How a Chronicle photographer captured kayaking into the kitchen
How a Chronicle photographer captured kayaking into the kitchen
San Francisco Chronicle photographer Santiago Mejia found what he was looking for in Lorin Doeleman, the woman he captured kayaking through her living room inside her mother’s flooded home on River Road, just east of downtown Guerneville.
Donning hiking boots, not high ones, and ski pants, and bringing along a towel to dry his camera if needed, Mejia tempered his expectations for comfort early on.
After speaking with the photographer, Doeleman invited the photographer into her mother’s flooded home, where two or so feet of water lined a hallway.
Camera in hand, Mejia trekked inside the flooded house, first into the hallway, where there was more than a foot of pooled water.
[...] Mejia ever so slowly lowered his camera to the murky water just below him on the stairs, closer and closer, careful not to let the expensive piece of equipment drop.
Only the paintings hung high on the wall as Mejia composed the first of several shots were visible, a window into some alternate, and flooded, reality, he said.
“That’s when I got to see a lot of the debris and the Russian River and the flood in its entirety, the massiveness and the scale of it, and it was just incredible and horrible to see at the same time,” Mejia said.