24 Aug 11

It’s a situation that calls for a plow horse, and I am…

…a thorough bred?

All right, that brought the first smile of the day.  And that’s a good thing, because the news is a little grim.  This is what the island looks like, today, more than 48 hours after the hurricane passed.

                         

Yup, trouble in paradise.

Jack would know what to do.  Among the talents he possessed was a great facility for nursing the always temperamental chain saw into life.  And having mixed the gasoline and the oil into just the right proportions, and having done an experimental pull of the rope to start the beast, he’d sit back and study the situation.

“We take her on the down side, and she’ll probably drop to the left, get hung on that maple there.  Better get her on the up side, and then do a little counter cut under her….”

Or words to that effect.  We’d be somewhere up in the woods, surveying a tree that had half fallen, and needed to be felled.  Jack would be doing the physics—calculating gravity and weight and counter balance.  He had an eye.

“Could make a hell of a widow-maker, we get her the wrong way…”

Widow-maker—a part of the childhood terminology, like undertow.

“Happens on the quietest day, still, no breeze.  You got a fork of a tree hung up there on another tree, been there years.  You walk under it all the time—maybe you know ‘bout it, maybe you don’t.  Then one, there’s not a breeze in the sky, and that thing decides to come down.  Down she comes, just like that.  And if you’re under it….”

A widow-maker.

Ahem, Jack, the 54 year-old Marc now asks—was this a good thing to say to a kid?  That no sunny day is safe, that no stroll through the ocean shore is not potentially fatal?  That disaster, in short, is only a second away?

Maybe it is.  Maybe it’s true.  Another story from the family lore.

North Dakota, the 30’s, the dust bowl.  But it wasn’t the dust that came that day, but the hail.  Huge balls of it, pelting from the sky, onto the field where the young shoots of wheat were a foot high.  In twenty minutes, the crop was gone.

As was the income for the next year.

Jack’s father strode out into the field, gathered the hail, went to the barn and found the ice cream maker. 

“Sat on the porch, there, and looked at the field, watched the hail melt, and ate ice cream,” said Jack.  “Best I ever tasted….”

Ice cream makers and chain saws.  Two tools, two generations of Newhouses.

Alas, the third generation is not doing too well.  After striking Puerto Rico early Monday morning, Irene went her way, leaving us all to assume it was over, the damage—relatively little—done.  Yesterday, I went back to work.

Only to realize that the tail of this storm was gigantic, and carried seemingly inexhaustible amounts of water.  Which fell, yesterday, in one the hardest rains I’ve seen on this tropical island.  It is, in fact, a fifty year rain, which is, I now read in the papers, a meteorological term.  It denotes an event that may be unique, not just limited to fifty years.  It’s a different breed of horse, not the same mare with a different collar.

I saw the rain for forty minutes while waiting for a bus that never came, some twenty miles from my home.  I admired it, in fact I liked it.  Finally, a colleague scooped me up, and drove me to the train station.

I saw flooding where I had never seen flooding, I saw a Smart car delicately pushing its way through a huge field of water, I saw rivers where there had been streets.

And I seem not to have a chain saw at hand, or if I do, not to recognize it.  My nerves are shot, my stomach is churning, my mouth dry.

Just as I felt, those days after the auditions….