I went to high school, Mariposa, California. It was a town teenagers were desperate to leave. A town where “making it” hinged on getting out. I understand towns like this very well. These were the only kinds of places I knew people to live until I was fifteen. At that point I met more “city kids” and kids who grew up outside the Central Valley.

The mid-nineties had been a very auspicious time for my aunt Beth. She’d struggled as a single mom in her adult life and had finally pulled together the money to buy her own home. My mom and I went to a few open houses with her, all at the type of tract housing development my parents had grown up in, only updated for the times. I loved touring those model homes. Each one had its own theme and was staged like a film set. The imagination that went into it just thrilled me. There was more than just furniture. There were fake TVs, towels in the bathrooms no one was allowed to use, bowls of pungent potpourri, perfectly styled and plumped to camera (we were the camera).

Beth’s house was on a picture-perfect street. Lawns made of fresh, bright green sod lined both sides of the road. Bushes, fresh from their plastic hardware store pots, sat under brand new wood chips dyed a vibrant hue to look like redwood. Each home had a newly painted stucco exterior in a soothing hue of beige, bone, ivory, and wheat. The street was constantly swept and clean. It was the American dream come to life, the homes just five feet away from each other. And we loved going to Beth’s house because we loved spending time with her and seeing her nesting in such a bright, happy place she’d worked so hard for.

I don’t really remember what we did for New Years that year, though my dad tells me we had some kind of party. I’m guessing we probably went to the Blockbuster video nearby and spent hours trying to choose something, a frequent occurrence when were were in town. My mom and aunt tended to go for high-brow, critically acclaimed movies like Angel at My Table. My cousin Dawn’s former stepdad owned a comic and video store and used to get advanced copies of weird indie movies and foreign films we’d watch. That year we got an advanced copy of Freeway, a totally bonkers Reese Witherspoon movie no one really knows that we thought was really funny because of how dirty her mouth was. It’s a crazy retelling of “Little Red Riding Hood” but where Reese Witherspoon is a juvenile delinquent. She’s really good in it and no one knew who she was back then. Dawn and I knew she was a star from day one. Her good girl image hadn’t overtaken her yet and it’s a treat seeing her act like such trash.

I grew up with Dawn, she’s the closest of all my cousins to my immediate family. She’s nearly the same age as my sister and they’ve always had a special bond. But she was also shy and fearful of people like I was as a kid so we always felt deeply connected. That New Year’s eve, as my aunts and family had hung out downstairs, Dawn and I sat upstairs listening to Pink Floyd, Mazzy Star, and Portishead and telling stories. We were kind of little kids that way, we’d just make up dumb stories and tell them to each other in the dark with candles burning, incense floating through the air.

That night was the first time I told Dawn I was gay. I put it into a little story about myself in the third person. I don’t remember how I phrased it but I’m sure it was silly, filled with unnecessary details, and sweet. Dawn, like most of my family had known that already. By that time Dawn had lost her father. She was fifteen and so deeply sad about it. She was, and has been since, one of the sweetest most open, sincere people that I know.

When we woke up on January 1, 1997, the weather in Salinas was gray. The picturesque street where Beth and Dawn lived looked flat, somewhat dead. There’s a certain kind of flat gray that only happens in the central part of California. The sky is gray with clouds, fog rolls in and makes driving perilous, the winter foliage is all dead, matte brown. This type of gray is three dimensional, not far away like a typical winter sky. It comes right down and touches your skin, enveloping you in malaise. And it usually lasts all winter.

Hundreds of miles away in Yosemite Valley, a particularly warm winter had led the snow in the High Sierra Mountains to begin melting much earlier than normal, fueled by rain at levels up to 9500 feet. And it had been raining for days and days. Yosemite Village, the small neighborhood within Yosemite National Park where I was raised, began to fill with water. Yosemite Falls, about a half-mile from my childhood home, was running at capacity, rattling the houses nearby.

The rains began on December 31, 1996 and lasted until January 5, 1997. During that time, the Valley floor covered with water. Yosemite Valley is criss-crossed with a network of rivers and streams, all flowing in and out of the Merced River, which winds its way through the center of the Valley before eventually heading down the hill, running adjacent to California Highway 140, through El Portal, before breaking off at Briceburg, eventually headed off west into the San Joaquin River.

