Floods in California

It was time to go west again. You can live in this city for decades on end and keep telling yourself in your head that New York is not America – it is, of course, nowhere else – but the mental habits of living in a metropolis, the habits of mind, become automatic, as addictive as praying in church or reaching for a cigarette and New Yorkers, like Londoners, most of all Parisians, truly believe they live at the centre of things and that life outside is a watered-down version of the same thing.

Balzac, writing I'm sure with a straight face to hide the fact that he was writing something absurd but true, he once wrote, 'In Paris there are many kinds of women. There's the duchess and the banker's wife, the wife of the consul general, the politician's wife, there's the woman who belongs to the Right Bank of the river and the woman who belongs to the Left Bank, but in the provinces, there is only one woman and this poor woman is the provincial woman.'

This is a universal snobbery of people who live in capital cities. I am not noted for diffidence or biting my tongue, but in the presence of some of my closest friends, born and bred New Yorkers, not to mention Londoners, I have heroically held on for years and just given a sickly nod of the head when they talk with great complacency and enormous ignorance about Southerners, about Californians – all of whom are supposed to live in Beverly Hills – most of all about Texans, all of whom, it seems, if they have not been cast for the glitzy soap opera 'Dallas', would like to be.

So even a reporter who's been flattering himself for a lifetime that he's not as other men has to get away from time to time and be surprised. I keep in my calendar diary notes of the places, the restaurants that I eat at and I give ticks like Michelin stars. No tick means more than acceptable – it had better be or I wouldn't go there again. One tick is good. Two ticks is very good indeed. Three ticks is a superb meal in which no single course is inferior to the others.

I was painstakingly going through my diary the other day – I had to, alas, it's tax return time – and I noticed that throughout the whole year, I had given only three restaurants three ticks. And where were they? Not in New York or London or New Orleans. One was for a dinner at a new hotel in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a stone's throw or a soufflé toss from Harvard Yard. The other two were both for restaurants in Houston, Texas.

Well, my destination this time was California which is about as enlightening as saying my destination was Asia. Not quite, but California is over 900 miles long and which part you're going to ought to tell people right away what sort of landscape, what sort of life you can expect. I was going to northern California, not quite as far north as a man on the plane was headed – Crescent City, a timber town whipped by north winds notorious in the past for shipwrecks, where on a reef, seven miles offshore, there's a fog signal station, a grey dank place for the most part which knows snow into the spring and where, when the spring rains make the river gurgle, the most characteristic sound is of the bump and clatter of the logs rolling.

We stopped off for a day or two at friends in Los Angeles where, last week, it was for several days in a row a sweaty, smoggy 90 degrees. Then on up to San Francisco where, after some atrocious cold rain, things were back to normal at this time of year – 50 degrees at night, 65 by day and the sun ringing like the light off an iceberg.

Mainly, however, I'd come to check on the ordeal and the survival of a friend who lives 30-odd miles north of San Francisco in the Napa Valley, one of the great wine valleys, and on the good luck, or ill luck, of my stepson who grows wine grapes in the Alexander Valley which is about another 50 miles to the north.

Three years ago, during that freakish and appalling week when Queen Elizabeth visited California for the first time, arrived way south in San Diego in a raincoat and probably a sou'wester and need never have taken them off for the slamming rain and the mudslides she encountered all the way to Seattle, which is 1500 miles north.

During that frightful week, my stepson saw his vines, one howling night, go floating off down the valley like little logs in Crescent City. He lost the whole crop – 65 acres – and he's had, at about three-year intervals, similar misfortune from similar freakish floods. They're not supposed to have them. And I began to think of him as a character in Thomas Hardy and started to greet him, in the good times, I should say, with, 'So, how's the Mayor of Casterbridge doing?'

Well, my concern this time was to see how he'd fared through a single week in which northern California, so-called, which begins about 80 miles south of San Francisco and goes on and on for another 300 miles or more, northern California had the wettest spell in 30 years. The normal annual rainfall in San Francisco and on up through the Napa and Sonoma Valleys is 22 inches – 22 inches a year. In nine days in February, they had 22 inches. The result was to turn a huge area of the state into a great lake. Well, maybe huge area is overdoing it. The land more or less under water from six feet to a foot or so was a little larger than the size of England.

