The first
point is that in my neighborhood of New Haven we were astonishingly lucky. It
could have been so much worse; the difference between us and what we are now seeing
in lower Manhattan, the borough of Queens and New Jersey may be
attributed to the random distance of sixty insignificant miles, and the storm was more than 1,000
miles in diameter. Pure luck. The second point is one that persons who have lived through
a cyclone or hurricane often make, but which is incomprehensible if you have not
experienced it at first hand: The sound. It is not a roar, even above the
sickening cracks of big trees snapping in half like toothpicks, one by one, all around you, so
much as a mighty and, to me, terrifying howl, with industrial base-notes of
steam train, and at very close proximity. Mercifully this lasted only for a
comparatively brief period from approximately 5.30 p.m. on Monday evening (when,
of course, we lost power) until about 10.30 p.m., at which point the whole
thing stopped, and there were even glimpses of a cold full moon. It did go on, of course, for much of the night, but intermittently. In the late afternoon,
before the theatrics set in, the sky turned a deep pea green; I have only once
seen anything like it, and that was when Mark Aronson and I narrowly dodged a
tornado that mowed across Springfield, Mass., last year or the year before—I forget.
At about 2 o’clock on Monday afternoon the clouds stopped scudding, and started
sprinting most unnaturally. I gathered up a few precious things, and pathetically stowed them in
the linen cupboard, as if this would have made the slightest difference had the roof come off. Still, it was as well to be kept busy. After
dark I repaired to the basement with my duvet, pillow, flashlight, bottled
water, and what remained of my supply of Fortnums fudge. I sat there feeling
scared and stupid, mainly scared. You cannot sleep in case something serious
strikes the house, or floods the basement, or the neighbors strike similar
problems, and, of course, with cell phone coverage swept away, you are totally in the
dark not only literally but figuratively also. At the head of my shopping list
this week is an old-fashioned transistor radio, or, better still, a
hand-cranked clockwork one for real emergencies. That, and a generator. I am not quite sure why one clings to total irrationality in situations such as this, but for some reason the fact that the power is still off—and the fridge full of slowly rotting food—bothers me far more than it would otherwise because I make out my monthly check to a relatively small but profitable corporation that persists in calling itself, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, The United Illuminating Company.
The atmosphere in New Haven this morning has shifted from
portentous to frankly strange. Nothing much at all is happening, yet. The phone rang
well before dawn, and it was dear Uncle Alec—calling from his magnificent
longhorn cattle estancia at Fingal on the Mornington Peninsula, to make sure I
am all right. He’s now going to bed, as is the rest of Australia. But I am getting
up. The newspaper was delivered as usual, as it was on the morning of Hurricane Irene last year. The city also kindly collected the rubbish, an almost heroic gesture in the circumstances. It has
evidently been raining all night, though it best resembles just now what the
Irish call a “soft,” a fine swirling drizzle, but notably cooler than last evening.
Gusts of wind that normally one would regard as empty puff, seem
rather more ominous amid all the canceled flights, trains and emergency preparedness
measures that have kicked in all the way from the Carolinas to Massachusetts—as well as several hundreds of thousands of poor souls urged to evacuate their neighborhoods.
We are told to follow the directions of our local and state government
officials. In due course those gusts promise at the very least to complete the work of the
fall, in short order. The sugar maples are now almost entirely bare, but like a mad and
restless child the wind is tossing their leaves all over the place. The sound of a winter wind is
bleak and barren, but the fall adds texture. The small note is a rustle, but
the wooded hillside opposite is producing now a rhythmical ebb and surge, uncannily marine in
character, which at this stage is almost comforting. From my bedroom window I see the single, wholly contingent wire that droops wearily from the corner of my house all the way across to the far side of Chapel Street and a messy aggregation of fixtures that cling there to an ancient wooden pole. This doubles as the host for a very old street light, but the pole leans alarmingly shy of vertical. The wire is now swinging in the wind from side to side like some malnourished lazybones in his hammock, fodder for any one of a dozen potentially dangerous branches that could easily snap off through the next twenty-four hours, maybe longer. In fact the first of these cracked with the sickening loudness of rotten timber just five minutes ago, mercifully just beyond my northern boundary in the other direction. This first casualty gave up the ghost before whatever battle lies ahead of us has even begun. It is surely significant that well into the second decade of the twenty-first century one faces the almost certain prospect of power loss, probably for days, with an air of complete resignation, due to the hopelessness of our electrical infrastructure. In a land of blizzards and hurricanes and forests, why would any thinking person persist with the nineteenth-century project of stringing little wires from post to post? Reinvent the system, and put them all below ground where they belong.
