Ernesto walked down in the shallow ravine next to the gravel road as the ancient pickup truck rattled slowly past. He had moved there when he saw the vehicle approaching, clearing a way for the truck to have full berth in the thin lane when it arrived.

The ravine was a dry, leaf-speckled wrinkle between a stream of gray white rocks and the field of trees that governed it. A quiet rumble in the clouds to the west suggested that it would soon rain. The air was a dry cold, and the cloud shelf above was low and gray and anxious, and Ernesto felt anxious from it as he walk and smoked. The strong scent of maturing walnuts mixed with the valley air, cleansed by churning sea to the west and electrostatic energy above, reminded him of the vendors barking about their little sacks of nuts at the county fair. It also reminded him of the great sorrow.

Ernesto kept his eyes down as the truck careened by, just because he did. In the cab, two men in brimmed hats bickered loudly behind the glass panes, faces red and arms active, arguments essential. They did not see the thin young man walking by as they elaborated their positions.

As the rattle of the truck quieted behind him, he climbed again onto gravel road and looked around above him, measuring the weight and the temperament of the gray over him. He wore a thin off-white button down shirt that was stained on the front by faded red and brown spots he had accrued during the morning. His green work apron was resting over his left shoulder, neck strap dangling down to his black jean pocket.

It was a long walk between the restaurant and his room at the Las Colinas Ranch when the weather was fair. The clouds had surprised him this morning, though, beginning to build quickly after he arrived at the winery cafe. A week’s worth of unbroken sun and moonlight was forfeit, and Ernesto walked faster as the brisk air entered his shirt, and the rumbling behind him grew closer. He had another two miles yet before he reached the village Tres Perros and then the ranch.

The smell of the sky and the ripening of the walnuts took Ernesto away to his distant days with his family and the year of the flood.

“Oh madre. Oh padre. Santa María, Madre de Dios, ruega por nosotros pecadores.”

When Ernesto was a child with his brother Santino, his parents were happy and alive and his father was a harvest foreman on the sprawling Harman Ranch, which sat in a plain southwest of Salinas. His father had been a warm and polite man at home, but by nature, he was quiet and serious, and after years of working for him, his father was trusted by James Harman to oversee the migrant crews who came to the fields late in the summer to bring in the lettuce and cauliflower and artichokes and broccoli. His mother was tiny and vibrant and protective, always full of warmth for her husband and her sons, and she made everywhere a home. Ernesto’s family had been given a small clapboard house to live in on the property at an intersection between fields, a two room structure tucked into the edge of a field of walnut trees.

Ernesto remembered how the ground beneath the rows of trees and around the house seemed covered by snow in the spring, when white walnut pollen dusted the surrounding earth. He also recalled the citrusy scent of the walnut leaves when the warm winds of summer entered the valley and carried the sweet aroma into the bedroom at night.

The house under the walnut trees had been the place where the world for him had been friendly and clear and reliable. But it had been his place of safety and happiness long ago, before the flood.

He had been a child of a people who knew the earth and cared for it, a child living and learning amidst the rows of plants and tress, in a long green valley, where the sun and rain were frequent visitors, nurturing the ranch.

Before his childhood ended, though, a long rain came one spring, and with the endless deluge, the Salinas river swelled, until a levee up valley collapsed. A wall of water crashed over Harman Ranch. Ernesto had been trying to catch a chicken in the pen in front of the house under the steady rain when he heard what sounded like a stampede to the north. He went behind the house and climbed up into a nearby tree to try and find the coming horses that were getting louder. And then he saw the white wall enter the distant field of young crops, crashing like a thousand thunders. He was it enter the far edge of the walnut tree field, where some crowns bent and were swallowed by the wall of water. It became so loud he could not hear himself yelling “Madre! Mama! Mama!” As the white wall approached the tree he was in, he wrapped his arms tightly around the thick trunk and lowered his head, in time to see little Santino stumble out of the house.

He watched powerless as the wave kicked ferociously against the trunk of the tree he was in, bending it back toward the house behind him. A jet of water reached up and pounded his arms and legs like pellets as he squeezed the tree as tightly as possible. He saw the wave smash into the house behind him, nudging it first from the earth, and then sucking it into the river that unfolded beneath him.

And he saw little Santino, standing in a patch of mud, reach a hand for the sky before the white wall swallowed him, carrying him away with everything else too small and fragile in the valley.

Ernesto spent the rest of the day and the night in the tree, clinging to the abrasive bark, watching living and dead creatures and uprooted trees and broken things and splintered structures push past in the high waters. Later, he cried quietly when he saw a break in the clouds to the west and the waxing moon lit the flooded valley.

He would look down, and the house was gone.

In the dawn light, men in a motorboat came and pulled the drenched crying boy from the bent tree.

He waited hours in a blanket in a crowd in a tent by a freeway for his mother and his father and his brother to come in.
But they never did, and he slept for a long time in a stranger’s bunk house near San Benito.

Everything was gone.

“Todo se ha ido, hermano. Te extraño.”

Ernesto walked quickly while remembering, anxious about the clouds closing in and lost in his memories. He hoped to get to the feed store at Tres Perros before the rain began, where he could wait out the storm in the Velasco’s stable.

He thought of his young daughter and smiled and then frowned.

The gravel road before him was empty and turned northeast in a quarter mile. The cool breeze intensified behind him, and he bit tightly on the cigarette and walked faster.

“María Elena, hija mía, no me dejes.”