City Spirit

Today Lance Armstrong won his seventh Tour de France. We watched it from the cyclists’ entry into Paris, to Armstrong’s winning speech. Of course, seeing the Tour Eiffel through the gray rain sent me into a tizzy about Paris.

I needed to see this—not just an American doing something positive and heroic, but also to see an un-romanticized, non-glossy view of Paris. That city as backdrop, not subject.

And what I saw on the t.v. brought it all back to me, and then some: the place is as majestic, as gorgeous, as indicative of human triumph and accomplishment as I’d remembered from my trip there in 2003. Paris just doesn’t disappoint.

So much more than the sum of the river, old buildings, monuments, well-dressed people, human scale; so much more than just knowing that it’s Paris. There is something there. Some alchemy has been performed in that part of the world. It’s magical because it represents, in stone and action, the upward thrust of the human spirit. Clumsy, abrupt, unpredictable, inconsistent…but inevitable and beautiful.

Conservator

It’s hard to believe I’m actually going to France for a year. There really isn’t anything left to do for the trip; all plans are set. In a way, this summer is going so fast it’s scary—I want time to conclude all my projects and soak up Florida and America. But in another way, I’m also afraid that these last five weeks will drag agonizingly.

I’ve been thinking about pursuing a career as an art conservator. The job would definitely use all my talents and interests; unlike painting itself, where I’m only supposed to be interested in painting alone. I spent the night looking up art conservation schools. Cambridge? Cortauld? Delicious, but intimidating.

And today I felt scared about it all. I didn’t want the trip to be railroaded by any career plans. I still wanted this upcoming year to be fluid and open, just living and art-making. It’s really sinking in that I’m going there, not only for a novel little junior-year experience, but for the purpose of advancing a career. It’s also a trial run, a laying of groundwork, and a possible training for residence there.
That’s pressure.

I feel myself backing away a little from grand plans. Not unreasonable at this stage.

Dennis

Branches come first. You start with the easy things, get them out of the way; otherwise, you tire quickly on the big stuff, and end up just kicking the small pieces around. So we told ourselves, though I admit finishing our preliminary beers had something to do with our decision. Still, it was an important job, and we wanted to be thorough.

We stood around the front yard of his grandparents’ house in north Santa Rosa County, an isolated property on the Coldwater River. It was still and hot that July morning, the blown-out dankness that hangs in the air after a hurricane. The sun shone brightly down on the blasted green leaves littering the yard, remains of Hurricane Dennis. From one end of the property to another, branches—and sometimes whole trees—pulled at the limbs around them, scrambled and pitiful.

Tossing our empty bottles in his truck bed, we set to work.

No one had heard of Katrina yet. New Orleans was still a vibrant—if apprehensive—city that afternoon in September 2004, when I put my face in my hands and cried in Richmond’s public library. Having no cable or internet yet in my new apartment, I relied on the library’s internet to show me what Hurricane Ivan had done to my hometown. There is nothing worse than being far from home when people you care for are in harm’s way. I had spent an agonized night as the Category 3 storm struck Gulf Shores, sending ten feet of water surging over the beach, tearing off my friends’ roofs. At the hour the library opened, I had gone straight back to the computers, bringing up the Pensacola newspaper’s website. I was afraid to look, but I had to know.

There was my favorite bar on the beach with its innards sucked out, looking less like a club now, and more like a wobbly old pavilion. There were houses of old high school friends, reduced to swirls of wood. Fort Pickens was underwater. My home, the place in the world that I love most of all, was truly battered.

My back had begun to ache from the bending. His grandparents’ property, while well-kept, was still a basic country A-frame, deep in the north county woods. Trees outnumbered open spaces by a large margin; but there had been enough room for the wind to pick up and fill the clearings with debris. The easy twigs and small branches were long since piled up. We had paced ourselves carefully, neither of us wanting to be the first to have to start dragging the large branches. We ranged over the property, sometimes following the strewn saplings to opposite ends of the field from each other; sometimes working side by side, him holding the black plastic sack and me filling it with sticky pinecones. I took a grim delight in the work, despite the increasing pricks and splinters. After all, I’d have given anything to have been here, doing this, the previous fall.

When my friends had seen the large green swirl bearing down on them on their television screens that September, almost all of them fled the area. The lucky ones stayed in motels, or found family out of the warning area. The unlucky ones got stuck in their cars on random Georgia and Alabama roads, listening to the remains of the storm pass overhead from inside rest areas and truck stops. When it was over, a spooky stillness fell on Pensacola. The town’s online newspaper was one of the few sources of information out of the suddenly-isolated area. I had internet access. My friends did not.

The newspaper sent helicopters with cameras to canvass the city, photographing damaged areas and posting the photos on their website. From all over the south, evacuated residents looked to the site to see if their homes still stood. And from my seat in the Richmond library, I looked on behalf of my friends, as they waited silently on the other end of our cell phone connection.

Large branches down. Split trunks, limbs tangled in the powerline. Utter stillness. We got the chainsaw out, as the sun balanced at noon. The quintessential post-hurricane racket. Sawing through the still-living wood, dragging the pieces over to the bonfire pit, straining to lift them and fling them atop. The labor reduced itself to an endurance of unthinking motion—racket, saw, drag, lift, throw. With each step, I crushed underfoot my memories of last autumn’s agony, my fears for my friends, my remembered helplessness. I dragged it to the pit and threw it in, later to burn. My palms turned red and raw, the sweat covering me. All the frustrated pity I’d felt last fall, loosened and flowed out of me, leaving my heart through the ache in my muscles. This time, I could act.

When I’d been on the phone with my anxious friends, clicking hesitantly through the galleries of photo carnage, I thought it couldn’t get worse. When one of my friends, unable to evacuate, was missing for over a day, I didn’t think I could take any more strain. But the worst outcome of hurricane Ivan took longer to unfold. It began when my evacuated friends went home. The majority fortunately had homes to go to, but their tales of the wretched destruction all around them broke my heart. Here I was, stuck in Richmond, with no money and no way to fly down there and be with them. No way to help them. As they pitched in with their neighbors to repair roofs, bathed out of bottles, and ate a month’s worth of Army MRE’s, I slept in my air-conditioned house and wished I was anywhere but Virginia. All that was asked of me was that I turn away from their problems and focus on my easy life of being a painting student, but I couldn’t. I would have personally unearthed Pensacola Beach with a teaspoon, if I could have just gotten down there. I would have tirelessly worked to fix even the smallest piece of my hometown.

Soon there was more cleared ground than covered in his grandparents’ yard. The piles to burn had multiplied and towered over our heads, but the job was nearly done. Hot. That wasn’t even the word to describe us. We walked over to the well, our vision nearly tunneled with exertion and beer. As he primed the pump, I swayed a little on my feet. The water ran clear into the plastic bucket, and I could smell its coldness. He pulled on the handle, all machinery silent now, dead with lack of electricity. He’d gone a month without power, the previous fall. He’d lost ten pounds from the crappy packaged meals. But that was ten long months ago; and as he lifted the bucket and poured the shocking icy water over both of us, that time was washed away.