Chapter 8: Those Who Were There

Thursday, July 12, 2012, was a hot, cloudless day. “We’re going to the beach!” Rachel Rozzoni exclaimed on the phone to a friend when she saw the brilliant blue sky that morning. A day for visiting neighbours and taking things easy, thought Bob Yetter, who’d had heart surgery recently. Early-rising country folk like John Madill and Harvey Armstrong had already completed a full day’s work before 10:30 a.m., shovelling gravel, cutting hay and making firewood. Others arose late and prepared large breakfasts in celebration of this stunningly beautiful vacation day at the height of midsummer.

Petra Frehse

No one can know exactly what Petra Frehse did that morning, but from the facts told to me by others, along with her habits and routines, her morning might have transpired something like this:

Petra probably smiled to herself as she sipped her morning coffee and inhaled deeply on a cigarette. She’d said that the first coffee and cigarette of the day were always the best. She drew back the red and white checked curtains and looked out the kitchen window. Her special deer were there as usual, tame as could be, a doe with two fawns, feeding contentedly on the scraps she’d put on the lawn for them. The creek was thundering down the hill beyond the garden, louder than ever. Petra’s mother, Ruth Vogt, called daily from her home in the Black Forest of Germany, to check that everything was all right. On Wednesday Petra had told her how shocked she’d been to see the horrible colour of the creek—as black as her coffee.

She’d also said that she hadn’t seen a bear in the yard yet this year. Bears were Petra’s passion. Her small, orderly living room was filled to the rafters with stuffed teddy bears, mostly her own handmade white spirit bears. A huge brown teddy bear, larger than Petra, sat in a chair near the dining table, taking up much of the room.

The phone rang, as it did every morning, at around ten a.m. Her mother worried terribly. Eighty-six years old and in frail health, Ruth would have preferred that Petra didn’t spend half the year in Canada. But Petra had said many times that Johnson’s Landing was her soul-home, the only place she wanted to be.

Petra and her husband, Jürgen Frehse, bought their property in Johnson’s Landing in 1989 after searching across North America for the perfect place. They fell in love with the 1930s heritage cabin tucked into a grassy glade beside Gar Creek.

After Jürgen died in 2006, Petra retired from her job with a German broadcasting company and began spending six months of the year in the Landing. She hated having to return to Germany and would telephone Jillian Madill every Sunday during those dark, absent months while she counted the days until spring, when she’d board the plane in Frankfurt and return to her real home, in the Kootenays.

As part of Petra’s routine, every Thursday she drove to Argenta to have morning coffee with her good friend Edith Mautner. Edith, in her late nineties, was Petra’s Canadian “mom” and they greatly enjoyed these weekly get-togethers. But this week Edith had a medical appointment on Thursday, so Petra had visited her on Tuesday instead.

On Thursday Petra’s last words to her mother were, “Now I’ll go and make myself a good cup of coffee, but not with this awful coffee-brown creek water.”

Lila Taylor

Lila was cooking breakfast in the gleaming wooden kitchen of her parents’ timber-frame house. It stood like an eagle’s nest among the fir trees, overlooking Kootenay Lake. The kitchen window faced the ravine and Lila could hear the creek pounding below the house. At around 10:20 the phone rang—Diana Webber was on the line, at home with her dad and sister on the other side of the creek.

Diana sounded strange, unsettled and anxious. Something was wrong, she told Lila, and she wanted to get out of her dad’s house as soon as possible. Lila was surprised. Normally the Webbers’ place was their hangout spot. Lila invited Diana to join her right then for breakfast, but Diana declined. Her dad was cooking breakfast for his girls, so she’d eat at home with Val and Rachel, then drive over to Lila’s afterwards, in about twenty minutes’ time.

They hung up and Lila sat down to breakfast with her family. Her father, Richard Taylor, is a well-known and highly regarded local artist, and her mother, Susan Grimble, is a Feldenkrais practitioner. Richard’s two young granddaughters were also with them, visiting from California.

