“Baptism by Fire and Flood”
by Ann Stalcup
Art by Jody Roberts
An Ode to Topanga
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In June 1967, we purchased a small home in the valley behind
the Topanga Feed Bin, an area known as the “Snake Pit” The previous evening we
had looked at a house overlooking Paradise Cove, priced at $55,000. The asking
price of $5,500 for the Rodeo Grounds house sounded more appropriate to our
modest teacher salaries.
Like most of the older Topanga homes, the room size was
rather inconsistent. The living room measured nine feet by nine feet. The spare
bedroom was twenty-two feet square. The only heating was a pot-bellied Franklin
stove in the spare bedroom. The exterior walls were covered with asphalt
shingles. When we tried to buy suitable outdoor paint, we were told, “It can’t
have asphalt walls!” But it did!
The garden, filled with banana trees, splashes of magenta
bougainvillea, birds of paradise, ginger blossoms, poinsettias, hibiscus,
avocado trees, purple morning glories and towering bamboo, was like a scene
from a Gauguin or Rousseau painting. Every spring, the dirt lane beside the
house was thickly covered with a carpet of nasturtiums in brilliant shades of
orange.
We should have known that it wasn’t really paradise! On our
first weekend at “Little House” as we fondly called it, a barefoot teenager
drifted by on horseback. “Did you know that your house floods every winter?”
she asked with a self-satisfied smirk. It didn’t flood that first winter
however, so we were able to convince ourselves that our teenage “soothsayer”
was just indulging in a little wishful thinking.
But, in early 1969 we had three twenty- four inch floods in
a two month period. Two feet doesn’t sound like much, but it’s enough to float
a bed, and when you're located at the mouth of the Creek, the deluge of flood
water brings with it a wall of debris all the way from the top of Topanga. By
our fifth flood in 1974, we had become totally blasé. We had drilled one inch
holes in the floor, hopefully not big enough for snakes to enter, although we
anticipated the occasional frog! The holes enabled us to hose off our carpeting
which was now floatable grass matting, and hose down walls, floors and
furniture. We became experts at piling almost everything we owned on top of two
large tables. Our cat learned how to find safety in a drawer. Our dog learned
how to relax on a floating bed. It took five floods to reach this level of organization!
But all of this comes much later.
In January ’69, the weather was so bad, it was obvious that
a flood was inevitable. The rain, at its most torrential, lasted over a week.
In the middle of the night, on the second Saturday of continuous rain, our dog
woke us barking rather hysterically. The toilets were making a loud gurgling
noise and the carpeting was afloat! We couldn’t believe that we had slept so
soundly. Now, twenty years later, in my home high on a hill, my stomach still
goes into a tight knot at every first drop of rain!
We got busy stacking our furniture and clothes higher and
higher. It was pitch dark. The water was icy cold. A thick fence around the
property was acting as a fairly efficient filter, preventing the mud from being
too thick. When the water was a foot deep, we went back to bed. It was the
driest place to be. The water level seemed to be stationary. At 5 a.m. we
realized that the bed was floating. The water was considerably deeper. We got
dressed (as best we could on a moving bed), gathered up pillows, blankets and
dog and left the house. The icy water was up to my armpits. The night was
still pitch black. It felt as if dawn would never come.
We climbed the hill behind the house and reached the home of
an ex-colleague of my husband’s. Within 30 minutes there were forty other
refugees huddled together in the same living room; some were dressed, some were
in night clothes, some were wrapped in drapes. It was the only house in the
area above water level.
As dawn finally broke, we fed everyone a huge breakfast,
then looked down on a scene of utter devastation. Some of the homes were filled
with solid mud up to the second story. In fact, some homeowners lived upstairs
from then on. It was easier than shoveling out the mud! We had been lucky.
Water damage was considerable, but there was little solid mud. Once we’d
discarded the carpet, clean up and repainting were tedious but possible.
The most immediate problem was that we were cut off The rain
had stopped, but the pretty tree-lined stream was now a wide raging river.
Massive sycamores and a great many cars had been swept out to sea. We had no
electricity, no water, and there wasn’t a single functional toilet in the
neighborhood. Two long-overdue pregnant young women were helicoptered out, but
the rest of us stayed. No one could close their front door. They had been swept
open, then propped open by the muddy flood waters. We were all afraid of
vandalism. Since Benedict Canyon was flooded that same weekend, its “poor
relation”, Rodeo Grounds, got little publicity, sympathy or protection.
