“You can't run away from trouble. There ain't no place that far.” ― Uncle Remus
A rare evening post, but I'm not sure how the world will look in the morning. Idalia hurtles north as a strong 2, on her way to being a 3 for sure and maybe a 4 by sunrise. The eye may well pass over my favorite oak tree in front of the big house at Wyldswood; maybe blow it straight down after over a century of life.
We let ourselves hang onto an emotional attachment to that place, to the life we built there in the midst of plagues and insurrections and a collection of vicissitudes we couldn't have imagined when we drove through the gate and brought that beloved space back to life. Now, maybe it's all gone.
The disaster unfolding just to the east reminds me of an old story I recall from history class, about poor Elmer McClean and his efforts to protect his family.
He looks a little flummoxed, as one would well expect. By all accounts just a nice guy, poor McClean was a merchant who tried to raise his family on a lovely, rolling property near the town of Manassas, and a little creek called Bull Run. As times changed and states seceded, McClean's home became the situs of the first major battle of the Civil War, and his kitchen was Beauregard's headquarters.
Deciding he'd had enough of the madness of his era's internecine conflict, Elmer sought to get as far from the war as he could conjure, and bought a house and some land in a backwater west of Richmond called Appomattox Court House.
We all know how that worked out. Four years later he found what was left of the Confederate Army exhausted at his doorstep, with emissaries asking to use his parlor as a venue to sign surrender papers. The war ended there that day, and poor Elmer watched the Yankees cart off his furniture as souvenirs, with the promise of compensation later. I think maybe he got paid for some of that; I reckon he'd rather have foregone the whole exercise and kept his dining room table.
So much for running from the storms of one's generation.
The story floats into my consciousness as I ponder the debacle P and I are living at this moment. Nearly five years ago we lost pretty much everything, and rebuilt our lives around the premise that our Florida home in TayCo wouldn't be further west where storms seem to arrive with unnerving regularity. Rather, we'd dig in at Wyldswood, in a corner of the state where no major storm had arrived in a century or more, and where all the political ugliness and overcrowding endemic in Florida would be an abstraction. We'd raise chickens. We'd sit in our truck bed pool and drink margaritas while listening to John Prine's paeons to kindness. The world would all come crashing down at some point; Wyldswood would certainly be the last to disappear under the waves.
But that appears not to have been a solid set of assumptions. The world's ending tonight. All that we loved, and all we hoped for ourselves blown flat by a world that is letting us know unequivocally that it would just as well you and I go away. No escape.
I am a dumbass, however, and so my solution to this climatological and political disaster focuses upon moving north to someplace less vulnerable to either. Really? I reckon I've learned exactly nothing.
Jim Morrison was right. No one here gets out alive. We just have to cleave to the people we love, appreciate the good that still washes over us, and accept that trying to hang onto some place or moment is just hubris.
But I still miss it, am numb at all the loss we've endured this year.
Goodbye old girl.
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