"Even with all our technology and the inventions that make modern life so much easier than it once was, it takes just one big natural disaster to wipe all that away and remind us that, here on Earth, we're still at the mercy of nature."
8.31.23
An early one here at the Wingate adjacent to the Asheville Airport. Something in this hotel room has had me itching all night like one of the cats, leaving me wondering if there's something in their laundry that compels this endless scratching. Otherwise, however, this hotel has been great, much better than I expected for $88 a night, taxes included. It's your basic clean, relatively new, business class hotel, complete with a cheerful local at the front desk who said "rat" instead of "right", as she pointed me toward their little minimart in the lobby when I asked last night upon arrival if there was a place within walking distance to find a bite to eat.
"Not in this weather", she replied, "but we have some things you can buy rat over here." I grab a spicy ramen bowl and a pilsner from a local brewery, which she helpfully places on the room tab.
Yesterday felt almost surreal, watching on my computer the video of Idalia ripping through Taylor County and submerging Steinhatchee and parts of Cedar Key. The NYT published a map showing a relatively small area, maybe twenty miles across, in which one could expect "extreme winds". I found Salem and Athena and Foley and Perry, concluding that Wyldswood sat smack in the middle of the shaded area. The eye was blasting directly over our farm.
Several times during the day I felt almost drunk, like my balance was failing me and I was going to throw up. My best guess as an amateur doctor is that this was blood pressure run amok, especially given that I kept getting a stabbing pain in my chest to go with it. Then again, I'm a history major who couldn't spell MCAT. Maybe I was just really tired.
At my lunchtime Kiwanis meeting, just before my erstwhile young associate stood to present a discussion of the Wee Guverner's attempt to gerrymander our judicial circuits in his continuing quest to disenfranchise and just generally screw over the Democrats who comprise around half of the state's population, even if it means screwing over all these nice old people sitting around me who mostly voted for the little troll, they passed around the basket for "gratitude dollars". The weekly drill called for placing a dollar or a five in the basket, and articulating to the group something for which you're grateful. Several in a row said with a smile how grateful they were that this huge storm landed over there and not over here. I dropped my fiver in the basket and said the storm had passed directly over our home a little while ago. I was just grateful for insurance. An audible gasp rose up from the crowd. Every shot may make someone happy, but it also makes someone else quite unhappy.
At that point we had no intel regarding how Wyldswood had fared. George was stuck in Old Town with fifty miles of downed trees on the road between his place and the farm. Mike had gone by the place to check the cattle as the storm was coming ashore, and rather cryptically texted P that we "should have cut all these dam pine."
Rural Southerners are less sentimental about pine trees than the rest of us. While I close my eyes and see, along with Hoagy Carmichael and Ray Charles, "moonlight through the pines", the farm-raised crowd just sees a spindly tree that's apt to fall on your house or barn in a storm. P'd seen to it that we didn't have any pines within a hundred yards of the house. Did one of the barns get crushed?
We waited for news, trying to get on with our day. I responded to dozens of texts and messages from friends offering their concern and sympathy, which pretty much forced whatever paying work I'd hoped to accomplish to grind to a halt. Finally at two I left the office for ECP and the flight up here to Asheville to pick up the plane, figuring I'd fly back to Florida this morning, either to FPY or ECP, so I could survey the wreckage and start the insurance claims process.
I arrived too early at ECP, after nearly missing my flight last Friday when I found myself in the security line with an entire college marching band. This time there was no one around, so I breezed through the metal detector and set up shop in the airport bar with time to spare and a little work to do.
Meanwhile, I anxiously checked the news, Facebook, and my own text threads for an update from Taylor County. Information is always spotty in those hours right after the storm takes down cell towers and power lines, creating a sort of communication dead zone sort of like when an Apollo capsule went ominously silent as it burned its way back into the atmosphere, and we'd all collectively exhale when one of the astronauts made that first transmission from our side of the stratosphere.
The first transmissions I received came as the jet pulled up to the gate at Charlotte. P wanted me to call her, as did George and Issac. I knew George was battling his way through wreckage with Beth as I was leaving ECP, having finally made it up to the farm from their place. Now I'd hear what they found.
The photos on my phone looked about like one would expect. Lots of snapped off pine trees. The greenhouse had been lifted and tossed across the pasture between the house and the hay field. The neighbor's privacy panels that shielded his meth lab from our driveway were strewn about.
But that was it. The house was fine, the barns undamaged, the farm equipment intact. It's looking like there won't even be an insurance claim.
I recall three decades ago the moments before, during, and after my first combat sortie. The hours leading up to that night were filled with fear and mourning for my own demise, imagination populated with images of tracers and explosions and death. The actual experience was what it was, less dreadful in some ways but more acute in others.
But afterward we all felt this giddiness, this joy, that I've never been able to describe or replicate since. We'd survived. We all laughed and told flying stories with our hands of dodging SAMs and getting disoriented in the soup as we tried to find the tankers in the dark. We smoked. We slapped backs. If I could bottle that sensation, I'd put every distiller on the planet out of business.
Last night felt just the slightest bit similar. These last eleven days have been some of the toughest. The Columbia stranded me here in Asheville, and I drove all night to fulfill a work commitment first thing the next morning. I tried to work a full week while planning my mother's funeral. I flew to Texas, picked up her ashes and drove around with them, stopping by our old house where we reminisced about those crazy days. I herded relatives who'd flooded into Dallas from all over the country to be there for the family. Then I flew home to news of a storm building off the Yucatan that threatened the Gulf Coast, and watched in horror as it drew a bead on a place P and I love more than any other, anticipating loss compounded upon loss. I'm not sure how I got through the days since I arrived here for a fuel stop that Sunday evening.
But I did, and Wyldswood survived. Hence, this morning's giddiness.
After speaking with George I decided there's no point in rushing back to Perry today. There will be no insurance claim to open, the airport is closed for a week, and there's no electricity in the lines or fuel at the pumps. All I'd do is stand there and sweat, assuming I could get through the downed trees to the farm at all. So I'll fly back to Corning today, and maybe just "be" for a a little while. A week from tomorrow Issac's volunteered to meet me at the farm to help run equipment and clear all those downed trees, and George agrees that's a pretty good plan for now.
Hey, it's seven a.m. here! Dawn's early light has begun to illuminate the tree line outside (pines, no doubt), and it promises to be a gorgeous day to fly an airplane up the East Coast. Off we go.
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