We’ll be without Internet and telephone for some time at home. But we were quite lucky to not be among the 1.5 million people who had to do without electricity since Saturday, 700,000 of them still in that state this morning. I thought of them as I took my hot shower. And we have the other missing services at my work, a distinct advantage of working at a hospital. I suppose they have earned their overhead percentage that I calculated into those funding requests so recently. And I brought coffee out to the four workers who came to at least clear the street in front of the house.
Memories of being a kid along the Eastern seaboard of the United States, and barricading oneself inside, listening to the wind howl, as remnants of Caribbean hurricanes swept up toward Nova Scotia and removed tree tops, forgotten ladders and garbage pails along a wide swath. Friday night, we closed all the shutters and brought out the candles. Like when one brings an umbrella on a stormy day to ward off the rain, some illogical deep part of me wants to believe that these propitiary gestures kept the lights on and the roof pottery intact.
Before the wind started blowing, I salvaged the miniature bead necklace my daughter had set out on her windowsill for the fairies. Weaning her slowly off Santa Claus has not been a problem, but I’m still waiting for her natural skepticism to kick in with respect to other fantastic denizens of the world out there. Now that she can recognize my handwriting and I have to resort to fancy fonts on the computer, I need to choose between managing her disappointment at no answer (currently, the fairies are reputedly in hibernation) or continuing to fabricate proof. She’s only nine; I suppose I can keep it going until the autumn when we’re planning to move up north again.
Glad you and yours are safe and well, Heather. Whether one believes in fat men on clouds hurling thunderbolts or not, one can only respect the awesome power of
Naturenature.Thanks, Henry. As you know, Kim Stanley Robinson has described in a gripping way how this sort of thing might well happen more frequently, and how it might impinge on the life of ordinary people such as ourselves. Recommended reading for the fatalist optimists among us.
Also glad you and your family are safe, Heather. I’m surprised that so many houses along the coasts of the US don’t have shutters; people resort to rolls and rolls of masking tape, and large pieces of plywood, instead. Some of the older homes in New Orleans, particularly in the French Quarter, have shutters, but most suburban homes don’t.
A friend of mine and her six-year-old daughter build fairy houses from twigs, moss, and leaves in their backyard. I remember building such things as a child, but we didn’t call them fairy houses … we made them for our toy animals and Breyer horses.
So glad to read you are OK, Heather.
Oh, wow. You were not kidding about those storms!
I forgot to say that the photo was in front of my home. So we were a little stuck for somewhat less than a day, which was very good for the paperwork on my desk.
@Kristi: even though I grew up in New England, I only discovered functional shutters in France!
@Eva: one never knows when the national weather service is going to play the over-cautious card, as localized hurricanes in 1999 [I was in the red zone for the first of them] caused more damage than their due because people didn’t take it too seriously. So I am concerned when the service cries wolf too often – and here, they didn’t.
My parents lived for a while in the Gers (not so far from Toulouse) and lived in an old farmhouse which had very thick walls, and built with its back to the prevailing westerlies [NB: for Siege of Stars fans, my parents’ old house featured extensively in that story, and only slightly modified]. All the farmhouses in the region were like that. And the weather, at times, was ferocious. The funny thing was that although the vernacular architecture was clearly created with the weather in mind, whenever a storm hit the locals all used to complain that it was ‘pas normale’.
Wow, that’s some damage. It always amazes me how little respect (it seems) people give to nature’s destructive power. Here in Florida, there are way too many mobile homes for an state known to have strong hurricanes every few years or so – and some of them don’t even evacuate when warned. I remember there were people surfing off of Saint Pete Beach when it was supposedly going to be hit with a Cat 4 hurricane in 2004 (lucky, for them, it hit south and carried only a Cat 1 storm surge). If the surge had been the level of a Cat 4 and the storm had hit the beach directly, they’d have been smacked with a 13-18 ft wall of water and 130 kt winds. The storm managed to do severe damage even hundreds of miles inland when the winds were down to 75 kt. And people were out, in the water, hoping for the storm to hit them. People are insane.
True, Christie, although those who were out in the water when the Southeast Asia tsunami hit four years ago were the ones who survived. But yes, every year there are spectators who get swept off the wavebreaks in Biarritz (France) and Cape Ann (Massachusetts) – so people are universally insane.
Still no phone/internet, but I’m really lucky because most mobile phones are out as well. And this is not even storm/wind country; weather can be bad, but this really was pas normale. The Gers got whacked something good, and they’re still sharing means of access to generators and water pumps.
It’s good to live in a country where my taxes pay for public services that step in and manage this sort of crisis. I hardly felt it, whereas in Indonesia four years later, they’ve either moved away or are still recovering.