Forty signs of rain - Kim Stanley Robinson [119]
As the dark morning wore on, many of the residents of Neptune Avenue went out to look at their stretch of the bluff. Various authorities were there as well, and interested spectators were filling the little cross streets that ran east to the coast highway, and gathering at public places along the cliff’s edge. Many residents had gone the previous evening to hear a team from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers give a presentation at the town library, explaining their plan to stabilize the cliff at its most vulnerable points with impromptu riprap seawalls made of boulders dumped from above. In some places getting the boulders over the side would damage the iceplant covering. Routes out to some of the cliff top dumping points might also be trashed. Given the situation it was felt the damage was justified for the greater good. Repairs when the crisis had passed were promised. Of course some things could not be fixed; in many places the already narrow beach would be buried, becoming a wall of boulders even at low tide—like the side of a jetty, or a stretch of some very rocky coastline. Some people at the meeting lamented this loss of the area’s signature landscape feature, a beach that had been four hundred yards wide in the 1920’s, and even in its present narrowed state, the thing that made San Diego what it was. There were people there who felt that was worth more than houses built too close to the edge. Let them go!
But the cliff-edge homeowners had argued that it was not necessarily true that the cliffside line of houses would be the end of the losses. Everyone now knew the story behind the westernmost street in Encinitas being named D Street. The whole town was on the edge of a sandstone cliff, when you got right down to it, a cliff badly fractured and faulted. If massive rapid erosion had happened before, it could happen again. One look at the raging surface of the Pacific roaring in at them was enough to convince people it was possible.
So, later that morning, Leo found himself standing near the edge of the cliff at the south end of Leucadia, his rain jacket and pants plastered to his windward side as he shoved a wheelbarrow over a wide plank path. Roxanne was inland helping at her sister’s, and so he was free to pitch in, and happy to have something to do. A county dump truck working with the Army Corps of Engineers was parked on Europa, and men running a small hoist were lifting granite boulders from the truck bed down into wheelbarrows. A lot of amateur help milled about, looking like a volunteer fire company that had never met before. The county and Army people supervised the operations, lining up plankways and directing rocks to the various points on the cliff’s edge where they were dumping them over.
Meanwhile scores or even hundreds of people had come out in the storm, to stand on the coast highway or in the viewpoint parking lots, and watch the wheelbarrowed boulders bound down the cliff and crash into the sea. It was already the latest spectator event, like a new extreme sport. Some of the bounding rocks caught really good air, or spun, or held still like knuckleballs, or splashed hugely. The surfers who were not helping (and there were only so many volunteers who could be accommodated at any one time) cheered lustily at the most dramatic falls. Every surfer in the county was there, drawn like moths to flame, entranced, and on some level itching to go out; but it was not possible. The water was crazy everywhere, and when the big broken waves smashed into the bottom