Hey! I'm famous. Kinda sorta. Not really. But I did send some information to the mediabistro Fishbowl LA blog and it got printed, along with Jeff's photos . Here's the intro:
News-Suppress, Part 205
As promised, here is an update on the Drama-by-the-Sea: About 500 Santa Barbara News-Press staffers, former staffers and community leaders rallied outside the News-Press's historic office building on Tuesday to let billionaire owner Wendy McCaw know that they were, um, mad.
Read the rest here.
This piece was originally published in the Ventura County Reporter 1/13/05, and then mentioned here . I have since written several stories on the family, the area and the politics surrounding this issue.
This wasn’t supposed to be a first-person story.
I first heard about the La Conchita mudslides when my roommate called at 8:30 to say there was no point in getting on the freeway to go to work in Ventura. At that point, the mudslides were an anomaly, a freakish expression of Mother Nature that was inconvenient but in no way tragic.
I still felt this way at 2:30 when my boyfriend, a professional photographer, called from La Conchita. Some houses had been buried. The situation was getting more serious. I spoke to my editor, and soon I was off, too, to report on what was happening.
I still hadn’t even brushed my teeth when I found myself near Carpinteria, arguing with a Sheriff who was just doing his job but finally let us through. All the way, I thought about the people I know who live in La Conchita. Charlie. His sons and fourteen-year-old daughter. All the friends and family and significant others who called Charlie’s house “home” and Charlie their “dad.”
I MET CHARLIE WOMACK when I was six years old and going to kindergarten at Hollywood Beach School in Oxnard with his son Orion, but I don’t remember that. What I remember is meeting his daughter Cory, a former bartender at the Sans Souçi and now The Drink, and then Charlie again on my first trip to the Burning Man festival, where he was camping with the people who later became my closest friends.
Charlie, who at 51 was easily my parents’ age, quickly became a peer. He was always sweet, kind, generous and peaceful, a kind of hippy patriarch for a wide range of kids and adults. He opened his home, his heart and his wallet to anyone who needed it; and at the time of the slide, could’ve had anywhere from six to 15 non-blood-relatives living with him, including the most recent transplants: Jimmie Wallet, his wife and their three daughters.
I didn’t always understand Charlie—a carpenter with the willingness to give more than he had. I wasn’t always comfortable with his half-way-house lifestyle or his role as fun-DJ-party-guy in conjunction with his role as the father of a 14-year-old girl. But those were my issues, and my over-identification with his teenage daughter. I knew that if anything happened to Charlie’s house, there were going to be scores of people both emotionally devastated and also homeless. And if anything happened to anyone living in that house, an entire community of people was going to need support.
This was what I thought of when I arrived on the scene, trying to park behind other media vehicles and then forging my way through the first mudslide, which submerged cars three-fourths of the way to their roofs and knocked entire sections of concrete wall into the ocean. I wondered if Charlie’s house was OK, and what it would be like to interview him in this kind of situation. I didn’t even wonder what it would be like to interview his kids about their father’s condition—and eventual death.
As a reporter, I’ve always been squeamish about emergency situations. I’m never sure how to handle the situation—feeling a strong pull between my ambition and my editors who want the best story, and my compassion and humanity, the girl who wants to help and respect the victims.
As a kid, I always thought it was rude that reporters interviewed grieving, scared or injured people. I’ve never wanted to be one of those reporters.
But later in the evening, I began to understand the role of a reporter. As friends who knew I would be on the scene started calling my cell phone, wanting to know if Charlie and his family were OK, I realized Jeff and I were the eyes and ears for our friends. We could be somewhere they couldn’t be.
And that’s the larger role of the media, too. Though the reporters and photographers may not know someone involved in, or affected by, every disaster and event, the media’s purpose to be the eyes and ears for the people who care about what’s happening. For me, suddenly, it became not about “getting the story” (which I’ve never been good at anyway—which is why I left the Star and moved to the Reporter), but about telling my friends what’s happening; and explaining to people who aren’t my friends why they should care about this.
