Katie Doyle, Girl About Town

Tuesday, Feb. 22, 2005 - 1:54 a.m.

Okay. I am officially sick of rain. Like, seriously. Enough is enough, people. Alla y'all livin' in places where the rain is spread out throughout the year are totally stoked, because believe me, practically 60 days in a row of the stuff is too damn much, even if you happen to like it. And you people living in Seattle?

Well, you're just nuts. (Bygones.)

Yesterday I went over to the illustrious Jonny-C's, to get my geek on and have some fun with the friends, and the drive home at night was really scary. Visibility was practically nill on the highway, so me and my ride cut off onto side streets, where we had to negotiate - and I'm not kidding - such things as small lakes, fallen trees, and yes, the now ubiquitous mudslide. On my very own street. Oh - and a section of irrigation piping, and I have no idea how that ended up in the street, since it was completely unrelated to the slide, which was further down the hill. This was just a nice, long section of irrigation which had somehow migrated down its hill and into the street. With several largish rocks, the biggest of which is about the size of a bread box (maybe bigger) and has been pushed against the curb. I wonder if it hit any cars on the opposite side of the street, because if it did, that thing did some serious damage. It's not a 25' boulder, and I don't live on Topanga, but it was still a darned big rock.

Today I drove down to the store to find that the mud and iceplant had all washed down the street to the bottom of the hill. The street was just this big sheet of mud, with chunks of iceplant dotting it. And where the mud and iceplant had been, there was this huge, ugly scooped out section in the hillside. Which will probably slide again tonight, what with the pounding rain we're still getting, though just at the moment, it has tapered off a good bit. It's a pretty impressive - albeit ugly - scooped out section, too. I mean, seriously, at least the top 3' of dirt went, and when it decided to go, it *really went*. It just peeled away. Like, when you peel and orange and chunks of the pulp stick to the peel? Like that kind of peeled. It looks seriously nasty, and all I can say is wow, dirt must weigh a lot when it's wet. I mean, you know this already, but when you see it just sheared away and sitting somewhere which had been pretty much mud-free, you really get the idea that yeah, mud is pretty damned heavy. I kinda wish I'd seen it go, because it probably looked pretty cool. And I wonder how much noise it made, and whether or not the people who live at the bottom of the slope, on the other side of the street, heard it and thought "huh; I wonder what that was?" I bet they were pretty suprised when they came out to go to work this morning...

And now, a word about iceplant to you people living in Southern California. A lot of people who live here in the formerly Sunny CA have iceplant planted on your slopes. Landscape designers and architects here seem to love the stuff with a capital L-O-V-E. The only reason I can think of for this unreasonable attachment and widespread deranged usage of a plant is for it's fire retardant qualities, as it is a succulent, and as such, stores water, making it slow to burn. So they frigging plant it everywhere. Iceplant and red apple are on damn near every single slope here, from Bakersfield all the way down to Ojai. And then some. You can't spit without hitting one of the two, and the ONLY reason I can think of is for their flame retardant capabilities, because they do not stabilize a slope. There are two reasons for this. The main reason being, they both have a single large taproot, with smaller roots coming off of it perpendicular to it. They do not put out a wide network of surface and shallow roots, all nicely interlaced together, which is what you need to stabilize a slope. And in the case of iceplant, it is actually contraindicated on any sort of steepish slope because when it gets wet - as in the case of a pounding rainstorm (or even mildly heavy rain such as we can get during the rainy season in any reasonable rainfall year), it actually becomes waterlogged and HEAVY, and will precipitate (no pun intended) a landslide, because the weight of the plant (it's pretty heavy) and the weight of the water sticking to it, not to mention the stuff in/on the ground, are just too damn much for the slope to bear.

So personally, I think the people who own the house at the top of that insanely sleep slope should sue the crap out of their landscaper for putting that stuff in. Especially as the Sunset Western Garden Book - the Bible of every single landscape professional in the western half of the United States - specifically says DO NOT PLANT THIS ON STEEP SLOPES. I have driven up my street I can't tell you how many times and looked at the iceplant and red apple on all the slopes leading up from the street and shaken my head at the idiocy that led to the decision to plant either of them. And yet, there they are...or were, in the case of about 70% of the Slope That Was.

Anyway. I actually didn't mean this to turn into a planting lecture, but um, there you have it. I'm just glad our hill is all planted with Johnson grass, because I don't *think* we have to worry about sliding off of it, but I still get a little nervous, if I really think about it, so let's not think about it. We live on a pretty steep slope, too. We almost pulled all the grass out to put landscaping in after the last spate of storms, because we thought they were done. What with this new cell passing through, I'm glad we didn't, because mulch? Just wouldn't cut it.

Anyway, I have to go to bed now. It's 2:30 am, and I have to try to get back to the days I was on when the temp job came along. Next Monday's the big day. :)

Peace out,
Katie

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