08 March 2004

Mighty Wind

Seven rockets roared into the Green Zone in Baghdad last night like a mighty wind. They hit the famous Al Rasheed hotel. You remember the place. It is where Bernard Shaw reported with awe the first night of the air war in 1991 and where Peter Arnette stayed in the first Gulf War.

When it was over Saddam had the mosaic of President Bush the First in the foyer where guests had to walk over to check in.

The mosaic is gone, but the insurgents remain. The Al Rasheed is used now by U.S. occupation officials and visitors in town for the signing of the interim constitution. It was signed this morning, though it is clearly a signal from the Shia clerics that they are not going to go lightly into democracy. This latest was the biggest attack on the Green Zone in weeks. The insurgents did not succeed in disrupting the ceremonies, all twenty-five signatures now drying on the document.

They said the affair went off in record time. Perhaps the delegates were reluctant to stay in one place too long.

But signed or not, there is not yet a satisfactory formula in place for creating the interim government that is to assume power shortly before our Fourth of July.

Four Haitians and a Spanish television journalist were shot in Port au Prince yesterday in the presence of the Marines. The gunmen were the chimères, the thugs that former President Artistide used to enforce his rule. Our interventionism is having its moments. I am not sure we can conjure functioning nations by the summer, and if Al Qaida has their wits about them, they should lay low and let our attention blow through the elections and echo in the shattered societies in Afghanistan, Iraq and Haiti.

There was a mighty wind here, too.

Big Pink is a massive pile of pastel brick. When the wind comes from the west the building is a bulwark against it. The air rushes up the sides, increasing the pressure on the windward side and creating a low-pressure lee on the other.

On the Fifth floor I was on the lee. On the First floor I am at the juncture of the east-west axis and the first of the two projecting wings. The wind is gathered here, rushing and confused. It feels like the swirl between Kabul and Baghdad and Port au Prince.

It keened through the night, tugging on the windows, rousing me just after three. I had the strangest dream. My fiancée was in London, scheduled to fly back to Washington with her daughter. They were to leave at 5:58AM, an oddly precise time six hours ahead of me, and I was to get them at the airport. But the Secretary's Command Center notified her ex to meet her, not me. It would be a confrontation at the airport, messy, since we were to be married the next day. I did not know what hotel she was in, and in this dream there were no cell phones.

I seem to revert to a default setting in my sleep, sometime in the mid-1970s when my step is springy and I wear no glasses and my hair is rich brown, not a mass of gray Brillo. I got up and padded over to the door and toggled open one of the Plantation shutters and peered out into the gloom. The foliage danced in dark merriment under a full moon speared on the cross of the church across the street. I could feel tendrils of chill air blowing through the sill of the door.

It appears I was premature about Spring.

I did not trip over the little pre-fabricated bathroom cabinet I bought at the Target mega-store yesterday. In a burst of optimism I put some holes into the dry-wall of the bathroom last night and discovered that the anchor screws I had purchased work. I drilled into the wall and it crumbled, evidence of long-ago repair. This will be more complex than I had anticipated. You would think I would learn that over a half century, but hope springs eternal, and always on home improvement projects. So the perky white cabinet is not going up on the wall before the next trip to the Home Depot. There will be a week of stumbling over it until the weekend comes again.

Oh well.

I first felt the wind as I walked across the little room after leaning the cabinet against the wall outside the kitchen. There was an unfamiliar thin keening sound, and I cocked my ear like the RCA dog. The sound grew and the door to the inner corridor quivered minutely. The keening grew louder. There was a palpable presence in the room, a sense of pressure. The windows on the right side of the apartment were open to greet the balmy air we basked in last week. They are the only ones that I can open. The others are frozen shut and are a project for another time.

Suddenly the wind was with me, the sound rising. The Plantation shutter popped open from the pressure of the chill blast outside. It is the Colorado breeze finally arriving here, the one that brought heavy snow to the peaks and collided with the moist tropical bubble that pressed up from the Gulf.

So far it is bringing me only cold rain blowing sideways, at least that is what was going by the door as I rearranged the plants to try to get at the elusive knurled handle.

Spring it is, but it is not a gentle process. Birth is a conceptual exercise for men. There are consequences and obligations that come from it. But for all mothers, even Mother Nature, there is the visceral pain that comes before the great change of season.

I'm glad I cleared off the patio this afternoon before I started to assemble the cabinet I cannot hang. There was not much to blow away in the wind, only the doormat and a couple empty flower-pots that rolled away with a disconsolate rattle. That is not pain, only inconvenience.

Spring will be here at Big Pink whether the wind blows or not. I am as confident of that as I am that we will stumble through the transition in Iraq, establish democracy in Haiti and stabilize the hinterlands of Afghanistan.

It just might be a day or two.