Hurricane Irene: the aftermath, part two!

---

After our recent hurricane, you generally greeted people with something like: “How was your hurricane?” Usually you got a few words: wry, sad, a fallen branch here, no power there.

 

 

There's a big older guy who delivers the campus mail to my building. “How was your hurricane?” I asked him a few days after Irene swept through, expecting the usual light-hearted reply; he's normally very cheerful.

 

 

Thunk! went the bucket of mail. “I lost five hundred dollars worth of meat!” he wailed. “Freezer was out of power for fifty-five hours! I opened it and I was sick to my stomach! Not literally, I mean. It hasn't rotted yet. But the waste! I called Narragansett Electric, and they -”

 

 

Some people, when they tell you a story like this, turn it into a performance piece. He was one of those people. He was leaping into the air and shaking his finger in my face, and for the first time I was beginning to notice how big he was, and I was desperately hoping he wasn't going to turn green and bust out of his clothes. “There's one connection – one! - that runs under Bristol County. And if it goes out, Barrington goes out! And Warren! And Bristol! And National Grid knows it! We've told them time and time again! I told them, I'm gonna bring it up at a town meeting, and we're gonna get signatures together, and we're gonna make them -”

 

 

“You know what I heard?” I said feebly, in an effort to distract him. “It's the restaurants you have to watch out for. They're sorting through their food, and they don't want to throw stuff away – and now there aren't enough food inspectors - “

 

 

“Tell me about it!” he brayed. “My neighbor, he works for [redacted nearby Italian restaurant], and, well you know they've been closed -”

 

 

“What?” I croaked. “We just ate there – we liked it -”

 

 

“It's been closed for seven or eight days now!” he boomed. “Flies! Flies in the walls! They're everywhere! Somebody working there turned them in - “

 

 

I am thinking now of the very nice meal Partner and I had at that restaurant only a few weeks ago, and am trying to remember if I saw any flies, and I have talked myself into believing that I did.

 

 

I used to work for a food distributor; several of the salesmen told me that, once you see the average restaurant kitchen, you will never eat there again.

 

 

On the other hand: a few years ago, Partner and I were in Manhattan and ate at a really lovely Brazilian restaurant called Plataforma. It was Restaurant Week, and we got a special deal: special meal, free gifts, and a personal tour of the kitchen. Kids, you have never seen such a beautiful kitchen. Brazilian restaurants are all about meat, and there was a huge multi-rotisserie with at least ten cuts of meat rotating on it; it looked like something on the space shuttle. The staff looked like they laundered their uniforms every ten minutes. Even the salads they were tossing looked like they were meant to appear in a movie about salads.

 

 

So not all restaurants are filthy.

 

I don't care. I'm gonna eat at that Italian place again. We had a very nice meal there.

 

 

(I'd better not see any flies.)

 

---

 

Hurricane Irene: the aftermath

---

Hurricane Irene was only a tropical storm by the time she reached Rhode Island. She was very noisy, however; she fairly howled around the windows for a couple of hours on Sunday. We tried to ignore her; we watched television a bit (we were lucky to keep our electricity; a lot of people in the area lost theirs), and then I read and napped for a couple of hours.

 

 

(I think disasters make me physically ill. I was queasy on the day of the earthquake a few days earlier; now, with Irene roaring and trumpeting around the house, I felt achy and tired. As a kid, I loved storms. Now I just wanted this to be over.)

 

 

By four o'clock or so the rain and wind had (mostly) stopped. Partner suggested a walk, and I was only too avid to get out of the house. The skies were cloudy but bright, and there was a fresh cool breeze blowing. Everything felt different. Masses of leaves had been torn down from the trees; small branches and twigs lay everywhere in the streets and on the sidewalks and lawns. We didn't walk far before we found our first downed tree: a big sycamore. (Why do they have such shallow roots? Are they chumps, for god's sake?)

