I woke up at 4:15 this morning, panicked, out of a vivid, realistic dream. It took place at a lake that looked much like Donner Lake near Truckee, but with gentler slopes all around it, and with an enormous dam at the east end where the state park is. There were houses all up and down the hills around the lake, a small city really, four or five thousand people, and Suzie and I lived in one about midway up.
In the dream we were driving away from our house when we heard on the radio that a gigantic freak rainstorm had hit upstream; an enormous wave of water was headed toward the lake. We drove frantically toward the top of the ridge to try to escape the water, to no avail. Water swept over the car, and we were lifted off the road and into the wave, tumbling over and over in a white froth, thinking we were going to die.
Then, miraculously, as happens in dreams, our car was deposited in the yard of a house at the very top of the ridge surrounding the lake, just next to the high-water level. We got out of the car and immediately noticed that wherever we set foot, the ground was cracking and crumbling, the integrity of the ridge itself was suspect. Looking down, we saw that all of the houses below our level were underwater; the death toll was certainly in the thousands.
In the bizarre dreamscape we managed to meet up with a group of six other survivors. The only way to leave the location we were in was to follow the ridge and then cut down and across the front of the dam. Someone managed to find a minibus and we jumped in and started driving.
We got to the dam and started driving down the ridge to pass in front of it. The discharge tunnel was raging, the churning water produced an eerie groan. The face of the dam — enormously long and high — seemed to be bulging, straining to retain the massive load behind it. Fissures were appearing in the dam face, small leaks at first and then spurts of water from an increasing number of openings. We drove on in deep fear; we’d survived this far, but would the damn hold?
I bolted awake.
An obvious metaphor. Floods are natural. The real question is: Will our dams hold?
Categories: Politics