When they heard the booming noise, Lila and her parents raced outside and watched in disbelief as part of the landslide roared down the ravine below their house like a low-flying jet plane, snapping off trees in its path. Lila’s first thought was, “This’ll be a fun day for me and Diana, but we’ll probably be stuck on opposite sides of the creek.” It took the family a few moments to register another significant thought: Mandy and Christopher’s house!

Loran Godbe

Loran didn’t get to bed until past daybreak. From his home, the highest house in the Landing, he’d monitored the creek’s bizarre behaviour throughout Wednesday, and sent his second email advisory to everyone in the community at around five a.m. on Thursday morning.

Loran described sudden surges of dark water, each of which brought down more logs and woody debris. Gravel deposits and a nearby logjam had obliterated the community water intake. The driveway was impassable—the culvert was so clogged with debris that virtually the entire creek was flowing over and along it in raging flood.

His email continued:

The entire creek bed is raw and constantly being scoured and re-shaped. Mom and I sat for an hour on our trail just above the creek and watched… Within ten minutes, in any given spot, the creek bed might be filled in [with gravel]… then the water would change course and it would be scoured out again. We heard large rocks banging along the creek bed underwater.

At 10:30 a.m. Loran and his mother, Linda, were asleep in the house they share with Gerry Rogers on the north hillside overlooking Gar Creek. Gerry had risen early as usual, and left home at around 10:00 a.m. He forded the creek at a spot some distance above their treacherous driveway, and went to tend to their horse, which was stabled near the Johnson’s Landing Retreat Centre.

Loran woke to a sound, and knew instantly what it was. He has no idea how he got from his bed, out through the door and to the lawn so quickly. The slide—he knew he was looking at a slide—was approximately opposite the house, about fifty metres away, thundering down the creek. Loran estimates it was moving at close to 160 kilometres an hour.

A hurricane-force wind that pushed ahead of the slide blasted the trees horizontal and snapped their tops off. The ear-splitting noise—a low-frequency rumble caused by the crashing rocks and trees, and a high-pitched scream like a jet engine from the wind—was so loud Loran thought his hearing could be damaged. The air was filled with dust and resin from exploding trees. For more than an hour afterwards he and Linda couldn’t breathe outside without a mask.

The ground was shaking as though a freight train was passing by. Indoors, Linda had leapt out of bed and stood in the middle of the living room. The house was quaking, their kiwi vine outside the window vibrating; she was convinced that the landslide was already surging around the house foundations and there was no escape. She stood rooted to the spot, expecting the house to collapse. She believed she was about to die.

Loran followed the sound as the slide carried on down the hill, heading for the lake. In his interview he told me his first thought was, “Oh my God! There go Christopher and Mandy! My heart sank and I could hardly breathe. I knew it was the end for you guys.” Indoors, Linda’s first words were also, “Oh no! Christopher and Mandy!” Loran was shaking so badly he could barely walk, not so much from fear as from the magnitude of the experience. He’d been so close to the visceral power of the low frequencies, they seemed to have affected his nervous system. His body shook for minutes afterwards.

Boulders continued falling into the creek and trees burst from the strain of being bent over. After that it was eerily silent.

John Madill

John and Jillian’s gracious log house stood at the top of Holmgren Road, a hundred metres below the Godbe–Rogers driveway, and adjacent to Petra Frehse’s property. John said goodbye to Jillian just before nine o’clock Thursday morning, and she drove off down the road in the silver Buick to meet me at Creek Corner.

At 10:30 a.m. John, in his coveralls, was behind the garage and guesthouse, seventy-five metres from the house, collecting gravel and small stones for a building project. He loved to putter around the homestead, never short of jobs to do. He shovelled the gravel into a trailer attached to his ATV—strenuous work, and a heavy load to pull. He climbed onto the ATV and trundled slowly back towards the house, admiring the colourful perennials and the vibrant young corn plants, taller by the day, standing in their dark green rows.