I FINALLY PARK MY CAR on the far side of the first slide and make my way into the small town. Most people who drive the stretch from Ventura to Santa Barbara know La Conchita in some way—either as the road sign which promises food they don’t need, or as the place they can fill up with regular and Corn Nuts when they realize they can’t make it to Santa Barbara without either one.
Now a nearly 30-foot-high pile of mud covers 15 to 20 houses over a four-block area where rain suddenly loosened part of the adjoining hillside, managed to level some houses, split others in two, move an entire bus from one side of the street to the other and buried anywhere from six to 12 people.
What was different about this slide from the one in 1995, said a spokesperson for the Ventura County Fire Department, is that the earlier mudslide was a slow, gradual release of the Earth. This one, however, was incredibly sudden and violent. All but a few houses were completely buried, invisible from the top of the debris pile.
Residents had little warning. Some reported hearing a rumbling, then saw the mountain come loose and move toward them. The people trapped inside the rubble may not have known what was happening before the debris locked them inside what may be their muddy graves, said emergency personnel.
The place is teeming with people, few of them civilians. Fire departments from several cities, sheriffs from several counties, EMT, reporters and cameramen are all there.
They won’t let me past the yellow tape, so I walk around. Tessa, Charlie’s fourteen-year-old daughter, stands behind one of the lines. As soon as I see her, she grabs onto me. She’s near tears. Her Daddy is in there.
I cease being a reporter. I put away my notepad, and avoid helping the other reporters on the scene whom I know from a former job, a former life. I find Annie, whose sister dates Charlie’s son Isaiah. She’s holding on to two of her dogs—a medium-sized and a small one—held together by one single rope. She tells me Charlie’s still in the house, buried beneath the mud. Her boyfriend Griffin, who was sleeping in a bus-made-living-space outside the house, survived with a broken leg. Her twin sister Brie lost all her pets. Brie’s boyfriend and Charlie’s other son, Orion, are up on the hill, trying to dig out their father.
Everywhere, there are fire trucks, emergency vehicles, people in matching uniforms. It seems the only civilians are people I know.
The sheriffs won’t let us through to find Brie (whom Annie wants to find so her mom can take them to Santa Barbara before the rain starts again), so we snake our way around the southern side of the tape, through someone else’s backyard. Annie finds Brie and they embrace. I climb onto the roof, where Tessa is sitting with other family members and neighbors. I can’t help but cry as I look out over the towering pile of mud and the rescue workers, like ants, who are dwarfed by the enormity of it. The platform Charlie built for the top of his bus, where his band would sometimes play, was turned on its side and pushed across the street. The top of a teepee Charlie built for himself in the yard, where he may have been sleeping, barely peeked out of the dirt about half a block away. Pieces of walls, sections of furniture, entire trees and more mud than you can imagine covered everything else—including people. Including Charlie.
I think about him again. For me, a twenty-something with a stable family, a history of trauma, a freakish streak and a serious issue with feeling like an outsider, Charlie was always the unconditionally loving father-slash-cool-friend-slash-self-esteem-boosting-guy. His hugs were always warm. His promises were always sincere and manifested. His connection with me—eye-to-eye, heart-to-heart—always felt special, unique and real. I know I could’ve called him at 4 a.m. on any night to help me out of an emergency, and he would’ve come. In fact, he rescued so many people—on large levels and small levels—that it’s hard to imagine what half my friends would’ve done without him. And even harder to imagine that now he was the one needing rescuing.
IT BEGINS TO GET DARK. And cold. I’m starving. I can only imagine the last time the families of the victims, who wander aimlessly from backyard to backyard trying to do something have eaten. Or the victims themselves. When was the last time Charlie had a meal? I heard he was sick, and might’ve been in bed if he wasn’t on some kind of spiritual hike in the hills. What kind of sustenance had he ingested before the slide? Was he trapped in a muddy hole, suffocating and dreaming of French fries?
