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July 2004
Not exactly Johnny-on-the-spot with July,
either, am I? Here it is, July nearly gone.
Well, it's summer. A certain languid indifference
to the demands of the passing days is in order, is it not?
At any rate, that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.
In fact, my brain went on strike towards
the end of June. Or perhaps it developed a prolonged cramp.
Can't say for sure, but the upshot was a decided aversion
to sustained mental activity. When I tell you that even the
Sunday New York Times "Style" section was
a shade too taxing, you get the picture.
Last year at this time I was deep in the
thick of writing Electric Dreams. There was a summer
of '03, but not for C. Kettlewell. Vaguely I recall something
torpid and sticky I passed through on my way between house
and library; I presume that was the summer season proceeding
as usual.
Then came September, which in Virginia isn't
all that different from August in what our local weatherman
likes to call the "humiture," which is to say that
feeling that you are living in a sauna set on "asphyxiate." September of 2003, however, had said weatherman turning instead
to talk of storm tracks and strike probabilities and a repeated
discussion of how trees in full leaf act like a sail to catch
the wind and thus are more likely to topple in a strong blow.
Prescient words. Hurricane Isabel churned
into town late on a Thursday afternoon (after rolling over
Northampton County, NC, readers of Electric Dreams
may be interested to know as a bit of historical trivia),
and the trees commenced to doing that sail thing with considerably
more enthusiasm than a homeowner surrounded by 100-plus-year-old
oaks might wish.
Just to round things out, our power gave
a last flicker of farewell sometime around 2 PM, when Isabel
was still really only warming to the task. So much for using
a storm day to catch up on the vacuuming.
Then darkness fell all about us, and so
did the trees.
To be strictly accurate, the city estimated
that 10,000 trees went down on actual city property. The rest
were what you might call private-sector trees, of which our
neighborhood in particular harvested a bumper crop. Thus,
the whacking big hole in the roof of my office, followed by
copious amounts of rain, precipitating an immediate need to
hurl everything from my office out into the dining room before
it all was rendered a sodden mess.
There is no time when a hole in your roof
is really all that convenient, but a hole in the roof of your
office when you are in theory only a few weeks shy of the
deadline for your book manuscript is a case of particularly
poor timing. That, and the thirteen days we went without electricity
until Our Valiant Heroes imported from Mas Tec power in North
Carolina fought their way street by street through our neighborhood
to return us once more to the 21st century.
And yet, we got off easy with a hole in
the roof. The morning after the hurricane, the street in front
of our house was so thoroughly blocked by massive, fallen
trees, that it would take days of effort by the city to clear
a path through the debris. Around the neighborhood, cars were
crushed and whole houses stove in. Nature's awesome majesty
indeed.
this gives you an idea.....
I won't go into the whole post-hurricane
saga--the days of boiling water because the city's pumping
systems had been flooded, the rumors that this or that store
was open and had ice to sell, the disconcerting darkness of
a city without lights, the flood of wannabe manly men wandering
about with chainsaws, the tree companies from far and wide
trolling the neighborhoods with bucket trucks and cranes,
the laundry piling up by the powerless washing machine, the
growl of generators long into the night. It was an adventure
for a few days, and then you started feeling a seething resentment
towards people who'd gotten their power back and were blithely
flipping on lights and bringing home milk by the gallon to
store in their purring refrigerators.
After toppling trees have subdivided more
than a few of your neighbors' homes, a mere hole in the roof
is the disaster equivalent of a hangnail, exceeding low on
the priority list of any contractor, and rightly so, and so
it was that we passed the winter with a blue tarp over the
hole and me camped out in the dining room amidst stacks and
piles and heaps of everything that had been excavated from
my unusable office.
And I finished the book. Close readers of
E. Dreams will note the occasional appearance of the
word "hurricane" in the text. That's my little joke.
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