The Flood
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The Flood My stomach is in a knot. I don’t know what this affliction is, though the symptoms are familiar enough. It must be something picked up on the road last week that has turned my innards to jelly. I had a call from my old life around dinner last night. The conversation made my insides churn. When it was over, I looked at the phone and wondered about the human heart. Life is brutish and short, even if we pretend otherwise. Why do we seek to make it worse? There is real peril out there in the wide world, and in the end, no one survives it. But in the inner world, she made things so hard that moving out was the only solution that made any sense. It has not been an easy four years, but there has been no screaming, and no madness. The wind will arrive here this afternoon, they say, and sharp thunderstorms will follow. They may be heavy enough to flood the underground garage at Big Pink, but we measure that in inches, not a storm surge of a dozen feet. We are on a bluff hundreds of feet above the Potomac River , so any flood would be temporary. Nothing short of a bomb could penetrate the foot-thick concrete walls. The upper reaches of Hurricane Katrina will be here late. I have been numbed by the images from New Orleans and Biloxi . It all runs together, these images of the wind and flood. So many storms, so close together in Florida and the Gulf. Uprooted palms, flattened buildings, boats hurled deep ashore. I thought how glad I am that I do not own a yacht, do not have to walk away from a heaving marina in the rising wind, or think in the night about the snapping lines and crunching hull and where the boat might be. It is not as bad as it could have been, that is all that can be said for it. It is easy to say that from far away. On the scene, the prospect is daunting. There are still people to be rescued, and the dead have not been counted yet. The total is not a hundred this morning, but they have not found all of the corpses yet. It is not to say that the city was saved. The power is out, and the phones and the water is contaminated. The windows are blown out in the proud towers, white curtains flapping out in the still-brisk winds like flags of surrender. Fires burn where the flood has not reached. It will cost billions to fix. It was perhaps Voodoo that raised the barometer a few millibars, weakening the fury just enough, causing it to veer a bit to the east. The levees held, and the pumps worked, mostly, and New Orleans will live again. Perhaps Biloxi did not have the strong Gri-gri of the old French Quarter. Bourbon Street is mostly unscathed. The city will build again, and toast their luck. Meanwhile, the baby formula and food, clean water and ice is starting to flow south. There is insulin to be kept cold, and the newly-homeless to be sheltered. The wind and rain from the tropical storm now stretches up the Mississippi Valley and reaches toward me. Two streams, one strengthening and one dissipating They say that the Corps of Engineers have been so efficient in controlling the mighty Mississippi that the annual deposit of silt at the mouth of the Delta has been eliminated. The city is consequently three feet lower than it was a century ago, huddled down behind the dykes. The levees need work. There is much to be done, and there are people to care for. The System is starting to work, again, and this hurricane season is almost over. Copyright 2005 Vic Socotra www.vicsocotra.com |
