A year ago today Hurricane
Irene hit the banks of North Carolina. By early the next morning it was hitting
the Vermont/New Hampshire border where we live. We stayed quiet that day,
watching the trees outside our windows bend and sway, waiting for the big
winds. But the big winds never came. Instead, it rained, hard. We stayed indoors
for the morning watching it rain and checking the weather and feeling grateful
that trees weren’t falling on our roof. Around mid-morning we decided to go out
for a walk, as the storm seemed relatively calm. We put on our raincoats and
rain boots and walked down the road where we discovered my parents, soaking
wet, looking harried and thrilled at once, carrying shovels and rakes. They
told us the bottom of our road was completely washed out; that a large bridge
downstream of us had just been destroyed, that the small, tricking brook we
live on, the Whetstone, had turned into a raging river. They said we should go
down and look, but that we should stay on a high bank, and be prepared to run
uphill, fast.
It was true; the bottom
half of our road had been washed out. Only not just washed out; it was gone.
There was a two-hundred-foot-long, ten-foot-deep gully where our road had been.
The river was like I’d never seen it. The rains picked up and we walked back
home and started checking Facebook. I sat there at the table swearing out loud
as I watched near-live video footage of houses being destroyed, covered bridges
going under, trucks floating down the main streets of our town. People in the
videos were yelling “fuck!” and crying. The weather channel said the eye of the
storm was now directly above us; outside the sky cleared and the winds stopped
completely. There was an eerie calm. Then the winds picked up again, the rain
started falling again, and the power went out.
It was five days until
electricity came back. The next day we discovered that all the roads between us
and everywhere else were completely gone. Route 9 was washed out in over ten
places. People lost houses, businesses, livestock, fields of produce,
livelihoods. The damage spread through half the state, and has taken nearly a
year to repair.
Which is why, when I wake
up in the night to the sound of rain on the roof, it stills me. It reminds me
of the subtle, quiet way that harm came. Of the way things can creep up on us.
Of that blue-skied, eerily still eye of the storm.
But this morning, here, the
rain has let up. Avah has forgotten about downed bridges. Cricket doesn’t know
he was conceived in those five days of still, grounded quiet. Our laundry is
soaked, but that’s the only damage. Instead the fields are happy, and the
wells. The woods emanate the heady, sweet scents of wet hemlock and pine. And my
children are safe and sound downstairs under this roof we built them. Which
seems, today, like a church of sorts, inside of which I am filled with a deep
and tender awe.
