This particular morning was the worst yet. Tree branches tossed violently; three eucalyptus trees had been knocked over on Neptune Avenue alone. And Leo had never seen the sea look like this before. All the way out to where rapidly approaching black squalls blocked the view of the horizon, the ocean was a giant sheet of raging surf. Millions of whitecaps rolled toward the land under flying spume and spray, the waves toppling again and again over infinitely wind-rippled gray water. The squalls flew by rapidly, or came straight on in black bursts of rain against the house’s west side. Brief patches and shards of sunlight lanced between these squalls, but failed to light the sea surface in their usual way; the water was too shredded. The gray shafts of light appeared to be eaten by spray.

Up and down Neptune Avenue, their cliff was wearing away. It happened irregularly, in sudden slumps of various sizes, some at the cliff top, some at the base, some in the middle.

The erosion was not a new thing. The cliffs of San Diego had been breaking off throughout the period of modern settlement, and presumably for all the centuries before that. But along this level stretch of seaside cliff north and south of Moonlight Beach, the houses had been built close to the edge. Surveyors studying photos had seen little movement in the cliff’s edge between 1928 and 1965, when the construction began. They had not known about the storm of October 12, 1889, when 7.58 inches of rain had fallen on Encinitas in eight hours, triggering a flood and bluff collapse so severe that A, B, and C Streets of the new town had disappeared into the sea. They also did not understand that grading the bluffs and adding drainage pipes that led out the cliff face destroyed natural drainage patterns that led inland. So the homes and apartment blocks had been built with their fine views, and then years of efforts had been made to stabilize the cliffs.

Now, among other problems, the cliffs were often unnaturally vertical as a result of all the shoring up they had been given. Concrete and steel barriers, iceplant berms, wooden walls and log beams, plastic sheets and molding, crib walls, boulder walls, concrete abutments all these efforts had been made in the same period when the beaches were no longer being replenished by sand washing out of the lagoons to the north, because all these had had their watersheds developed and their rivers made much less prone to flooding sand out to sea. So over time the beaches had disappeared, and these days waves stuck directly at the bases of ever-steepening cliffs. The angle of repose was very far exceeded.

Now the ferocity of the Hyperniño was calling all that to account, overwhelming a century’s work all at once. The day before, just south of the Mulhouses’ property, a section of the cliff a hundred feet long and fifteen feet deep went, burying a concrete berm lying at the bottom of the cliff. Two hours later a hemispheric arc forty feet deep had fallen into the surf just north of them, leaving a raw new gap between two apartment blocks a gap that quickly turned into a gritty mudslide that slid down into the tormented water, staining it brown for hundreds of yards offshore. The usual current was southerly, but the storm was shoving the ocean as well as the air northward, so that the water offshore was chaotic with drifts, with discharge from suddenly raging river mouths, with backwash from the strikes of the big swells, and with the everpresent wind, slinging spray over all. It was so bad no one was even surfing.

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 of the cliffs, they had nowhere to go. Big surges shoved up, disintegrated into a white smash of foam and spray, hung suspended for a moment balked masses of water, regathering themselves high against the cliff face then they fell and muscled back out to sea, bulling into the incoming waves and creating thick tumultuous backwash collisions, until all in the brown shallows was chaos and disorder, and another surge managed to crash in only slightly impeded.

And all the while the wind howled over them, through them, against them. It was basically a warm wind, perhaps sixty or even sixty-five degrees. Leo found it impossible to judge its speed. Even though the cliffs in this area were low compared to those at Torrey Pines about eighty feet tall rather than three hundred and fifty that was still enough and more to block the terrific onshore flow and cause the wind to shoot up the cliffs and over them, so that a bit back from the edge it could be almost still, while right at the edge a blasting updraft was spiked by frequent gusts, like uppercuts from an invisible fist. Leo felt as if he could have leaned out over the edge and put out his arms and be held there at an angle even jump and float down. Young windsurfers would probably be trying it soon, or surfers with their wetsuits altered to make them something like flying squirrels. Not that they would want to be in the water now. The sheer height of the whitewater surge against the cliffside was hard to believe, truly startling; bursts of spray regularly shot up into the wind and were whirled inland onto the already-drenched houses and people.