On living with Isabel

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On Living with Isabel

While you’re living through the agony of a hurricane like Isabel, with 70 mph. winds battering your house for five hours, trees and power lines tumbling down all around you, and rain coming down so hard that it penetrates the edges of your storm windows, several things become slightly more than crystal clear.

1. You could die at any minute if one of those monster trees decides to use your house as a landing site and stab you through the noggin with one of its branches. Or you could be buried alive under all the stuff you’ve accumulated if the second floor decides to give way and create that cathedral ceiling look in the interior of your house.

2. Electricity is a good thing. In fact, it may even be a morally good thing, since you tend to take the deity’s name in vain rather constantly when you’re listening to howling winds and pelting rain in the dark. Furthermore, all this blather about how quaint it is to get back to the old days and sit out on the porch and look at the stars at night or enjoy candlelight dinners is pure and utter crap. Do that for six or seven days and you’ll see what I mean. It just doesn’t cut it. Being totally cut off from the outside world, with only a crank radio to bring you squawking signals from some distant radio station, isn’t my idea of the joy of roughing it. I want the Weather Channel, if you please, so I can see where the damned storm is and how soon the gusts of 80 mph. are going to subside.

3. Even better than electricity is gas. Mainly because you can cook when the power lines flop over, as they incessantly do in a storm like Isabel. The only problem, of course, is finding food to cook. But if you’ve done your homework, and you know the storm is approaching, you will have stocked up on all sorts of canned goodies, like La Choy Chinese dinners and Dinty Moore’s beef stew. Or tuna fish and salmon in a can, which don’t have to be cooked, but which nevertheless make for delightful candlelight dinners. Also, gas ranges are just the thing for heating buckets of water, since your hot water heater is bound to be defunct unless you have a gas one of those dudes too. In fact, anyone who has an electric range in this day and age is just plain stupid. Or at least until the power companies come to the conclusion that sticking 40 foot skinny poles in the air with thin wires on them is probably not the way to go in tropical storms or ice storms. We don’t put water lines up on skinny poles, or gas lines, so why are we still back in the dark ages of hoisted power lines?

4. In the midst of a hurricane, when life as you know it could be trashed in an instant, you tend to forget mundane stuff, like, for instance, the antics of George W. Bush. Tell you the truth, I didn’t think of Dubya once during the whole thing, nor did I care if he gave away the store, which he probably did to get the electricity flowing in Iraq. Of course, I wasn’t encouraged one bit when I heard that he had vacated the White House prior to the storm’s arrival, though that seems to be his modus operandi when danger is imminent. No one knew where he went, of course, which made it almost as exciting as trying to find him during the first few hours after the events of 9/11. But I didn’t care, though I did wonder what my chances of survival were in my somewhat smaller Cape Cod house, if they thought Dubya was in danger in the White House. At that point I would have happily joined Dick Cheney in his secret bunker, but I didn’t know where that was either. On the other hand, I was mightily impressed that Dubya showed his face in Virginia after the storm and promised us everything in the book to get us back on our feet. Problem is that the communications between localities and the state and federal governments were so atrocious that the stuff we needed, like ice and generators, never arrived. We had just as much chance of getting all that promised help as the Africans have of getting the AIDS money that Dubya promised them.

5. Dogs don’t do hurricanes. Or, more precisely, they try to do them, but their instincts tell them that what’s going on outside is not one of your calm, balmy summer days. Rather it’s something altogether nasty and downright threatening. Yet, it’s hard to keep a well-trained, housebroken pup penned up for hours on end when nature calls. Pees and poops do work their way through the system, and what to do but go outside and get on with the business of relief. Only trouble is that outside at the point of high poop pressure is howling winds and tree limbs cascading down all over the place. Nevertheless, nature is nature, so out you go, leash in hand and hope that the usual routine of sniffing and finding just the right place will be put on hold this time around. It isn’t, of course, and while you’re yelling at the dog to produce pronto, he’s highballing it back to the door, smarter

than you are for realizing that you both should never have come out in the first place.

6. Monopolistic power companies suck. Having been without power for almost seven days, I can tell you that the worst thing about it is not knowing when the power is going to zip through your lines again. The problem is that during crises such as this the power and cable companies take a hike when it comes to communicating with the public. The only thing they told us is that they would restore power to hospitals, water treatment plants and firehouses first, and then they would deal with the rest of us. Comforting indeed. Now I don’t begrudge the hospitals their power, believe me, but does the power restoration plan have to be as guarded and secretive as the role the Saudis played in 9/11? I don’t think so. Why can’t these people, who screwed up to begin with by putting their wires up on skinny poles surrounded by trees, at least give the public some general idea about where they’ll be working each day? Incommunicado is not what we want these people to be when it comes to giving us back our juice.

There are other things I’ve learned as a result of living through Hurricane Isabel, such as the fact that powdered milk is probably a good thing to have, or that freezers are useless, but all this is now common knowledge. Suffice it to say that, important as we think we are in the grand scheme of things, we’re mere nothings when it comes to something like a destructive hurricane with the soothingly sweet name of Isabel.

September 27, 2003