Jul 18, 2005

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.

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