John had just reached the house and climbed off his ATV when he heard rocks and scree tumbling down in the ravine. His instinct was to bolt in the opposite direction, back along the driveway towards the guesthouse. Then he heard a much louder noise: a rumbling roar, accompanied by a powerful downdraft of wind that flattened the trees. He had the presence of mind and just enough time to turn back to the house and sprint behind the west wall. The slide thundered past, higher than the house, burying the driveway, the garden, the garage and the guesthouse, plus their vehicles, camper and boat. A tree pierced the house, narrowly missing him. Flying debris hit him in the face.

Jillian said later, “John thinks clearly in a crisis and makes cool-headed decisions. I believe it was that trait that saved his life.” He is also very fit and agile for his age. Afterwards he found it difficult to talk about his incredible escape. “It was like a tornado with stuff flying through the air. The wind and the noise were terrible. I wouldn’t want to go through something like that ever again.”

When the noise stopped, John’s first thought was for their cat, Tumbles, but the cat was nowhere to be seen. The house was a wreck, punctured by enormous trees, but the main debris flow had missed the building by centimetres. John grabbed his air horn and climbed the hill in search of Petra. He couldn’t believe his eyes: there was only a small triangle of original ground left. Her house, carport and shed had disappeared under metres of wet mud, laced with boulders and trees. He sounded his air horn.

Bob Yetter and Harvey Armstrong

Down the hill from the Madills’ property, Bob and Susan’s circular, hand-built timber-frame house nestles into the hillside on a knoll of land, looking out over a sweeping view southward down Kootenay Lake. They moved from Montana to the Landing in 1999, bought their land in 2001, built a workshop, then the house, and finally took up residence there in 2008.

Bob Yetter, a woodsman and carpenter, was alone that morning. His wife, Susan VanRooy, a nature journalist and watercolour artist, had left the previous day to travel with her parents to a family reunion in Ontario. Bob was recovering from heart surgery; he’d had a stent fitted at the end of May and was taking life a little easier. He’d resolved to make some changes on account of “the heart thing”; he wanted to get out to spend more time with his neighbours. Around 10:30 a.m., hearing the sound of Harvey Armstrong’s chainsaw, Bob went outside and ambled up the hill for a chat.

Harvey was also alone that day. His wife, Kate O’Keefe, had left early and driven to Kaslo, picked up Osa Thatcher and continued on to Nelson to attend a watercolour workshop. Harvey had been busy that morning cutting grass for hay in their large meadow, south of Kootenay Joe Farm. He and Kate lived in Algot Johnson’s original log house, beautifully restored and enlarged. Harvey also owned the four-hectare property next to the Madills, uphill from Bob and Susan’s land. It was home to his pottery buildings, a rental house (where our niece Margie had lived as a child) and his woodlot, where he was now hard at work dicing up rounds of lodgepole pine. It was a hot morning and he appreciated the shady canopy of trees overhead.

Bob and Harvey exchanged only a few sentences of conversation before they heard the noise. “Wait. Listen. What’s that?” said Bob. “A truck on the road? No, that’s in the creek. That’s something big.” As the noise rose to a crescendo Bob yelled, “Run!” and they dashed to a ridge about 140 metres away from the creek, near Bob and Susan’s house. They stopped running only because the noise immediately above them also stopped.

Looking towards Gar Creek, Bob watched the slide’s transit down the channel, marked by the trees toppling in its path. That last phase of the slide went past in about five seconds. He knew our house must have been hit. He shot indoors and called 911, becoming the first person to do so, then he and Harvey drove to Creek Corner, where the road now ended, and sprinted down the hill.

Rachel Rozzoni

Rachel Rozzoni, a mother and homesteader in her late thirties, stood in the kitchen of her house on Holmgren Road, almost opposite the Webbers’ property. Her older children, Aidan and Giselle, ages fifteen and thirteen, were still asleep upstairs.

Rachel and her husband, Dan Tarini, had moved the family to the Landing nine years earlier, greatly attracted by “that beautiful place under the mountain,” with its sun exposure, lack of mosquitoes and fabulous views. They set up a small farming operation, and raised goats and purebred Labrador puppies to pay the bills. Rachel sold goat’s milk, yoghurt and cheese.

