Hurricane Sandy

Prolonged periods without electricity are rather like air travel with long layovers—I get a lot of reading done. I finished the last few pages of Andrew Graham-Dixon’s superior biography, Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane. Every Third Thought by John Barth—a book my Dear One read a year or so ago when Jack sent a copy hot off the press—lasted from about 8:30 last night to mid-morning today. Now it is on to Erik Larson’s In the Garden of the Beasts which I am pretty sure has been part of the “to read” pile since last Christmas.

I should not complain—I whine incessantly about lacking time for reading, pleasure reading, personal reading, the kind of reading that occupied me from my first moments of literacy to my employment job into teaching. Teaching means you read things you need to read, not things you want to read.

We are about twenty hours into powerlessness and I feel, if not powerless, then aimless, drifting on a current more electro-magnetic than watery, pulled from things I know I should be doing and held in bed, waiting for daylight to offer its dim grayness, or on the sofa where the warmth of the crackling red coals can just reach me, all the while aware of the faint perfume of candle wax and burnt matches that still permeates the house and which will soon intensify as darkness already obscures the printed page even if it cannot dim the computer screen.

Yesterday morning, Monday morning, I opted out of my usual perambulation—the brisk walk around the neighborhood, iPod set to Ellen’s Playlist—intimidated by the gusting winds and horizontal rain. This morning, however, the worst of Sandy having moved to the Midwest and northern New England, I donned a jacket and gloves and headed out to Steve Goodman’s rendition of the jolly “Vegetable Song” aka “The Barnyard Dance”:

It was late one night by the pale moonlight
All the vegetables gave a spree.
They put out a sign that said, “The dancing’s at nine”
And all the admissions were free.

Streets almost empty and our cul-de-sac littered with fallen foliage and small branches; rain cold, light, intermittent. As I turned onto Manor Road, lawns looked freshly vacuumed—hardly a leaf to be seen. Those whirling winds had left some yards immaculate, others a wreck. A familiar guitar run introduced Iris Dement’s “Our Town“:

 And you know the sun’s settin’ fast,
And just like they say, nothing good ever lasts.
Well, go on now and kiss it goodbye,
But hold on to your lover,
‘Cause your heart’s bound to die.
Go on now and say goodbye to our town, to our town.
Can’t you see the sun’s settin’ down on our town, on our town,
Goodnight.

My circuit is about 1.3 miles. At least I think it is. I clocked about 1.2 miles in our new Toyota, the Blue Ravioli, then added a walk up and down a cul-de-sac, feeling I needed to lengthen it a bit. A fellow in a silver car, a neighbor as it turns out, pulled up alongside me, to exchange news and I realized then that porch lights were burning at some of the houses there, within a quarter-mile of our home. He said he lived on Kendrick and that the power never went out at his house. What! The other side of the block never lost juice?

James Taylor softly sang,

Goodnight you moonlight ladies,
Rock-a-bye sweet baby James,
Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose,
Won’t you let me come out in your dreams
And rock-a-bye sweet baby James.”

Such is the nature of the grid, though, that I realized that while the “old” houses at the bottom of Kendrick had functioning refrigeration, central heating, illumination and computers, a generator was humming away at a “new” home, one in our post-2005 subdivision.

Now it was Tracy Chapman in my ear. Woodsmoke tickled my nose and as I stepped into the living room, my Dear One was reading on the couch and a fire blazed in the hearth.

Trees are down all around the area. The Tuckers two houses away lost a corner of their roof as a tree in the protected but of forest behind them toppled, peeling away their rain gutter and crushing the railing at the steps that lead from the basement. A few blocks distant on Paradise Road, a pair of pines had brought down a power line. Swan Creek is rushing with a muddy fury that I have not seen since a near flood when my Tattooed Boy was a ten-year-old attending day camp at the Aberdeen Swim Club. I suspect it looked like that in 2011 when Hurricanes Irene and Lee flooded our waterways. Back then, however, Robin Hood Road was closed then and we couldn’t go look. Today Robin Hood Road was closed father down between Old Robin Hood and Route 40; a fellow in a motorized wheelchair said three large trees snapped wires and were lying across the road. We decided not to rubberneck.

This time is a gift, though. I learned to make udon noodles. A new book awaits. It has been years since I rocked quietly by the fire and listened to the weather.

Hallowe’en Epilogue: I was a bit more than one hundred pages into In the Garden of the Beasts when we blew out the candles and retired. Around midnight electricity was restored. This morning I misremembered the time of a doctor appointment for my Dear One, carved a jack o-lantern and at present am trying to avoid correcting essays and mooshing lectures together to make up for hurricane-canceled classes. As I walked my circuit in the predawn darkness, clockwise this time, the moon beginning to deflate from its hurricane fullness shone inside a a rainbow-edged corona, a nocturnal variation on an ancient expression of hope. When I turned toward home, a stripe of dingy-gold sunrise pushed above the treetops, lifting low sooty clouds and the morning star twinkled above home in a patch of clearing blue.

Heaven help those poor souls who took the brunt of Sandy’s wind and rain.