Maria Morales had drawn the line herself, or a version of it, more times than she could count, the blue line on the flood maps that said this is where the river is allowed to come and no farther, and on the morning of January second she stood on Sierra Street in water to her shins and watched the Truckee ignore it.
She was fifty-seven and she had been with the city planning office long enough that the young ones called her when they did not know what a regulation meant, and she had come downtown before dawn in rubber boots and her husband’s old coat because the floodplain administrator was her job and the floodplain was, that morning, most of downtown. The rain had come warm out of the southwest for three days, the kind of storm the forecasters had a cute name for, off Hawaii, and it had fallen as rain to the top of the mountains where there should have been snow to hold it, and it had melted the snow that was already there, and all of it had come down the canyon at once. The river had gone over its banks around ten thirty the morning before and it had not come back.
The worst of it was the bridge. She walked toward the Virginia Street bridge as far as she could and stopped where the water got deep, and she could see the trouble plainly, the way you could see it every big year going back to when the bridge was built, in 1905, a beautiful concrete arch that everyone loved and that had one flaw, a center pier that caught things. Whole trees were coming down the Truckee, root balls and all, out of the burned and logged canyons, and they were piling against that center pier into a dam of their own making, and the river, denied its channel, was climbing out sideways into the streets. She had written memos about that pier. There was a file of them. The bridge was historic and the bridge was beloved and the bridge was, in a hydraulic sense, a cork, and nobody was going to touch it on the strength of a planner’s memo.
A public works crew was trying to work a log loose with a boom truck parked on the high ground by the park. Wingfield Park was a real island now, the way it was meant to be a park island and was instead just an island, the trees standing up out of brown water. Down Sierra and down Center the casinos had their doors sandbagged, the new one and the old ones both, men in waders stacking bags in the gray light while the marquees ran their bulbs overhead as though it were an ordinary Thursday. The Riverboat had water in its basement. Two of the small clubs had water on the floor and the word already going around was that they would not open again, that this was the flood that would finish what the competition had started, and Maria, who had watched downtown thin out casino by casino for fifteen years, thought that the river was only doing quickly what the market had been doing slowly.
Her radio crackled. Out in Sparks the water had been trenched into the big gravel pit to get it off the warehouse district, and the pit had filled and the ground had gone soft under the interstate, and a piece of the freeway had dropped. She wrote it down. That would be weeks. That would be the Army Corps and the state and every agency with a seal, and somewhere in the middle of it a planner with a clipboard would have to walk the flooded blocks house by house and building by building and decide which ones were damaged more than half their value, because that was the rule, that was the federal line, if the water took more than half you could not simply rebuild the same thing in the same place and wait for the next one. She had done substantial-damage assessments before, after smaller years. People hated you for them. You stood in a man’s ruined ground floor and told him the map said he could not put it back the way it was, and he told you his family had been on that corner since before you were born, and sometimes that was even true.
Her family had been on this river since 1869. That was the thing she did not say to the men whose buildings she condemned, because it was not relevant to them and because it was the whole of everything to her. Her great great grandmother had come up from Sonora and settled by the water because the water was where the work was, the railyard, and the family had never really left the sound of it. There was a flood the family still told about, 1890, when a Morales girl of fourteen had stood on Commercial Row and watched the Truckee take the Chinese quarter and the saloon and the first floor of half the town. Maria had grown up on that story. She had gone into planning, in part, because of that story, with the idea, young and clean, that a person could study the water and map the water and write the rules that would keep it in its channel, that the disaster her family remembered could be turned into a line on a page and the line would hold.
The line did not hold. It never entirely held. That was the thing she had learned over thirty years that the young planners in the office had not learned yet, that you did not defeat the river, you only negotiated with it, and it did not honor its agreements. The maps she drew were not fences. They were warnings. They said, if you build here, know what you are building in. And the town read them the way towns always read them, which was to build there anyway, because the ground by the river was flat and central and cheap in the years between floods, and the years between floods were long enough that people forgot, and forgetting was the most reliable thing about people.
She looked at the water climbing the sandbags. It would crest soon, they were saying, if the trees at the pier did not build up worse. It was not even, she knew, a hundred-year flood, whatever the television was calling it. She had run the numbers herself in her head walking down. It was a bad flood, a fifty-year flood, maybe less, and the true hundred-year event, the one the maps warned about and the town did not believe in, was still out there in the future somewhere, larger than this, waiting for its warm storm and its full snowpack and its forgetful decade.
The boom truck got a purchase on the biggest log and dragged it screaming out of the pile, and the water at the pier dropped an inch, then another, a small mercy bought by six men and a machine. Maria took out her notebook, which was already going soft at the edges, and started to write down what she could see, because in a week someone would ask her what the river had done, and she intended to be able to tell them exactly, so that this time, maybe, the town would remember a little longer than usual. She did not believe it would. She wrote it down anyway.
The New Year’s flood of January 1 through 3, 1997, was the worst modern flood in Reno’s history, caused by a “Pineapple Express” atmospheric river dropping warm rain on a deep Sierra snowpack. The Truckee crested at nearly fifteen feet, higher than the 1955 flood though with less flow; debris jamming the 1905 Virginia Street bridge worsened downtown flooding, several small casinos never reopened, and a section of Interstate 80 collapsed in Sparks after floodwater was diverted into a gravel pit. Governor Bob Miller and President Clinton declared disasters; damage across the region exceeded half a billion dollars. Jeff Griffin was Reno’s mayor from 1995 to 2002.