My family and I missed those first few days of 1997 in Yosemite. And as wild as it sounds, I think most of us regret it. For the people who were there, it was a wild adventure. And because a natural disaster of that magnitude hadn’t happened before (or since) in Yosemite Valley, there wasn’t a huge sense of imminent danger about this particular flood. Now, as an adult who’s witnessed many a natural and human-made disaster (fires, mass shootings, etc) I don’t think I’d have the same sense of fearlessness I felt then. But most of my friends who stayed in the park at that time weren’t at all scared. They rode their bikes through the flood waters, only to find out later they were filled with spilled sewage. They went out and looked onto the meadows, now vast oceans blanketing the most beautiful place on earth.

It has to be said that while the floods were destructive and terrible, they were also absolutely beautiful. The granite cliffs surrounding Yosemite Valley reflected into the pools of water below. Bridges sat, sturdily for the most part, under roaring whitewater rushes. The cottonwood trees next to Swinging Bridge sat suspended in the middle of water, as if to be growing directly out of the river. Where the animals went, I have no idea. But I don’t remember seeing them in any pictures of the flooding. The park felt abandoned, by both humans and animals.

My dad, always the adventurer, was first in trying to get back into the park. He drove separately from the rest of us so he could golf on the way to and from Salinas and he tried to get back through the Yosemite gates on January 1st. He found out on the way the roads had all closed, so he stayed with a friend in Merced, attempting to go in a few days later only to be turned away yet again when massive flooding continued throughout the park and the surrounding areas.

I’ve been through a few natural disasters with my parents. Most recently in 2017 when a massive fire burned the hillside next to their house in Santa Rosa, California. They live near the top of a hill on the outskirts of town, on the Sonoma side of the city. A few houses up the street from them burned to the ground. It was truly a miracle their home survived. When I visit them now, it still feels strange to see the houses that were lost. There are houses at the top of their hill that were completely incinerated. The oddity is that on either side of them sit homes that remained standing, intact and unscathed, not even a smudge. Imagine how angry you’d feel to see your house burned to the ground between two homes that looked good as new. How targeted you’d feel to have lost everything all at once while your neighbors were spared. I think about those people a lot. The grief and loneliness they must have felt being the only ones.

In 2017 when my parents’ house almost burned, I helped them load their Subaru station wagon at four in the morning. A man had banged on the door, waking and scaring the shit out of all of us and prompting my dad to show up to the door with a baseball bat.

“Fire, you guys have to get out of here!”

We walked outside to look at the hill up the street from my parents’ house burning, the heat from the fire against our faces. Holy shit. This is going to burn the entire fucking neighborhood down. How could it not.

This was the first time I’ve ever had to take the reins with my parents (well, one of them at least). My dad, a former Smoke Jumper who knows his way around fire and its dangers, was being relatively pragmatic. My mom was despondent. We made a plan to drive west, away from the fire to my brother’s house in Windsor. I told my mom to pack some things up she cared about. Someone had told me to take photographs of everything for insurance so I went throughout the house with my phone and filmed the entire thing so we could write down all that was lost in the fire. I was sure it was all going. A house filled with all the beautiful things I was raised with. Art made by my mom’s friends. Old photos my dad took at Berkeley. Table linens my mom had sewn by hand out of fancy fabric she coveted for years before she could afford it.

My mother stood next to the dining table staring into nothing and when I asked her what she was doing she responded, “I kinda just don’t know what to take.”

“Grab the art and the photos - nothing else matters.”

So we loaded all that stuff into the car, filling it to the ceiling, and drove to Windsor at six in the morning, the fire still raging. The air still thick with smoke.

At the time, the Tubbs Fire was the most destructive fire in California history. It was by leaps and bounds much more destructive than the 1997 Yosemite Floods in terms of personal losses and loss of life. The fire destroyed so many homes, from the entire middle class (and dense) neighborhood of Coffey Park to the affluent and less dense neighborhood next to my parents’ own, Fountaingrove. Both neighborhoods have since been mostly rebuilt. But the people who lost their homes then will likely never be the same. Many of my parents’ friends have moved since then, seeking safer places.

We stayed with my brother, his wife, and their two kids for a few days until my parents headed to be with my sister, who was about to give birth. But during that time - and this detail is why I’ve decided to include this otherwise unrelated disaster story - my parents felt a strong urge to go home. They were texting friends who had snuck into the neighborhood to check on their houses. They were receiving updates from the text-updating system for Napa/Sonoma Counties, Nixle. They knew, generally what was going on on their street.

