The Ministry for the Future

very far, and hard to believe what you could see. Later I heard the whole LA basin was flooded, all the way from the Hollywood Hills down to San Clemente, past Irvine where I grew up. Orange County was just as bad as LA, which makes sense given they are the same coastal plain with the same backing mountains. Of course there are some high points here and there on the plain, as everyone found out that day. Palos Verdes sticking up near Long Beach of course, and a few inland neighborhoods on lines of low hills like Puente Hills and Rose Hill, and back where the freeways meet around San Dimas. But for the most part LA is just one big coastal plain, and on that day, a big brown lake. In lots of places the elevated freeways were the only flat surfaces that stuck up out of this new lake, so, with no other place to go, the freeways were where people went. There were still some cars up there, but none of them were moving, and as the need for space to accommodate people got greater, a lot of cars were shoved over the side into the drink.

I kayaked under the 210 through a very scary underpass, and paddled around getting people off roofs and over to the freeway, where onramps served as boat docks. A lot of people were zipping around on motorboats they had kept in their driveways, also some kayaks like mine. We were doing all we could to help, some people were really desperate, especially if they had kids, and it was hard to keep them from tipping my kayak over in their panic. My arm started to hurt where it had broken, and I kept feeling a sense of unreality that this could all be happening at all, it was too much like a cheesy disaster film, but whatever, I must have gotten cast at last, and besides the fear on people’s faces and in their voices kept reminding me that no, this was real no matter how weird it was. And my arm hurt, kayaking is just very bilateral, you can’t do it one-armed, but I just kept saying Fuck it and kept paddling.

One thing about the LA basin being so huge was that even though the whole thing was flooded, it was never flooded very deep. Lots of taller rooftops stayed above the flood level, although many other buildings had collapsed into the water. Most palm trees were knocked down, it was a shock to see and a danger to navigation. One of many! Sometimes I had people hanging on to the back of my kayak and the current would take us toward a floating tree or a car and I would have to paddle insanely to get away from them, my arm hurting and the people hanging on and not always kicking in the most helpful ways. And all the old washes crossing the plain were now revealed again as fast places in the flow, it was spooky to see those currents, dangerous too, and it was never obvious which way water would be moving on any given street, because it depended on where the nearest wash was, since the water got sucked toward those, and the streets were almost flat. A whole river network was being revealed or half-revealed by currents in the streets, north south east west, they could be running in any direction. Orange Grove Avenue was on enough of a tilt to be like a water slide running south, then the old sunken part of the Pasadena Freeway just west of it ran in the other direction, it was crazy. Sepulveda was scary fast, I was told, the other kayakers all said Stay off Sepulveda, it’s like class 8! And the rain kept pounding down on us. Hard rain, in LA, for hour after hour? It was like Noah’s flood! And it looked like it could go on for forty days and forty nights too, why not?

So, ten million people stranded on all the high points left sticking out, and no food to speak of. Rain pounding down for hour after hour. Lots of little boats but nothing big, and nothing organized. All the freeways packed with very wet people. It was never colder than about seventy degrees, although that feels cold when you’re wet and it’s windy, but cold wasn’t the issue. Nor was the flood like some do-it-right-now-or-die emergency, where you get an hour of total danger followed by relief. That became clear as it went on. So, not like a movie, not at all. Which was impressing me more and more. Here I was helping people, all of us wet and scared, and my right bicep just screaming, and I kept thinking This is real, this feels good, why again are you trying to be a fucking actress? Oh sure, some people had gotten caught somehow and drowned, it was inevitable given the number of people and the power of water, water is a force of nature, you can’t resist it if it gets you, but for the most part people were on rooftops or on the freeways, and it was more a matter of evacuating everyone before they starved than anything else. If you didn’t get drowned right away then it was just a matter of holding on and waiting for relief.

So as the day wore on I joined a crowd on the roof of a restaurant and they fed us spaghetti. They had broken through the roof and were using the restaurant’s food supplies and big pots from its kitchen, and cooking over an open fire a group of men were tending, set on a big sheet of corrugated metal they had pried off of something, with another sheet as a roof over them to keep the rain off. Chances seemed good they would burn that restaurant down, but on the other hand they could always take their roof sheet