That first morning the men went from house to house checking
that power supplies were turned off, and in our case, placing bedding and
clothing over the high beams to dry. We had phones, but no one we talked to
could quite visualize the situation as it really was. Since we had no access to
civilization by foot or car, we had no way to get supplies. Our road and
suspended bridge were long gone.
A sheriff’s posse rigged up a stretcher on cables across the
raging stream. Those who wanted to leave were hauled across. It was at best a
precarious escape route. When they announced that their rescue mission was
over, some resourceful natives replaced the stretcher with an egg shaped hanging
basket chair. The sheriffs men were persuaded to leave their cables.
The women went to work by pulling themselves across the
stream in this basket for many weeks. When the stream had subsided a little,
the men all bought themselves waders, but the current remained too swift and
treacherous for the women to cope with. Spirits remained high throughout the
whole ordeal as well as the two additional floods we had that spring. The
stream crossing was our greatest inconvenience. No matter how careful you were,
you always emerged filthy at the other end, besides which, you had to wait for
the arrival of a neighbor to pull you across with the cable.
For a very long time we showered at friends’ homes en route
to our teaching jobs. Friends did our laundry and we picked up home cooked
meals at other homes. We still had a house, yet for a long time it was just a
“roof over our heads”. It wasn’t a home. We had no electricity for two months.
Two bachelors were sharing our roof Their home higher up the Canyon had split in
half. The Canyon itself was closed. For our dog, a mud lover, it was the
happiest time of his life!
We threw a “Thank You for Helping Us During the Floods”
party when our garden had almost returned to its exotic splendor, now enhanced
by an abundance of swamp- loving white calla lilies. It was the best party we
have ever given for the best friends we’ve ever had.
Our toilet never really recovered. As fast as the septic
tank was pumped, it filled up again. An ancient spring, activated by one of the
three floods that Spring, appeared in our garden. It never left. If the toilet
refused to flush for a guest, our innocent faces and our, “It doesn’t flush?
Whatever could be wrong5” gave them no clue to our ongoing anxiety. We even had
a six month period with a camping toilet in a tent in the garden!
A segment for a TV series was later filmed at our house. The
TV script, describing our much loved home as a “freaky little pad,” offended us
briefly, but nothing could spoil our pleasure in our environment for long. Even
after five devastating floods we wouldn’t have exchanged our six and a half
years at “Little House” for anything.
Our last autumn (1973) in the house began with a very severe
Topanga Canyon fire. Back fires were set around the perimeter of our yard. It
saved the house but nothing on the hillsides. The firemen told us that the next
flood would sweep away every house in the valley. We knew that no matter what
the outcome, it would be the last flood that we could mentally or physically
tolerate. Our, by then valuable, art collection was put into storage in a
friend’s garage as a precaution. Finally in early January, 1974, the rains
came, we calmly dismantled our Christmas tree, stacked our furniture, and left
the rising waters for the last time. A phone call to a friend asking “When you
said we could stay with you the next time we flooded, did you mean it?” gave us
a bed until we found an apartment.
Now, I can never think of our Rodeo Grounds home without a
kaleidoscope of images: dirt roads, bare feet, horses, dogs, nasturtiums, a
once idyllic stream, and some of the most wonderful people we have ever been
privileged to know. And then there were die frogs. Night after night they would
climb our windows and freeze there, spread- eagled. They were wonderful watch
dogs. They croaked and croaked but were totally silent the moment somebody
approached.
I feel now that I have the best of both worlds. Having grown
up in England with a magnificent water view, it had always been my dream to
have a similar view as an adult We live on a hilltop in Malibu with a wide
ocean view, so I achieved my dream. But I teach in Topanga, and have done so
for the last few years. The joy I feel as I drive along Saddle Peak every
morning gives me a “high” that would be hard to beat I have my water view, but
I have my beloved Topanga too. What could be better! I feel as if my life has
come full circle in the best possible way.
___
Ann Stalcup, Malibu
resident and Topanga Elementary School teacher, was inspired to tell her story
by the Messenger’s 10th anniversary flood issue.