But still, something inside them wanted to see their house. Something in them, an instinct beyond their control, created an urge inside them to look at the house in person. Maybe it was the strong desire to know it was okay. Maybe it was a subconscious desire to see that it had burned to the ground, a sort of Schadenfreude but for oneself. I don’t know where that comes from, but I see it in most disaster victims. I’ve seen it in myself as my own home has been ravaged by fires and blizzards and unprecedented wind storms.

I see this when I see anything reported about people dealing with disaster. Most people want to go home and bear witness to whatever needs to be borne witness to. This is just innately true about being a person.

My parents were the same way during the Flood of 1997. It was still very dangerous when my father tried to re-enter the park on the January 1. And it would remain dangerous for days after that, but that didn’t stop him from trying to get back to our little house near Yosemite Falls. At that point, it was a bit harder to get information. Nothing was posted online. They did know people in the park (my dad knew everyone) but they still wanted to be sure our house was okay, to see it with their own eyes.

The house I grew up in has a creek behind it, probably about a hundred yards from the deck on the back of the house. It used to get filled to the brim but never flooded close to our house. Still, during this time it was completely within the realm of possibility that it could have flooded. Unlikely, sure. But Yosemite Valley itself is pretty small (seven miles wide long by one mile wide) so it kind of seemed possible for the whole entire thing to fill up with water.

A map showing the location of my childhood home.

My parents don’t remember when exactly we were finally able to get back into our house, but they do remember we were there by my father’s birthday, January 8. When we got home, we found the water systems were completely down. Pipes bringing in fresh water were not working so we had to drink from large plastic jugs of water we bought in town. The municipal sewer system had failed so toilets were not working.

My parents got a boat toilet from a friend who had a boat. I think we just put it on the back porch out of view from the neighbors - remember, it was winter and close to freezing despite the rains. There were also port-o-potties close by at the school. I have a life-long fear of port-o-potties, I always think someone or something is going to pop out of them and get me. Still, the port-o-potty was less scary to me than the boat toilet - that was a little too up-close-and-personal for someone as scared of bathroom stuff as I am (I always, always have been - and I refuse to talk about it!).

By the time of the flood, my brother had already left for college in Sonoma. My sister and I were still in high school. I’m guessing Mariposa County High School, located a two-hour bus ride from my house, didn’t close during the floods because the majority of their student population lived in the town of Mariposa, two thousand feet lower than Yosemite’s four thousand feet location. The Yosemite kids got used to this type of thing in high school. It would be blizzarding in Yosemite Valley and raining in Mariposa so school wouldn’t be canceled. School was never canceled for weather. They even ran the bus, through extremely dangerous conditions, on days when none of us should have been leaving the house. Being a small minority of the student population, our living conditions never really mattered to the school. We went to the school, but it wasn’t really “for” us.

At the time, information was discovered mostly via telephone. My dad had a daily habit of calling (209) 372-0200, a number I still have memorized because of the number of times per day it was called in our house (it still works by the way!). We had a black Sony cordless phone on an antique side table in our dining room equipped with a speaker phone. On snowy days, my dad would call that number every few minutes until he got the information he needed. Regardless of whether we were going anywhere, he wanted to know if the roads were open, if chains were required, if it was R1 (chains required on vehicles without snow tires and four wheel drive), R2 (chains required on vehicles except those with snow tires and four wheel drive), or R3 (chains required on vehicles regardless of whether they had snow tires and four wheel drive).

Road conditions on all routes leading to and from Yosemite Valley are treacherous. All roads leading to the Valley wind through massive canyons. Roadways are built onto the sides of incredibly steep hillsides, leaving only a few feet on the side of the road. One small mistake and you can plummet to your death - an event that happened a multiple times while we lived there. In addition to the danger of sliding off the road, there’s also the danger of rockslides falling on top of your car, smashing you to death. While we lived there, we got used to these roads. But looking back on it, it’s pretty wild we just drove around on them like we were invincible, especially considering how many rockslides happened per year (dozens).

The road from my family’s house on Lost Arrow Road leads eventually to California Highway 140. Highway 140, between Yosemite Valley and Mariposa, is one of the most incredibly beautiful stretches of road in the world. Emerging from Yosemite Valley, you pass through groves of lush, vibrantly green dogwood trees. You pass by the Merced River on your way out of the park, the road getting so close to the river it feels like the two may touch.

