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….
22 August 11
It was, frankly, the kind of storm I just hate.
I had gone to bed at about ten; at 2:41, when I glanced at the clock, the winds were already howling, doors were banging, and there was a persistent roar of the ocean five blocks away—the first time we have heard the ocean in this apartment.
In cases like these, Raf likes to cuddle. I, on the other hand, cannot bear to be touched. We ended up all the way to the edge of my side of the bed—it was cuddling or a fall to the floor.
“State Capitols!” I announced. “Capitol of Georgia!”
“Atlanta,” Raf said, sleepily rubbing my belly.
“Wrong—Augustus,” I retorted.
“Augusta,” he corrected.
“OK—Augusta,” I said, “though I can hardly be expected to keep track of every damn capitol….”
“Well, weren’t you the one….”
“Push-ups!” I proclaimed. “I intend to arise immediately and do fifty push-ups! I’d very much advise you to do the same!”
“You’ve never done fifty push-ups in your life,” said Raf, trying to kiss my ear.
“Ridiculous—of course I have. I rigorously do fifty push-ups every morning before going to work….”
“Nonsense,” said Raf, “let’s just stay here and…”
“I’m getting up,” I said. “I prefer vertical panic….”
At this point, the winds were howling harder than ever.
“I’m hungry,” announced Raf.
“Hey, there’s champagne!” said I.
So we got up--Raf stepping on the very dead and in fact eviscerated pigeon that Loquito had deposited (as always) on the oriental rug--and settled in to eat cold chicken and vegetables at the dining room. Which meant, of course, the classic white Wedgwood, and the crystal champagne flutes. Mr. Fernández does not lower standards in emergencies.
A charming scene, yes? Two men of a certain age dining formally in their large, Victorian dining room, lit only by candlelight, as the storm rages around them.
No.
Because the storm, however good or bad it is, is the least of it. It’s the next day, rising without electricity, that’s the worst.
There has been no serious damage. Our cats, our possessions, and we ourselves are all right.
My stomach is not. Nor is my body, which aches senselessly. I cannot stand without getting dizzy. Worse, I am utterly fatigued, and can only twitch when I try to lie down.
“Wal-Mart,” said the bored voice when I called at noon.
I wanted to kill her.
“Her” being Jaythel, a woman whose emotional range varies from profound boredom to a smug disdain. She is a woman as defended against any excitement as a bag of cement. A rain-soaked and now hardened bag of cement.
And I want to be just like her.
‘Why?’ I think. ‘Why do I have to be so damned sensitive? Why does absolutely everything get to me? The good, the bad, the beautiful, the ugly—I’m tired of it! I want to be a robot, just like her, and live my life as a constant, monotonous hum!”
Instead, I am pacing and tired, irritable, sleepy and ratcheted up.
And worse, the storm left—apparently—little damage. We have gone, therefore, through all of this for nothing. There will be work tomorrow—unlike a real hurricane where one can reasonably linger about for a couple of days, inventing excuses to tell the boss. There will be no federal aid, which will shoot sales up at Wal-Mart and almost inevitably assure a year-end bonus. There will be no hanging around people’s desks, exchanging horror stories.
There will be, instead, four long days of work, with no sympathy for my frazzled nerves. There will be thirty or forty orchids to be put back on the balcony, and the dirt and mud to be cleaned up. There will be the rugs to be placed back, the furniture to be repositioned, the mess that inevitably follows a storm.
There’s only one thing we’ve been spared. A mile away, so reports El Nuevo Día, residents abutting a mangrove swamp awoke to find their patios completely filled with…
…iguanas!
Yes, my old literary friends! They had fallen from the trees—didn’t I tell you they did?—or found themselves flooded, and decided to rest for a bit in the patios of a well-heeled apartment complex. Before anyone could report them to the pertinent government agency (which is anyway closed, I’m sure), in fact, before anyone could do anything at all about them, they had picked themselves and headed back to the swamp.
As I, too, will go to work tomorrow.
The storm is over—everywhere but in my mind and body.
Oh, and by the way—Atlanta is the capital of Georgia, but there’s no reason to tell Mr. Fernández that….
