The Night They Turned Red Bluff Off -- Part 1

Opening Statement of R.S. Pearce to the California Senate Select Committee on Red Bluff Electrification. Given at the Committee's Fifth Sitting, at the Tehama County Building, Corning, October 18, 2024

I thought the wind was the morning freight when it woke me up the night they turned Red Bluff off. It was whistling so loudly through the mountain passes and down across the valley that it rattled the screen of my window right down onto the ground. I remember, or I think I remember, it perfectly. I’ve said it at a bunch of hearings now, and the public record says it’s true, so I’ve decided it must be. I’ll tell it again, my little part of the tale, so that folks don’t forget.

I had an early start in Redding the morning they turned Red Bluff off, and I passed through on my way north at about 5:00. I was refereeing a soccer tournament and they were more than happy to give the new guy in the North State the earliest game. The donut place just off the 5 was going to be open for a quick breakfast, so I took off even earlier from Chico than I might otherwise would have, such was my desire for a baconeggncheese croissant and a maple old fashioned.

My friend Jimmy told me the Monday after, back at work, that he had been at the races in Red Bluff Saturday night with a couple of his buddies from E Clampus Vitus. He told me, up at the permit desk, that he was up a bit on his wagering and into “the third part of a 120 of Olde English” when he decided to skip the last race and meander over to Del Taco. “And by the time I was three-quarters of the way over to the Del Taco,” he told me, “they turned the lights off.”

I never did quite learn how Jimmy had made it all the way back to Chico that night, but it was something I’ve since thought about a lot. I have to assume one of his Clamper friends was DD’ing it, but that might be an unreasonably generous assumption.

On the morning they turned Red Bluff off, still dark out, on the drive up towards Redding I had passed first through Los Molinos without really noticing that anything was out of the ordinary. Los Molinos is more than a one-horse town, but it does have just the one major intersection. The 99, backbone of the Central Valley of California, blows through at 40 miles an hour, and for some wild reason Caltrans added a mile and a half of Class-I protected bike lane the last time they resurfaced the in-town part.

There is, and I mention this only to say that on that first morning I still found it funny, a section a couple of miles north of town where an overly-ambitious farmer laid down sixty-second avenue between some trees. On the other side of the highway, sixty-fifth intersects sixty-third and sixty-first on a loop, of course, and the next avenue back towards the city is ninth. There’s a certain whimsy to the situation, I think, and was still thinking as I passed through, not noticing at all that the almond trees lining the road weren’t lit. Why, after all, would Los Molinos have any real need for streetlights?

In the little towns up and down the Central Valley, the recession bit down hard and never really let go, but I’ve been to places much worse hit. There are parts of South Carolina, off of US-15 near Lake Marion in particular, where it’s obvious by the modern-ish quality of the buildings that they survived being bypassed by the Interstate in the 70’s or 80’s, and hung on through good luck or nostalgia or proximity to Santee Cooper’s lakes or pure accident of circumstances until George Bush’s two tax cuts for the very rich shattered on the back of economic reality in late 2008. Those places are shattered, but the Central Valley is in different straits. When a place develops out of an extractive industry into an agricultural one, the casual feudalism hangs around and becomes part of the blood, as it has in every town and city along the 99 (and the 5 north of the Grapevine, and the 43) with the exception of Sacramento. Los Molinos was no exception, and nor was Red Bluff.

I rumbled past two closed gas stations, the lights were off already, and I blew through the first intersection that was ostensibly a four-way stop because I couldn’t see the stop sign, tacked up to a bollard with non-reflective facing in the predawn darkness. I learned it was there only when I went through Red Bluff that evening on my way home and saw in the dimming twilight the old bollard there in the middle of the road, summoning two stops out of me as I passed through the town.

On the way up, though, I only caught the second intersection, and then only barely in my headlights, skidding to a stop halfway through. The Tehama County sheriff was apparently otherwise occupied, and I think by now the statute of limitations has expired on rolling stops, and anyway the Tehama County Sheriff has better things to be concerned with these days.

I realized, as I turned onto the 5, that there had only been one building lit up, and my groggy little brain finally realized that it was one of those PG&E power cuts, and the old Saloon had kept their generator on all night and into the morning, probably to serve the race crowd, and what I had witnessed would be over be the afternoon. I am led now to believe, after these three years, that I was the first person who came through Red Bluff that night who hadn’t been there when the power was cut. That is, I was the first person to experience Red Bluff as it has been for every day and night since September 10, 2021. 

I understand that my statement adds little that you didn’t already know (except that those of you from the coast could stand to learn a little about the valley, and those of you from LA could stand to learn a little about bike lanes), but I have been told that it is of historical value. Like most of you I had also never been to Red Bluff before, and it is hard, emotionally, to now ache for what I never knew, to learn of a better world and know it was lost. That's my ten minutes, I am open to any questions you may have, except Senator Denlay.