There’s a pull-out right before exiting the Valley where tourists can stop to look out over the Merced River and the end of Yosemite. It’s an incredibly beautiful spot, covered in reeds and vegetation that bleeds into the river. Once, while my brother was in high school the school bus broke down in that spot and the bus driver had to pull over into that pull-out. My brother and his friends went down to the river, then quiet and blanketed in snow, and threw snowballs at each other.

Upon running away from his friends, my brother discovered a body laying in the shallow waters of the river. It belonged to a ranger who had killed himself the night before with a shotgun. Yosemite is an utterly beautiful place, but its beauty provides no protection from darkness, no safety from the troubles of the outside world. Living there, you know that. You know that even living in the most beautiful place on earth can’t protect you from real life, from mortality.

After passing the pull-out, now infamous in our family, Highway 140 winds down the hill towards El Portal, through the granite cliffside, smooth and dark gray, streaked with light and dark stripes made from thousands of years of water cascading down. You pass under Dog Rock, a giant granite slab the overhangs the road, its shape the same as a golden retrievers snout.

In El Portal, you pass through a small town (population: 271), inhabited mostly by park employees and a few lucky people who managed to buy homes there. I’m not sure what the deal is - I think maybe they own the house but not the land - but it’s nearly impossible to find a house there. I haven’t seen a listing in all the years I’ve searched Yosemite area real estate.

The El Portal Market, built in 1934, was a historic market located right off Highway 140. It was old and dilapidated but decently maintained, well loved. It would have looked right at home in the 1991 film, “Fried Green Tomatoes” or the town from “Beetlejuice.” It just had an otherworldly, old timey feel to it. Creaky wood floors, a stock of random snacks and sundries, and a sign out front whose redundancy always made us laugh.

“Ice Cream, Milk, Dairy Products” it boasted.

When I got older and was able to drive my own car to school, thus allowing me to stop at my best friend Caitlin’s El Portal home on my way back, we’d go into that store and get candy and snacks before heading to her house to watch “Passions,” a delectable nineties soap opera complete with witches and dolls come to life. Cailtin’s mother, who worked for the park at the time, had an open tab with the El Portal Marker that we could just add things to. I always felt a little guilty doing this, though I doubt Caitlin’s mom minded. She was, and is, a cheerleader for us who thought we were just great.

Sadly, the El Portal Market burned to the ground in 2008. The locals still miss it, even though it’s been replaced with a more modern iteration. Great memories and the feeling of being cared for lived inside those walls.

Once you pass El Portal, where the bus would pick up a number of kids in different neighborhoods, including a trailer park where the majority of the local kids lived (almost completely free from judgement, by the way - it had a similar connotation to the trailer park in Malibu where Betsey Johnson lives - it’s such a pretty location no one was complaining that they lived in trailers). After that, 140 winds through grass-covered hillsides on its way up the hill to Midpines and Mariposa.

These grass-covered hillsides are truly something to behold in spring, when they are blanketed with California Poppies so intensely bright they feel neon and almost hurt your eyes. And they are everywhere, barely a spot of green grass to see between the lush petals.

Years later when I arrived at college, my dorm was a short walk over a massive gorge away from the building that housed the art department and most of my classes. When I told my college classmates about my harrowing high school commute, their eyes widened and they reacted as if I was telling some sort of tall tale.

“Wait, you drove TWO HOURS to high school?”

“Yeah, and I kind of miss it.”

There was something about that commute, about that “non-time” before school work and active thinking started, that allowed for daydreaming and fantasizing. The road was far too curvy to do homework or sleep on. So I’d just gaze out the window, looking at how beautiful the surroundings were. I had a lot of time alone as a kid so I was used to having this imagination time.

I’ve always kind of thought it would be fun to live in Connecticut or some other New York suburb for the reason of having this type of commute time, in a mode of transport I’m not driving, where I could just look out the window and think. But I guess these days I’d likely be distracted by my phone. A fantasy of the past I can never get back but hold dear still just the same.

In my description of the drive on Highway 140 from Yosemite Valley to Mariposa, I’m describing a commute that wouldn’t be possible for quite some time after the flood.

That morning, when my father called (209) 372 - 0200, we found out 140 was closed. My parents, both of whom I’m assuming were off work because the park was closed until further notice, spent those few days after the flooding stopped on the phone talking to friends and coworkers, trying to figure out what was going on. Knowing my mom, she probably went over to the school where she taught, three doors down, to organize and get some extra work done (she was an incredibly passionate, Type A, and dedicated educator - a fact I hold a lot of pride about). My dad also went to work, working on random filings and prep work for his dental practice.

