My new novella, The Byrd River Flood, was just released by Paper Angel Press.
Inspired by the true story of the 1995 Pajaro River flood in Watsonville, California, The Byrd River Flood is an adaptation excerpted from my eco-thriller, Fruit of the Devil. It portrays the social, emotional, environmental, personal, and political causes and costs of locating farmworker housing on the flood plain of a major river.
Since the founding of Santa Cruz in the 1800s, the Pajaro Barrio has been destroyed by water and buried in mud, only to be rebuilt in the same location, flood after flood. The most recent “costliest storm in NorCal history,” the El Niño flood of 2020, played out eerily like all other major floods documented since 1880, including the 1995 disaster portrayed here.
Please forgive my hubris for saying that if you hear echos of Steinbeck’s descriptions of the Salinas River, sister to the Pajaro, it’s intentional. John Steinbeck is a major influence on my writing.
excerpt From The Byrd River Flood:
The True Story of Pajaro River’s 100-Year Flood of ‘95
by an eyewitness
(Names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.)
A tidal wave, a rising wall of black water raced down the thirty-mile-long Byrd River, carving away banks, grabbing whole trees out by the roots, lifting shopping carts, tumbling truck tires, old shoes, bits of plastic, a nest of drowned rats. Four large metal storage barrels marked with red skull and crossbones slid down an eroded bank and fell into the river, bouncing and rolling downstream. The water tossed giant boulders like they were made of cardboard, bumping them against the metal barrels and dragging rocks and barrels along the river bottom. Hundreds of gallons per minute of swirling water scoured thick sediments laden with pesticides, detergents, motor oil, and estrogens out of the river rocks. Salamander eggs, frog eggs, salmon and trout eggs in the gravel redds washed away. The churning black caldron, rising and boiling in Earth’s belly, pushed toward Valle Verde.