Dan and Rachel had separated and she and her new partner, Riki, had an eight-month-old baby girl, Avalia. Spring 2012 had felt full of promise. Rachel and Giselle worked together in the garden from April till early July preparing the beds, replanting strawberries, hand-watering plant starts and running around in their bare feet, feeling happy and connected to the land. Baby Avalia played in the dirt.

Thursday, July 12, was one of those perfect summer days with a crystal clear blue sky. Rachel phoned a friend in Argenta and made plans to take the kids on a picnic. At 10:37 she was standing in the kitchen, contemplating what to take for the picnic, when Avalia suddenly looked up from the floor where she was learning to crawl, uttered an uncharacteristic shriek of pure distress and reached up for her mother, trembling.

Rachel picked Avalia up from the kitchen floor, wondering what was wrong, until she too felt the vibration; the whole house shook. Cups bounced on the table. Rachel’s first thought was war—a war had started and a hundred helicopters were rattling overhead. She ran outside onto the deck, scanned the sky and peered into the woods. Nothing seemed amiss but the noise was now deafening. She returned to the kitchen window.

Through the forest a vast wave of earth was coming straight for her like a bulldozer, mowing down trees in its path. They were going to die. It was going to cover the house. She held her baby tight. But at the last moment a slight swale in the ground diverted the mountain of material and it swept across their driveway and Holmgren Road, crashing down over Val Webber’s house instead. Rachel heard a sharp snap as the power and phone lines were ripped off her house.

Then there was silence, apart from the voice screaming in Rachel’s head: “Val’s house! Oh my God, we’ve got to go and help them.” Aidan and Giselle rushed downstairs. Riki appeared from the basement. There was instant chaos. They needed to get out fast; everyone needed shoes; the baby was naked. They tumbled out the door and ran towards the Webbers’ house, then stopped dead in their tracks. The roof was floating in a sea of gravelly mud in completely the wrong place. Trees and boulders lay everywhere.

No hope. No hope for them. There was no question in Rachel’s mind.

Renata Klassen

Down at the post office cabin beside our garden, Renata had unpacked her belongings and settled in. After his strenuous early morning walk, Lennie, her elderly golden retriever, had passed out on the cool cabin floor. Ren and I checked our improvised sand-bagging on the creek bank. I’d picked peonies and foxgloves and put them in a vase on the mauve picnic table.

Renata said goodbye to me at around 8:45. She wanted to do a load of laundry in the basement at our house but kept putting it off. At 10:35 she decided to empty the food scraps out of her bucket onto the compost heap in the garden. After that she’d grab the clothes hamper and stroll up the driveway, over the bridge to our place.

Renata was walking back from the compost heap when she heard a noise like boulders rolling down the mountain. It seemed to emanate from high on the bench of land above the beach. She roused Lennie from the cabin floor. At first she fled from the sound, up the driveway towards our house, but when she reached the iris bed just before the storage shed she realized she’d made a terrible mistake. The slide snapped and crashed down the creek towards her, the noise excruciating. She shouted to her dog, “Come on, Lennie! Turn around! Let’s go! Let’s go!” and hurtled back towards the garden. Her legs turned to rubber, she couldn’t take another step. She peed her pants. The slide roared across the driveway behind her. Everything stopped.

“It was the most earth-shattering, terrifying, life-altering thing I ever expect to experience,” she told me later. The next few minutes were surreal. Renata stood in the driveway with Lennie; to the right lay our garden: lush and normal. To the left, the driveway abruptly ended in a wall over a storey high of brown mud and trees without limbs or bark, denuded. The house was gone. There was silence, and then the birds began to sing again.

Richard Ortega, Gerry Rogers and Roger

At the top of Kootenay Joe Road, Richard Ortega and Gerry Rogers (still on his way to visit the horse) stood outside the Johnson’s Landing Retreat Centre in deep discussion with a young man named Kyle, the Corix installation engineer, who’d turned up that morning in his truck. Neither Kootenay Joe Farm nor the Retreat Centre had permitted him to replace their electricity meters with smart meters, so he planned to try his luck farther up Holmgren Road at the Frehse, Madill and Webber residences. Just as soon as he got done with this rather intense conversation on the ethics of smart meters.

