SWEPT AWAY

JAMES RODDA BEGAN TO HAVE SECOND thoughts about his decision to ride out the storms when his 5-ft. 4-in. wife Gloria opened their front door and met a 5-ft. wall of water. It was 8 p.m. on Friday, March 10, in Mission Fields, just outside Carmel; the lights were out, the phones were down, and there was no one left in the neighborhood to hear them screaming. California was in the middle of its second "100-year storm" in three months, and the Carmel Valley was in for a very bad night.

At 4 o'clock that afternoon, when the water began crawling up the sloped driveway, the Roddas thought they would end up with 2 in. of water in the garage. All afternoon the authorities had been ordering residents to get out of town, and by twilight most people had. By 5 p.m. the water was slithering into the house through the furnace; by 6 it was 3 ft. deep inside. There wasn't enough room on the shelves to stash everything, so they used their floating mattresses as arks. The two cats, disinclined to swim for it, curled up on top of the kitchen cabinets.

When Gloria was finally swept out the front door, James dived out after her. "I grabbed her hand before she floated out of the front yard," he says. "She began paddling, and with water up to our necks, I hung on to her all the way down to the next intersection." The couple could hardly afford to wait all night for help to come. James is 83; his wife is 72.

The Roddas finally found refuge with strangers in a house on higher ground--and remembered their stranded cats. So one of their rescuers put on his wet suit, paddled his surfboard back to the Roddas' house, wrapped the indignant animals in towels and ferried them out perched on the front of the surfboard.

Last week's marathon of rain and mud and wind cost 15 lives and up to $2 billion in damage, as some of the country's richest farmlands turned to stew. In Monterey County particularly, Nature brought herself to ruin: winds wrecked the orchards; floods loosened the vines and dragged crops out of the fields, which were too wet for tractors to plant new crops. Bees stopped pollinating, leaving peach trees and cherry trees barren. Even the cows were troubled, growing stingy with milk when their feet were wet and their routines disrupted.

California's troubles are all entangled: lots of rain means lusher growth, which, if a dry season follows, means more tinder to burn. If the fires torch the hillsides, there's nothing left to hold the mountains together, so when the rains return, the mud slides are worse. And when earthquakes come, the spongy ground can turn to pudding, and a house quivering on top sinks to the bottom of the bowl.