I guess I needed to walk away from narrating for a couple of days. Once the power came back on Saturday the relief was palpable, but it also felt like all of the sudden we needed to get busy, clean up, clear away generator lines and billows of dog hair, push the refrigerator back into place, attack the mound of laundry, contact friends, get our lives back together.
Saturday before the power went on I went to Wallyworld in Brusly for supplies. It was strange in there: empty row after row of black blank shelves on the food side, while on the other side there seemed to be way too much in the way of things nobody needed: clothing, dishes, housewares, etc., punctuated by empty displays where things people needed like flashlights and gas cans had been. People seemed to be staggering around feeling a bit overwhelmed by what seemed to be a lot of choices but in actuality the needed things were in short supply. There was a tiny bit of produce that looked or felt or smelled not at all fresh, but plenty of junk food. I got a bunch of that for the movie showing, managed to come up with 2 bags of ice, fire ant killer, mosquito repellant, kitty chow, ibuprofen, not much else. While I was in there the power went out and I panicked that we would be locked in, but they got it back on in 10 minutes or so, sparing me having to use the end of my cash. As I exited there was a line of folks waiting to get in from several buses that had pulled in while I was in the store. No idea where the buses were from.
We had a potluck supper in the building where I teach, using the small kitchen there. A colleague is staying in his office and living in the building, since his power won't be back until he gets the tree off his wires and they get around to fixing his service after that. He sent his children and wife back to Pennsylvania. There are so many people like him, making do. Anyway he had invited anyone around to come to a potluck--he made spaghetti, and the several students who came talked about the last week, It was good to just sit and talk, get to know how they were feeling. After that a few more students and a faculty member showed up, and we played a horrible movie in the Studio--From Dusk To Dawn, in honor of what our curfew had been. A weird horror movie, but it was also wonderfully distracting. Just beat the 10 PM curfew getting home. Gary had left the porch light on for me--how lovely not to have to fumble around in the dark any more, and not to have a heat wave hit one as one walked in the door. I slept like a rock.
Yesterday was clean up and catch up, getting ready for work. Today Gary got a couple of day laborers to help with the yard clean-up, roof patching, etc. since although we've been attacking the mess as much as possible it feels like we haven't gotten a tenth of it done. I spent a lot of time shooting email back and forth with colleagues; we're all trying to come up with plans and determining how best to help our students, especially our grad students, many of whom had only been here a few weeks before Gustav hit. As GAs they also teach, so they've got a lot on their minds, and not much in their pocketbooks since we don't get paid until the end of the month. To me the grads are the heart and soul of the university, and we're making plans to help them as much as we can. Several lost a lot in this storm; many do not yet have power.
But slowly the power is coming back. I believe EBR is up to or above 50% now.
Of course everything is being done under the looming possibility of Ike. Since we won't have TV for awhile I keep checking all the weather sites and models. They seem to yo-yo a bit between putting LA in the middle of the forecast and then wobbling over to Texas. No offense to Texans, and I wouldn't wish it on anyone, but we are hoping the steering fronts steer it away from us. I just don't know what will happen if we have to do all this again. It's Katrina and Rita II--a lot of differences, but why are major storms coming in clumps lately?
Last night I was reading in William Fox's extraordinary book Terra Antarctica that Adelie penguins' DNA mutates 2 to 7 times faster than others, in the context of a discussion of speculations as to why penguin tracks and corpses are found in the Dry Valleys, a region in the Trans-Antarctic Range that cannot support the penguins. Fox speculates that something is amiss with the homing instincts of these few penguins, so they go off track and wander off into an inhospitable region. He goes on to say that even so, this may be nature's way of sending out test balloons, trial and error, species finding ways to survive by expanding territory, and this process has to involve failed attempts that kill individuals. He concludes, "Nature, in a sense, loves a mistake because it creates information--you find out something you weren't expecting. And nature doesn't care much about the fate of individuals, only species" (167).
Could a set of answers to the question posed by The Hill List be lurking there? I am looking at our newly thinned-out trees, seeing how the live oaks endure while water and red oaks topple. But the live oaks have also had their tops thinned, dead branches sheared away, lots of vegetation stripped--if Ike comes, they won't be as damaged, because Gustav has given them a haircut and taken away the wind blockers. Wind can now circulate through them more easily. The trees as a whole may be better off even though so many individuals suffered or died.
But I can't think that way about people. It's too abstract, too close to social Darwinism which is too often a dreadful rationale for letting terrible things happen to people, or even for causing them to happen.
If I stand very near to the hummingbird feeders and stay very still, the hums seem to take me in stride after several minutes and buzz quite near me to get to the feeders. It's hard not to flinch, but every now and again one is buzzed right in the ear or even softly brushed. They seem so fragile and yet so insistently alive. I think of them en route on their migration path from Mexico over the gulf, hurried over it by the storms, making it to land here only to find the nectar-bearing flowers stripped away by the wind. We put out a few artificial substitutes for these with the feeders, for me hoping they are place-holders for the next migration, when the real flowers should be blooming again. Should I intervene this way? Or have I thwarted a trial balloon error and thus gotten in nature's way? What role do I , should I, play in that nature?
It's nice to have the luxury to think of things like this, rather than where one's next can of gas is coming from. We are getting ready for Ike, and this is the interval.
Fresh food still seems in short supply, but that may be this side of the river and the fact that we waited until 5 PM yesterday to make groceries. No milk, no sugar (needed for the hums), not much in the way of meat.
