SWEPT AWAY

By NANCY GIBBS

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.

Hardworking people who had that very week finished rebuilding their homes after the January floods found themselves washed out again. "What do you tell a two-year-old?" asked Delia Torres, 27, whose home in Castroville was swamped. "That our house drowned?" About 12 miles north, in the town of Pajaro, residents cursed fate and the endangered long-toed salamander, whose need for lush foliage on the riverbanks had prevented local officials from dredging and clearing to improve water flow. On March 11, as the Pajaro River edged higher and higher, the levee broke, sending 8 ft. of mud lurching through the center of town. Fire fighter Mike Vindhurst and his team of rescuers later went street to street, telling residents over loudspeakers in both English and Spanish that they had to evacuate. Within minutes, the waters came roaring into town. "My guys were wading out waist-high into the intersection and walking out with children in their arms," Vindhurst says, "the mothers clinging to their necks and the dogs across their shoulders."

Fire fighter Doug McCoun was carrying 14 people in his pickup before he stopped counting; he had to tell people to leave their pets behind. "It was literally a choice between a person or this dog. I know it's hard because this can be your best buddy." He tried to help women and children first, he says, "but there were a few panicked guys who climbed over them."

By the time the worst was past, the town was in ruins: the elementary school may never reopen, the churches were ravaged, the surrounding fields swamped. Barrels of jelly came drifting out of the local Smucker's plant, tires floated down the streets like black Cheerios, and everywhere there were sofas drifting across neighborhoods.

Down in Castroville, the problem was not just the water, but what was in it. When the local pumping station broke down, it sent raw sewage spewing out into the rising waters. Within a day, every river in the county was polluted with farm runoff. The ugly tides left behind thick gray silt like wet fur. Officials told residents to disinfect everything, shampoo the rugs, wash the clothes, boil the teddy bears and see a doctor if they got water in their eyes or mouth.

The sun shone in mockery through midweek, as family after family tried to salvage something familiar and comforting from the bogs that were their homes. Nomi McVey in Mission Fields was grateful for her neighbors' help but anguished all the same. "You love your friends, but they come in and of course in order to clean they have to go through everything,'' she says, "your underwear, all of your personal things." Her daughter Jordana, 11, lost all her letters from pen pals. Daughter Elizabeth, 15, was staying at a friend's house. With no phones or power, she couldn't call her family, so the next day she paid $30 for a helicopter ride to the beach, then walked five hours to reach the McVey home safely.

James Rodda lost the Bibles presented to his father in 1879 for good attendance in Sunday school. "Some things kind of make your life go by in front of you," Rodda says. "When you finally recognize the destruction of something, your life is really brought into focus. You just keep looking at things, saying 'Oh, God.' " And you watch the skies for the next sign of storm clouds or a rainbow...

--Reported by Dan Cray/Los Angeles and J. Howard Green/Castroville

With reporting by DAN CRAY/LOS ANGELES AND J. HOWARD GREEN/CASTROVILLE