 

 

Most of the damage was obvious, once we looked more closely: rotting branches, badly-pruned trees, isolated trees in unprotected areas. We did come across a small area on Blackstone Boulevard that might have experienced a microburst: two or three large trees torn out of the ground and a lot of downed branches in a very small area. I was sorry to see some of the big tulip poplars on the Boulevard had lost lots of their upper branches, and the wind had brought down whole handfuls of their graceful-looking flower buds. (Liriodendron tulipifera, the tulip poplar, is the most amazing tree: everything about it is remarkably beautiful, from its manner of growth to its flowers to its big mitten-shaped leaves. I hate seeing these trees damaged. But then, I have a weakness for beautiful things. I see a miserable little dogwood missing a couple of branches, and I sneer: Who cares?)

 

 

Lots of wires were down. We saw a cop driving lazily through the neighborhood; every so often he'd stop and take photos of a downed wire or an especially large downed branch or tree.

 

 

By this time everyone was out walking. This, of course, despite the fact that we'd been warned repeatedly by TV personalities not to go out walking, that there were still dangers everywhere, weakened branches waiting to fall on our heads, treetrunks waiting to collapse right on top of us . . .

 

 

Example: Partner's sister, up in Massachusetts, was out walking the dog on the day of the storm. She was bathrooming it under her neighbor's tree (get that?) when she heard the trunk creaking. Time to go, she thought. Half an hour later, safe at home, she heard a creak and a crash, and ran to the window to see that tree fall on top of the neighbor's house and both of his cars.

 

 

Example: A Brown shuttle driver told me that he'd been driving past the small park on South Main Street at eight o'clock on the morning after the storm, and had seen only a few branches down. He made his forty-five minute loop, and came back around . . . And a huge tree had in the meantime split in half and fallen all the way across South Main, blocking almost the entire road. Get that? Sixteen hours after the storm was over.

 

 

But the weather that followed the storm was fresh and almost cool, and there was dew on the grass that next morning.

 

 

What hurricane?

 

---

 

Sunday blog: Storm warning

 

---

Guess what Partner and I are doing today!  

 

 

Hiding under the kitchen table with our stuffed animals, of course, and eating tuna right out of the can, and waiting for the Big Storm to go away and leave us alone.

 

 

If you'd like to participate in the experience, just get under your own kitchen table, grab a stuffed animal, open some tuna, click on the following file, and close your eyes . . .

 

Wind-Mark_DiAngelo-1940285615.mp3 Listen on Posterous

 

---

 

 

Come on, Irene

---

Irene is a pretty name, don't you think? I think I had a cousin Irene a long time ago. The name means “peace” in Greek.

 

 

So now there's this super-fabulous hurricane zinging around in the Caribbean and Atlantic, also named Irene. It appears to have its little heart set on coming up north, to visit us Rhode Island folks.

 

 

Oh, goody.

 

 

Partner and I did not go grocery shopping last weekend, and it suddenly dawned on us that, if we waited much longer this week, the stores would be stampeded by panicky milk-bread-and-batteries customers, so we went last night. Partner struck up a conversation with the bagboy. “You must be expecting a lot more customers later in the week, as the hurricane gets closer,” he said.

 

 

Bagboy looked blank. “There's supposed to be a hurricane?” he said. Bless his heart, Irene could probably barrel right through his living room, and Bagboy would probably not notice.

 

 

We have not had a good hurricane since Bob, twenty years ago this month. Bob put out the lights in much of Rhode Island for most of a week. Providence got a little flooding, but not too much. Before that, of course, there was the mighty Hurricane of 1938 (back before we gave them cunning little names like Basil and Withnail and Hermione), which flooded the city to a depth of six feet (there are still little brass markers on the buildings downtown, showing the depth of the water), and tore apart much of inland New England.

 

 

We don't get 'em often, but we like to do 'em right.

 

 

Well, Partner and I have shopped, so we're all set. I've got my liquor and my canned sardines packed in Louisiana hot sauce; Partner has his tuna fish and Italian wedding soup and pitted olives.

 

 

As long as we don't lose our can opener, we're all set for a lovely hurricane.

 

---