There are, I hope, enough of the class present who are interested in how such an aberration could come about. One year's supply of rain in nine days? Well, the end of January through February is the usual rainy time on and off. The normal procedure is for the jet stream, carrying damp air, to blow in from Alaska and pass through Canada. For some reason, little understood, the stream coming across the Pacific took a headlong dive south and absorbed masses of subtropical moisture from the warm waters off Hawaii. Then it proceeded on its usual eastbound course. Towards, this time, not the eastern coast of Canada, but of northern California and once it hit the cool land, it unburdened itself of the huge storehouse of rain and lashed away at the crumbly soil of the Coast Range mountains and the soft soil of the northern valleys.

In these natural disasters – and it's true of tornadoes in the south and hurricanes anywhere along the Atlantic coast – people somehow revert to their pioneer origins and work their tails off night and day to help each other. The miraculous statistic about the California floods is that no more than 20-odd people died and this over an horizon which, seen from a helicopter, was one unbroken lake with thousands of cars bobbing like corks. About 10,000 houses were gone for good, about 50,000 people who were evacuated came back to tramp through ankle or knee-deep mud and guess what it would take by way of money and labour to restore their houses back to something like normal.

My stepson, pretty far inland, was luckier than usual. He lost only about a quarter of his crop. His headache this time was brought on by a vintner to the south who owes him a pack of money. 'Sorry,' the man phoned, 'it's all gone. I'm three feet under!' The friend I mentioned, who has a house in the Napa Valley has, also, about ten miles to the north of his home a restaurant that he built lovingly in a courtyard with old brick he'd collected and stored for a dozen years.

He saved his house by pumping his basement and cellar for five days in a row but on the third night, as the rains poured on and one, he heard from the manager of his restaurant. The carpets, the man said, are floating five feet above the parquet floors. My friend is wondering whether it's worth rebuilding and when I saw him, he was dickering with the insurance people to decide whether this pestilence was or was not an insurable act of God.

Well, after nine days and nights of the rain drumming on the roof (if by then you had a roof) they pattered and tapered off and, only then, on another river, the Yuba River, a levee burst. Another 22,000 people had to be evacuated. Floating down the raging waters were handbills and printed signs saying, 'Remember, we are still in drought!' and, 'Save Water!' Until mid-February, the general complaint was that the winter rains had failed to appear. For the first time in ten years, the restaurants in San Francisco stopped automatically serving glasses of ice water before they took your order.

But by the time we got back to San Francisco from the woeful and sloppy north, the floods were no longer the first item on the evening news. Back to all the normal preoccupations of American life towards the end of the twentieth century. Should an agency outside the Congress be allowed to cut the budget? Can a school respond to parents' objections by keeping a boy with AIDS from attending? Ought athletes to have to submit to urine analysis by way of screening them for cocaine and other drugs?

All these things and many more matters, seemingly serious or seemingly trivial, are fairly certain to come to the courts and, like all such claims of trespassing on the rights of the individual, could come eventually to the Supreme Court. Until last week, a fervent national debate had been going on about whether or not explicit pictures of sexual pornography were a form of discrimination against women and two weeks ago, the Supreme Court said they were not.

One evening last week I called on a man I've known for over 30 years – a San Franciscan, an incomparable, droll, irascible, charming Irishman who reads a great deal and can and will discuss intelligently all these burning issues. He's also an ex golfer.

I told him that the majestic course on which next year's American Open Championship is to be played, the Olympic Club, close to San Francisco, I told him that it had lost a hundred or more of the features that bring on the majesty, the towering California cypresses.

He said, with a sniff, 'About time. It was like playing in a damn cathedral'.

This transcript was typed from a recording of the original BBC broadcast (© BBC) and not copied from an original script. Because of the risk of mishearing, the BBC cannot vouch for its complete accuracy.

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