Finally in all their calling and town gossiping, my parents found out what was going on with Highway 140. The stretch of road just above Dog Rock had slid, taking with it the entire road. Giant granite boulders, lodged into the soil that held up the cliffside, plummeted directly onto the asphalt, pushing it downwards towards the Merced River. The historic granite safety walls, about 30” tall and built, I’m assuming in 1926 when the original Highway 140 was built, crumbled and gave way, falling down the cliffs into the river.

It’s hard to overstate the beauty of these handmade granite walls. You can see images of them here and here. After the flood, those historic granite walls were rebuilt to be crash-resistant. Made from steel and concrete and rebar. Their exteriors were moulded into the shape of granite, to a surprisingly lifelike effect. If I remember correctly (though don’t quote me on this), Disney Imagineers were brought in to help painters develop a technique to mimic the beauty of the original masonry. They did a good job, but nothing beats the gravitas of real stone.

The image of Highway 140, the only direct road to my high school, falling into the river has remained imprinted in my brain. I didn’t see it, but I can see it so vividly in my head. White water gushing. Large granite boulders, looking like gentle giants, rolling in slow motion down the cliffside. Luckily, there were no fatalities in this disaster. I’ve always wondered who the first person to come across the slide was (maybe the road was closed by then). Imagine looking down at a hole where a road had been. An access point millions of people used per year, hundreds of locals used a day, laying at the bottom of the rushing Merced River below.

Even disaster in Yosemite is beautiful.

The 1997 flood happened my freshman year of high school. I was just getting started, just starting to meet people who were friendly to me (I think it was a bit after this I met Caitlin and Sara, maybe in early spring). The flood would completely change the course of my high school life. The road remained closed for the rest of the academic school year.

At age fourteen, I moved away, alone, to live in a depressing, dark house in Mariposa owned by the school district. A rotating selection of Yosemite parents, sometimes my dad but usually not, came to take care of the group of kids (I think was around eight of us in that house, some were in other equally depressing shacks). I ate peanut butter on tortillas and walked home from school every day thinking some local kid was going to pop out of the bushes and beat me up.

I’d not grown up in Mariposa, it was a complete foreign land to me. The kids looked strange and alien. Their southern accents perplexing given that we were in California. They were culturally so oppositional to how was I was raised and who I was that I felt like I was going to school in a foreign country, in a time period one hundred years past.

I remember that being a really lonely time. I was a big ol’ mama’s boy and my mom was too busy with work to ever be the house mom. I’m guessing my dad would come and get me on weekends to drive me home, but living in that house was kind of like going to the worst boarding school in the world. The type where instead of it being better and more advantaged than your own home, it was worse, like a prison.

The lights in that house were all dull florescents, the type that are just big, glaring, yellow-white boxes affixed to the ceiling. The carpet was dark gray industrial carpet, stained with catsup and dirt. My dark oak bunkbed (I slept on top because the kid below me was too scared to) was outfitted in the cobalt blue Marimikko underwater/fish scene sheets my mom got me when I was seven. I had a kids My First Sony cassette player I’d listen to Bjork’s “Post” tape on over and over, drowning out the endless monotony of after-school-before-bed-time. The bright colors of my sheets and walkman looked dull and dead in the florescent light. I felt dull and dead in that florescent light.

This was before I really cared about school. I was a lackluster student back then. I had been placed in remedial math where a snaggle tooth girl named Sarah would taunt me for wearing clogs and call me faggot every day. One day, she stabbed me in the hand with a pencil. I got my act together sophomore year and ended up making up for freshman year by working extra hard the rest of high school. But looking back, no wonder I wasn’t a good student freshman year.

The road to my high school fell into the river and I had to live in a dark, depressing house in a town that was utterly foreign to me.

Repairing Highway 140 took years, and it wasn’t until fall of 2000 (coincidentally exactly when I left for college) that it reopened. The park service and the school district found a solution for us Yosemite high school kids who needed to commute into town for school. The solution, however was lacking in almost every way and led to a great deal of hardship for the few of us who decided to keep going to school.

TO BE CONTINUED…

*Please Note: I wrote most of this from memory. So if you’re a Yosemite historian, please excuse any details that may be off. Remember, I was fourteen.

You can view video of the flood here.