A little wind overnight, some driving rain today, but by afternoon it's settled down. Some 20,000 Humboldt County residents are still without power--that's about a third of the total. Our main access highway still is blocked about an hour to the north, and access south is intermittent. The governator has declared a state state of emergency for this county among others. Damage to roads and bridges is still being assessed, there's concern about contaminated water supplies, local reporting is still dangerously abysmal.

So on to the main business of the day, which is:

The New Year's Eve Story

With no electricity, and a soggy night outside, we settled in for a quiet New Year's Eve by the fire. We'd finished our Scrabble game. Margaret was leading most of the way but I finished strong to squeak out a last minute victory. Scrabble is a frustrating game; I actually had the word "Zodiac" and no place on the board to put it. But that's not my story.

Although I should say that it occurred to me while we were playing that this particular board had been in my family since I was a child. A couple of summers ago, while I was in San Francisco on an article for the Chronicle, Margaret spend a couple of days with her mother, her mother's sisters and her son. They all played Scrabble on this board. So it occured to me that Margaret had played with her mother on this board, and I with mine. It's their only point of contact, since my mother died many years before I'd even met Margaret.

We'd finished our game and we were talking, about something Margaret had read. I think I'd just said something about "consensual reality" when we heard a loud coughing. It had to be just outside. We assumed it was a student outside the students-occupied house across the street, or on our side of the street, perhaps going to a car. But the cough repeated without moving. Then it was a voice, sounding angry. A female voice. Then nothing. Now we were both thinking it was a drunken student. Then we were interupted again by a bad coughing fit, and I grabbed a flashlight--we were each carrying one, to supplement the candles in various parts of the house--and opened the front door.

I saw somewhat sprawled on the bottom of the two steps onto our porch an older woman with long hair, looking up at me. She was soaking wet. I didn't recognize her but I thought who it might be. I called to Margaret, "Is this the woman from" and I named a house in our neighborhood. Margaret came and looked. Yes, it was.

When we moved in here, an elderly woman came by one day to introduce herself, and she told us a little about the neighborhood, and the people who had lived in this house. We didn't see her much after that, and then several years ago, she passed away. Two women moved into her house, one of them her daughter. She was also elderly. The other woman moved away, and the daughter remained. She was a bit strange but harmless. I think I only saw her once or twice, but Margaret had some dealing with her, enough to realize that she was having a lot of problems with her short term memory.

Vans come nearly every day to pick her up, and there was often another car there, and another woman. She was being taken care of. That's all I knew.

But on New Year's Eve she had been alone in her dark house. She was trying to get on our front porch because she thought she was at her house. As we took her home, she told us she had been asleep, and seen lights and heard noises in the back yard. She went outside and there was no one there, but people were shooting at her. She became confused and had been wandering around.

The lights and noises weren't in themselves delusions; at a party down the street, they had shot off some fireworks early in the evening. In her house, furniture was overturned. A chair and a table in the living room. While Margaret cleaned her up a bit and tried to find dry clothes in her bedroom, I found the phone. It was hooked up to some electrical device I couldn't identify and couldn't see clearly with a flashlight---I assumed it was some alert device, useless now without electricity, and even worse, since the phone was hooked up to it, the phone was useless.

We asked her if there was someone we could call. She said her brother lived across the street. She told us his name, several times. So while Margaret got her dry and in dry clothes, I went back to our house and looked up the brother's name. Indeed it was in the phone book, and I called him. It was in fact her brother, though he didn't live in the neighborhood, and said he and his sister "weren't close anymore." Her children, he said, did live in the area, and he would call them. She had told us her children didn't live nearby (she told us she had three), and in a way she was right.

Her brother did thank me for being concerned; there were times I felt he was expecting to hear bad news about her.

I went back to the woman's house, filled Margaret in, then came back to find a flashlight we could leave with her. It was clear the woman was trying to be charming with us, but she couldn't remember anything for more than a few minutes (she kept trying the electricity, and we had to explain over and over that it was off for everyone.) Margaret got her dry and into bed, and we went home. No one from her family arrived. I checked outside her house after midnight, when there was another round of fireworks and noise, but it seemed quiet.

Margaret went to her house on New Year's morning, and found her with another woman, her caregiver. They exchanged information. Her caregiver was with her for half-days, and said she hadn't been aware of her adventure the night before, or that she had ever wandered before. She was surprised to learn that the woman's brother was in fact in the general area and that they weren't in touch. The woman spoke of him often with great affection, though continuing to believe he lived down the block.

The woman had a psychologist she saw, and someone who took care of her finances, though the caregiver didn't think either of them paid much attention to her really. But the caregiver said that in the two years she had taken care of the woman, she had never seen any of her children.

Just as this storm and its consequences weren't far away, and something I was reading about on the Internet or seeing on TV, I realized that this woman's plight wasn't being described to me in a news story or a media report,that I might get upset and indignant about. It was in my own neighborhood, and I hadn't paid much attention to its earlier chapters. Until there was a woman with wet gray hair lying literally on my doorstep. Who thought she had finally made it home.