The Truckee in February

Guadalupe Morales had learned the river's moods the way you learn anything you live beside long enough — through attention and a certain amount of fear.

He had been in Reno nine years. He arrived in the spring of 1869, twenty-two years old, crossing up from Sonora with two other men from his village, following word that there was work on the Central Pacific. The work was real. The pay was poor but regular, and Reno was close enough to the river that the heat of summer was almost bearable. When the other men moved on — one back to Sonora, one east toward Utah — Guadalupe stayed. He did not make a decision about it. He simply did not leave.

He worked the railyard now, loading and unloading freight from the cars that moved between Reno and the Comstock. The Virginia and Truckee had been running since 1872, and the yards were busy: silver ore coming down from Virginia City, supplies going up, a constant exchange of things the mountains wanted and things the desert produced. It was not glamorous work. It paid enough.

He lived in a room on First Street, two blocks from the river, in a building where several other railyard workers kept rooms. The landlord was a Basque man who spoke little English and asked no questions, which suited Guadalupe fine.

February had been cold, and then cold and wet, and then the wet turned to something worse. For a week the snow had been falling in the Sierra above Reno, piling onto the already-deep winter snowpack. During the day the temperature would briefly warm, and then at night it would drop again and the snow would harden into ice and then soften and then harden once more, and the whole mass kept accumulating on the mountains above the valley.

Guadalupe noticed the river on the fourteenth, a Sunday. He had walked down to the bank after church — he was not a dedicated churchgoer but he was a habitual one, a distinction he had never found a way to explain — and the Truckee was running faster than usual. It made a deep, urgent sound that was different from its ordinary speaking. The color was wrong too, a gray-green instead of the blue-gray he knew.

By Tuesday morning it had climbed its banks by six inches.

He mentioned it at work to Delgado, one of the other men on his yard crew.

"It does that," Delgado said. "It did it in '74. Flooded Commercial Row up to the knees."

"Did it damage the yards?"

Delgado shrugged. "Some. It dries."

The yards sat higher than the riverfront buildings, which gave them some protection. But the tracks ran through a low section near the First Street crossing, and if the water kept rising, the switchwork there would flood and there would be no freight moving until it receded.

On Wednesday the foreman sent them home early. The water was at the edge of the low tracks.

Walking home, Guadalupe went by way of the river. He did not know exactly why. It was not the faster route. But he found himself wanting to see it, the way you sometimes want to look directly at the thing that concerns you rather than away from it.

The riverbank near Virginia Street was busy. Men were moving goods from the ground floors of the commercial buildings, stacking boxes and barrels on higher shelves or carrying them up stairs. He watched a man from the Chinese quarter — one of the laundry workers who lived near the crossroads of Virginia and First — hauling a bundle of bedding above the waterline with a composure that suggested this was not the first time.

The water was brown now, carrying silt and branches. It moved with a seriousness of purpose that ordinary river water did not have.

Guadalupe helped a woman carry a chest up from a dress shop for an hour, without being asked and without being thanked, which seemed like the correct arrangement. Then he went home.

He stood in his room on First Street and listened. He could hear the river from there, a low thrumming in the walls that he had not heard before. The room smelled of damp wood. Through the window he could see that the alley below was beginning to pool.

He thought about Sonora. His mother's house was adobe, and in a wet year the walls would start to weep a little, moisture seeping through where the plaster had cracked. She would patch it with more plaster, smoothed on with her hands, and the repair would hold until it did not.

He had not been home in nine years. He thought about it sometimes and then thought about something else, the way you do when a thing is both certain and not yet decided.

The river peaked that night, crested the First Street bank by two feet, ran cold and fast through the alley below his window, and was back within its banks by Friday morning.

The freight yard was muddy but mostly intact. The low switchwork near First Street needed cleaning but not repair. By Monday the cars were running again, ore coming down from the Comstock, supplies going up.

Guadalupe did not know yet that this valley was where his life would happen. He did not know about his daughter Rosa, or her daughter, or the many generations of this family that would accumulate in Reno the way silt accumulates — slowly, without plan, until it is simply the ground you stand on.

He knew, on that Friday morning, that the river had returned to its banks and the work was there and the sun was out, which felt like enough.

He went to work.

---