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Sycamore Grove Floods, Residents Recover In The Break Of The Storm
By JET SILVER
While Santa Cruz residents around the city enjoy a sunny break from rain, one particular part of the city recovers from a traumatizing weekend of floods, evacuations, and disorientation. These are the residents of Highway 9, just past the Tannery, what is colloquially known as Sycamore Grove. There, the recent rain wasn’t just inconvenient or worrying, but was a disaster for those that make their lives along the highway corridor. All along the highway, scenes of broken tents and possessions checker the landscape. Most of all, there was mud, mud, and more mud.
According to estimates from those who were there, the water crested the river around noon on Saturday, and by that time many people got their necessities and prized possessions out of the flood zone. A woman I met named Michelle was staying with a friend of hers after her own tent was washed away about 200 feet from where it was. She was walking down the road with a black trash bag in hand, picking up small bits of garbage from the side of the road.
“The water came up first and crested the river, and then about an hour later it was about a foot below here,” said Michelle, pointing to an area about a foot below the highway.
“It all happened so fast, we had to move.”
According to her and others in the area, Santa Cruz Police and the Fire departments were first to the scene telling everyone to move out. Everyone was offered a ride up to the city-funded Salvation Army shelter, but one wonders how they could have fit everyone up there if they had taken it. There were far more displaced people than there are empty beds at the Armory; likely, they were counting on most people saying no.
Michelle brought the trash she collected to what was becoming a central repository for trash bags at the end of the turnout. Another volunteer, M, pulled a bag that was almost too heavy for her along the road towards it. She claimed not to live there, but when asked why she was doing it, she answered, “I don’t want the people to come here and look at it [the situation], and come down on them for it. I know these people.”
While some picked up after the disaster, most others rummaged through what remained of the homes they had known for some months, picking through the mud to find old possessions, or salvage anything useful. One man in a loose-fitting robe, Jeffry, was looking in the area that once hosted his tent, searching for something warm to clothe himself with. Next to a large tent that once belonged to a neighbor, he recounted being the last one out of the lower side of the highway, the one nearest the river.
“The river got angry,” he muttered in a low tone, as he recounted pulling his friend Whiskers from the flooded hills. SCPD offered to take him to the Armory, but it would have meant leaving behind what he managed to save from the flood. He and his girlfriend elected to stay.
Some of the refugees from the floodplain on the east side of the highway migrated to the hills above on the west side. One of them, Michael, was previously living down in the flooded area but managed to make his way to higher ground before everything was washed away. He remembers being moved back across the street towards the hills once before, believing that the authorities didn’t like people living right next to the river.
“They said they’d clean everything up afterward,” he said emphasizing the belief that once the storm had passed, the city would keep the lower floodplain off limits. Michael believes that disasters like floods were often used by authorities to “clean up” homeless encampments, making the area they were located on inaccessible for camping once everyone has left. Like a kind of disaster-assisted eviction and gentrification, the flood would do the work that the police would otherwise be expected to.
This kind of disaster-assisted development, often nicknamed “disaster capitalism” after the 2007 book “The Shock Doctrine” by Naomi Klein, has a history of being utilized in Santa Cruz towards the ends of profit-seeking enterprise. In 1989, after the Loma Prieta earthquake, the city was forever changed when business leaders managed to carrot-and-stick the city through reinvestment funding into adopting a consumer-and-car-centric downtown, as opposed to the winding, haphazard urban core that previously existed there.
Aware of the environmental issues with camping right next to the river however, Michael concedes that there may be a good reason for the city not wanting camping right next to the San Lorenzo river. “I can understand that,” claims Michael. “Homeless people tend to be pretty messy.”
But when asked about what homeless people could otherwise do with their trash, he balked.
“They did have a dumpster down here, but then they came and picked it up to dump it, and then never brought it back. You’d think if they had a problem with people having trash, they’d provide some trash cans so people could start using them. They’re willing to shoot themselves in the foot to hurt us.”
All around, city workers preoccupied themselves with clearing the highway of debris - fallen trees, rocks, and whatever belongings made it onto the road. People however were left to fend for themselves, as the one offer the city made to help, however genuinely, was made only once in the middle of the disaster. If it was not taken then, there was no evidence that anyone else would be back with any kind of relief. Water, hot food, and warm, dry clothes topped the list of what was most wanted in that moment. Some volunteers brought a few plates of food, some warm socks, and a couple gallon jugs of tap water only to lightly scratch the surface of the immense need.
Hunched under an umbrella with an obviously broken neck, one man named Mark recounted his own story of trying and failing to accept the services offered by the city.
“It’s a popularity contest,” he said, referring to the way that services are often offered - or not -based on the judgments and preferences of social workers. He was at the Benchlands before being in and around Sycamore Grove, and recounted his own attempt to get into the Armory as the camps were being closed by police and city contractors.
“I didn’t get in,” he said, referring to the Armory. “When I was injured and still walking in my walker, Jeremy and that lady he works with see me and they’re all: ‘oh, Mark, come here we want to talk to you.’”
“At first, I was like,” Mark mimes a look of alarm mixed with reticence, “because I had words with Jeremy about my sister, but they said ‘we’ve been talking about you. You need to be up there in the Armory because you’re injured, and missing medical appointments.’”
A lot of bad stuff was going on at that time for Mark. He recounts trying to see doctors for x-rays and pain prescriptions, and consistently being turned down for both. The lack of compassion in the doctors’ faces and demeanor at Dominican hospital was especially galling to him.
“So, I said, ‘ok, I’ll do it’, and she told Jeremy to come the next day to pick me up. ‘Ok,’ he said, ‘I’ll pick him up’. So I go, get my stuff ready to get picked up; there I am at 8 o clock in the morning sitting at my spot. He never showed up. Never showed up.”
“Two days later, I saw him talking to like five police, and I’m all ‘Hey you, what happened to you man? You were supposed to pick me up. You know how hard it is with a broken neck and broken back to carry all my stuff up there and sit there and wait all day, and you not show up?”
According to Mark, Jeremy, perhaps slightly more authoritatively given the police presence, told him that he needed to listen better. All that was promised was that Mark would be allowed go up to the Armory, not that anyone would pick him up and take him.
“Obviously I’m injured, I have a broken neck and back” he points out, and clearly remembers Jeremy’s partner telling him to pick up Mark that day. So, he protests and Jeremy replies, according to Mark, “I can’t talk to you anymore.” The conversation was over.
“It’s like, fuck you, deal with it,” agrees his friend Willy, standing nearby.
Minutes later and down the street, B, a very thin, young woman approaches me as I walk back towards the city proper, with all its dry interiors and happy lawns. “I forgot to tell you - I was trying to think of what to ask, or say. People out here, we could really use some food. Hot food.” She recounted a time when living in the Benchlands that someone gave her oatmeal with peanut butter and apples cooked in. She still remembers the taste, she said, and walked towards the hills above with a plastic bag slung over her shoulder.
Photo by JET SILVER
Every time a person without a home is displaced, meaningful objects and memories are sacrificed to the trash heap.
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