Roger drove up Kootenay Joe Road pulling his trailer, saw the Corix truck parked outside the Retreat Centre and swore under his breath. Damn it! They’d finally arrived. He carefully negotiated a U-turn with the trailer in tow and returned to the house he shared with Carol on the north side of the creek. Carol immediately put up a sign beside their electricity meter; they wanted nothing to do with smart meters in that household.

Roger swung out of their driveway again and crossed Gar Creek for the third time in twenty minutes—he was one of the last to see the old Creek Corner intact. The water looked even thicker and blacker this morning, and he felt vaguely uneasy due to the intensely earthy, rank, swampy smell. What the hell was going on? Thank goodness he’d pulled his backhoe out of the creek draw the day before.

Back on Kootenay Joe Road, Roger briefly joined Gerry and Richard and added his two cents’ worth to the discussion with Kyle, but he had work to do and abandoned the conversation to get on with the business of loading a large log onto his trailer.

Driving back down Kootenay Joe Road a few minutes later, Roger heard strange banging and crashing noises. Was something wrong with his load? The log not strapped down properly? A problem with his trailer? Jesse and Lyndsey, workers at Kootenay Joe Farm, were standing in the field adjacent to the road, staring in his direction. Assuming it was all about him, Roger waved and smiled at them as he drove past.

At the junction of Kootenay Joe Road and Holmgren Road he stopped, looked left for traffic, then looked right. What he saw was puzzling. About a hundred metres up the road, past the trees that bordered Rachel’s property, was a metres-deep wall of debris. Obviously he was looking at a landslide, but what was it doing there on the road, so far from the creek?

Richard Ortega and Gerry Rogers’s first thought was for Christopher and me. They abandoned the smart meter installer, raced down Kootenay Joe Road in Richard’s red truck and stopped beside Roger. “We’re going down to Chris and Mandy’s place. Want to come?” They were completely focused on what might have happened down the creek, and didn’t once look up the road in the direction of Val Webber’s house. Roger hesitated for a moment then joined them and they sped down the road, followed closely by neighbour Tony Holland on his ATV and Kyle, the smart meter installer, in his truck.

Patrick Steiner, Colleen O’Brien, and Patrick and Carol O’Brien

Across the road at Kootenay Joe Farm, the young owners, Patrick Steiner and Colleen O’Brien, were preparing to take their three-week-old son, Maël, to Kaslo for his routine hearing test. Colleen’s parents, Patrick and Carol O’Brien, had arrived two days before in their camper van, from their home in Mission, BC, to meet their first grandchild. The grandparents were out in the yard fitting a roof rack onto the kids’ car while Patrick was using a chainsaw nearby, wearing hearing protectors.

Patrick and Carol O’Brien could not see the landslide over the ridge, but heard what they realized later were the three stages of its passage. In the first few seconds it sounded like a train approaching, or sand in a funnel, getting rapidly louder. Colleen hurried outside with the baby because she could feel the house shaking. She signalled to her husband to take off his hearing protectors.

A huge explosion of sound, ten times greater than before, engulfed them. The ground shook and Patrick O’Brien said later it was like being bombarded by boulders. The din then ceased abruptly, and they heard what they presumed was the tail end of the slide ripping on down the creek with a whooshing, snapping noise. The family stood together, dumbfounded. O’Brien estimates the whole thing was over in about forty-five seconds.

Peter and Bobbi Huber

In Birchdale, a tiny, water-access-only community about five kilometres south of Johnson’s Landing, Peter Huber was doing some maintenance on the dock, pounding spikes into wood. Peter and his wife, Bobbi, have lived in Birchdale since 1976. They love the remoteness, the commute by boat across the lake and the absence of infrastructure. Phones are of the radio or satellite type, and their solar and hydro power is generated locally.

Peter was absorbed in his work yet at the same time aware of everything happening around him across the broad expanse and stunning sweep of north Kootenay Lake. He heard a far-off rumbling and paused, wondering if it was dry lightning or an approaching thunderstorm, but the sky was clear and he resumed his work. A few seconds later came another rumble. This time he stopped, sat back on his heels and looked north over the water towards Kootenay Joe Ridge. He saw a cloud of airborne material, but couldn’t see where it had originated because Gar Creek was behind the ridge and below his field of vision.

