"Of all the things you choose in life, you don't get to choose what your nightmares are. You don't pick them; they pick you."
Helene is now two-and-a-half days to landfall, forecast as a Cat 3 or 4 along almost exactly the same path as Idalia a year ago.
Maybe that's it, that's the reason for the nightmares.
Or maybe it's our trickster ghost, who's at it again. Three weeks ago I trudged down to the basement to fetch the shop vac and clean out the Traeger, after getting lots of snarky warnings from the grill's touch screen that the firepot was dirty. When I found the shop vac, however, its hose was gone. I used it last, and can assure you it had a hose when I put it away. It then sat on the back porch for a few days while I procrastinated about buying a new hose. Peg performed her own search in the basement, a place she hates because it's dark, damp, and spooky. She found nothing.
Then yesterday I finally went online to order another hose, and walked out onto the porch to check for a model number. The hose was attached, as if nothing had happened.
This is the weird world in which P and I live at Tara, with a presence that may seem benevolent, but is also unnerving.
But more likely than the ghost as a source of my nightmares is the storm. If the forecasters are right, this will be four storms hitting our homes, three major, in the space of six years. I can't say I'm worried--P and I agree our adrenal glands have turned to dust years ago. Rather, it's this weary feeling that we don't have enough gas in the tank to do this again, to gather the downed trees, catalog the damage to the buildings, fish the cows out of the neighbor's pond when the fences are blown down. We're too tired to wrestle again with insurance, with whether and how to rebuild, with reconciling ourselves to a space that's permanently transformed by nature at its most malevolent.
Which, I reckon, is the source of last nights trip through horror while P and the cat slept next to me.
First I found myself crawling around in a tangle of downed trees and canopy, a jungle laid flat except for a few twisted trunks sticking up through the decomposing mess. I've been in that spot, four days after Michael, going on foot to find what was left of the house because walking was the only way to get there. In my dream the car I was driving became so entangled in downed branches I had to leave it behind. As I was crawling through the debris pile, Bill Gates popped up in a clearing, dressed like he was ready for some 19th century African safari, and promised to write a check to fix all this.
Then I was on a low rise looking out over a desert plain, with this tremendous sense of menace at some presence just over the horizon. It was almost sunset, and looking down at myself I was in a makeshift military uniform cobbled together out of my closet. I was holding Jim's Russian, bolt-action infantry rifle, complete with bayonet. There were several of us milling around, none real soldiers, checking to make sure we had a round loaded and waiting for the onslaught of some enemy heading our way. We didn't even have a proper trench line, and there were only a few of us. I wondered how I would perform this time; would I do the right thing until I was inevitably killed? I know this terror; it's that feeling that stuck in my chest the first time I went up the ladder on the first night of the war, wondering if I'd acquit myself or live my own version of the Red Badge of Courage, at least the first part where he turns tail and runs.
That scene disappeared, and now P and I sat around a jacuzzi-sized hole that, based on the red glow emanating from the orifice, led down to Hell. There was a man there with us dangling his feet in the hole. It became apparent to me that some ritual was about to begin where I'd have to share P with this person, and there was a chalice of blood sitting there to consummate the consummation. I felt sickened, beside myself with anger and grief and revulsion at whatever force put us there.
Then I woke up. It was 4 a.m. Peg was snoring softly next to my ear, the sound of her breathing almost drowned out by the roaring snores of Dean in the throes of his sleep apnea. Who knew a cat could snore so loudly? Everything was safe and okay, all as it should be.
Man, this latest hurricane has crawled into the lacunae of my head. I'll appreciate the distraction of a little billing work today, even as I'm not sure if I'll be trying a case on Tuesday or clearing debris at Wyldswood. One thing life on the Gulf Coast teaches you: nothing can be taken for granted, and today's treasured space may be a pile of wreckage by the weekend. That nothing lasts forever is simply the way of the world; down there it has a tendency to hit you between the eyes in a way it doesn't in this region of old buildings and quaint towns that will never know the fury of a Cat 4.
And so it goes.
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