There is much waiting. Tessa, her brothers and a friend of the family, who ran on the train tracks from the roadblocks to reach the scene, say a prayer. “God, bring us back our families,” they say. Later, he tells me what Charlie means to him. “He was my dad, you know? Not my blood dad, but he was my dad.” They all take turns crying.
The men and women in matching yellow and orange rain gear are digging, chain sawing, and mostly standing around making people nervous. A body is found. Tessa is sure it’s her dad and she begins to wail.
“No no no no,” says the teenager, screaming as her aunt and another friend hold her. Photographers turn their attention from the pile of mud to Annie, Brie, Orion, Isaiah, Tess and others.
“Get that fucking thing away from me,” someone says to one photographer. There is a flurry of activity while someone tries to confirm whether the body is Charlie. It turns out it’s not, but that only comforts any of us to the degree that we still don’t know. It doesn’t mean Charlie’s alive.
Finally Annie, Brie, Tessa and Tessa’s aunt leave. It gets dark and cold. Isaiah and Orion won’t leave. Neither will Gator (Jimmie Wallet), who is at times calm, at times falling apart, thinking about his missing 2- 6- and 10-year-old daughters, as well as his wife. The three men had tried to help the rescuers, but were asked to leave the scene. All they can do now is stand in the street, on the roofs of houses, and watch and wait. At one point, Gator collapses onto the sidewalk, bowing into Child’s Pose with his arms over his head. Hours pass. Someone brings water and orange juice. We offer the boys our cigarettes, which they smoke gratefully. A body is removed on a stretcher—rescue workers confirm it’s a woman. It’s not Charlie.
There are fire trucks from all over, now: Montecito, Ventura, Santa Barbara, Long Beach, all shining football-stadium-strength lights over the scene. A block away, the public information officer holds a press conference. Up here, though, finally, the cameras and reporters are gone.
It’s now near 7 p.m. We hear the sheriff’s radios broadcasting that the hill is unstable and anyone who stays does so at extreme risk. They’re advising us all to leave La Conchita now, including the press.
Jeff and I decide we’re more of a hindrance than a help—we can’t dig, we’ve given away all our cigarettes and now we’re just dead weight. We are not Charlie’s closest kin; we are simply loving friends lucky enough to have jobs that allowed us to be on the scene. We navigate the complicated obstacle course of sheriffs, mud and debris to get out.
TWO HOURS LATER, the phone rings. They’ve found Charlie. Orion identified him. He’s dead. With a smile on his face. The ripples went through our community quickly. We are a close-knit group of friends, and any loss would have an impact. There was denial. Tears. Multiple phone calls. Decisions to meet up as soon as possible.
La Conchita is a small town of fewer than a hundred houses. And the mudslides, though terrible and destructive, only affected four blocks of the town. But within those four blocks, under a mound of impenetrable mud and dangerous debris, a friend of mine struggled for his life—or at the very least, spent the last moments of it trapped in a dark hole, alone.
No photo, no video clip, no quote from a bystander can tell you that.
Not even I, safely back in Santa Barbara, in contact with the family only by cell phone, can imagine what it’s like to be having breakfast one moment and seven hours later identify your father’s own body. And his smile.
But I know that I’m angry at the rain tonight. And at Charlie for continuing to live in that house after the 1995 mudslide.
And I’m sure soon I’ll be in denial again, with the help of my can of Coors Light, and then on to whatever stage of grief comes next.
And I’m also grateful for the fact that the sky, the streets, the lawns are miserable. Because so am I.
Charlie Womack’s friends have established a fund to help pay for funeral expenses. Contact Jessica Lunsford at 259-8885, or send checks to “Charlie Womack Memorial Fund,” Santa Barbara Bank and Trust, 250 S. Mills Rd., Ventura, CA 93003.