Peter dropped his tools and hurried up the trail to the house to tell Bobbi; she’d also heard something. A little while later their neighbours Robert Nellis and Sheila Murray-Nellis appeared at the door to say cups had been rattling on the table, and they were afraid something big had happened. They turned on the radio and within a very short time heard a breaking news story on CBC. Robert, a nurse at the Victorian Hospital of Kaslo, decided to go with Sheila over to Johnson’s Landing by boat to see if anyone needed help.

Over in Johnson’s Landing, Gerry, Richard, Roger, Bob, Harvey, Tony and Kyle crowded around Renata, who was shaking visibly, and still standing on the spot where she’d stopped running down the driveway. Muddy silt seeped across the lawn and through the garden. She told them, “Mandy’s in Kaslo, Christopher’s in Oregon, Kurt’s in Toronto!” Somebody added: “Thank God! And you’re here!”

Everyone cheered up with the knowledge that Christopher and I weren’t in the house. But when Roger explained that the slide had also come across Holmgren Road—to Val’s house—they leapt to their feet. They recall being in a sweat, pounding back up the meadow, manoeuvring to extract their vehicles from the parking jam at Creek Corner. Roger hopped on the back of Tony’s ATV; those two were the first of the group to arrive at Val Webber’s house.

Roger climbed onto the Webbers’ roof, but Rachel Rozzoni, standing nearby with her children, yelled at him to be careful because power lines lay everywhere. From his vantage point he looked out over an otherworldly scene. A vast area was covered and completely devastated—it was not the little finger of wreckage he’d envisaged. Val’s chimney was poking out of the mud not quite where it ought to be. Yet the untouched corner of the yard looked so peaceful with its green grass, fruit trees and barn—and there beside the barn stood two parked cars.

Bob Yetter remembers working on pure adrenalin as he pulled into Val’s driveway. He scrambled onto the roof to join Roger. The gable was filled to the brim with mud, and beams were popping. Both men realized it was hopeless. Mud up to the rafters and the house displaced—no hollow or space where people might still be breathing. They hollered into the void but Bob, as he reported later, had already made up his mind that no reply would mean no one was alive.

Roger heard John Madill’s air horn and went to investigate, leaving Bob on the roof. He followed an old trail below the toe of the slide, and found John, his face bloody, standing beside his house, signalling uphill towards Petra’s. The two men attempted to clamber over to her place, but the forested hillside had become an open field of deep soft muck with nothing to stand on. There was no destination either. Petra’s house had disappeared.

Roger was uncomfortably aware of the creek draw, denuded of its trees: he didn’t like the sound or feel of it. He told John he thought they should get out of there, and they raced back around the toe of the slide, passing Harvey, now on his ATV.

Eager to inspect the damage to his pottery studio and anxious about what he would find, Harvey drove up his forest trail, cleared the ridge and met a spooky, surreal scene. The grass and buildings immediately in front of him looked normal; the slide flow had actually stopped at the studio’s doorstep. But logs had shot forward like spears, with such velocity they’d run right through the buildings and knocked them crooked.

He explored around the Madills’ house on foot. A timber was sticking out of the west wall and his immediate bizarre thought was, “John must be doing some work on the house.” But when he walked round the corner, he saw that the wall had been hit from inside by a huge tree that had barrelled straight through the living room and kitchen.

At Petra’s there wasn’t anything left to see. Bewildered and disoriented, not knowing what else to do, Harvey took himself home and decided to finish the task he’d started that morning: making hay. He mowed hay like a robot, all afternoon, in the same traumatized, helpless way that I resumed my lawn mowing in Kaslo after learning that our house no longer existed. It seemed absolutely reasonable, in that moment of intense shock, to try to carry on as though nothing had happened.

HUSAR task force examines the Webbers’ buried house.

Photo: Courtesy City of Vancouver