Issue Twelve
Oh, the sadness of fallen trees by K.W. Frome photos by dellas
On Sunday, we were told that FEMA was coming...
On Sunday, we were told that FEMA was coming. Hillary Clinton quipped that we had nothing to fear–this was the new FEMA–and that Buffalo was not going to become New Orleans. We were told to watch out for FEMA poseurs who were knocking on doors collecting our most intimate personal information so that they could later rob our identities. In a way, our region had already had a bit of its identity taken away. My friends in New York tease me constantly for living upstate, but I always take comfort in the fact that (1) my town of Amherst is among the safest cities in America, and (2) we never suffer truly catastrophic events like hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, and tidal waves. I always riposte to my geographical critics that the worst that can happen in the Buffalo region is a snowstorm and then you stay in your house and make a fire and during the day drink hot coco and at night scotch, neat. We now know that a snowstorm, when it hits just at the right time, can topple a neighborhood just as well as any of those other natural disasters. I’m not so sure that we can ever say again that Amherst is the safest city in America. Just as a serious disease or military combat changes a person for life, I think too that a disastrous storm changes the psyche of a place.
On the first Thursday of what is now known as the “October Surprise,” the forecast called for rain and perhaps a few wet snowflakes. I flew back to Buffalo that morning from New York City, where the Yankees pitcher, Cory Lidle, had flown his plane into an Upper East Side apartment house and thrown the city into a panic over the possible return of terrorism. I was glad to get out of Manhattan to the sweetly safe western New York way of life. As I drove to work from the airport, cold Canadian winds began to sweep across the warm waters of Lake Erie, turning the moisture into two feet of heavy, wet snow. The winds, with their huge payload of snow, began strafing and then bombing Buffalo and a narrow band of towns and villages to its north and west. The trees were not quite ready for the fall. Fully leafed, most were holding strong to their summer green with some reluctant but realistic admissions of red and gold highlights. Peak fall foliage was a week away. Throughout the night, as the combination of leaves and dense snow proved too much for the trees, they split and broke and fell. Thunderstorms exploded. At times, the lightning was so intense that it was as if the spotlight of a prison guard tower had suddenly been trained on my house. All night, you could hear the agonizing groans of the trees falling. Pop–pop–pop. Sometimes the cracking branches sounded like mortar fire and other times you could hear what sounded like the echoing cries of an anguished mother. Oh, the sadness of fallen trees. Though the oldest tree in the region survived, so many did not and for days afterwards mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and all of their neighbors mourned the death of their willows and maples and birches and sycamores and even a redwood. The birches in the cemetery each snapped in the middle and formed spindly wigwams over the tombstones. Against a slate grey sky, this scene looked like a Matthew Brady photograph of a distant Civil War battlefield.
With the fall and crash of each limb, another electrical line hit the ground and the lights went out for 400,000 people. In what amounted to both a mea culpa as well as a historical report, National Grid, one of the power companies, advertised that this was “the most destructive storm to ever hit our region.” And in the morning, when we saw what had happened and when we heard that some of us would be without light and heat for more than a week, we knew that the task at hand was to locate power in whatever form we could find it. We tunneled out of our homes and nakedly pursued power–proudly, without apology and with growing bravado. A class system quickly developed around different sources of power. The least of us had batteries and flashlights, though, among the battery users, those with “D” batteries held a higher station than “AAA” and “AA” users. At one point, there were no “D” batteries to be found in any local stores. We lost phone service early, so if you had a cell phone you were doing well. That is, until it lost its charge. So, really, it was those of us with cell phone chargers in our cars who were considered well off. Of course, you needed gas to run the car to charge the cell, and the gas stations were closed, so those of us who had thought to fill our cars felt especially rich. Those with wood and working fireplaces also felt fortunate, though logs demanded the constant labor of lugging and dumping and lighting; ashes and smoke clung to our clothes and our nails grew black with soot. In the pecking order of post-storm society, we fireplace tenders were still just laborers. For, as in any civilization, the less dirty you were at the end of the day, the better your station. Some never lost their power or their juice returned quickly. These folks knew not to lord their good luck over anyone; I did not meet any power-Calvinists who saw their lighted doorways as signs of election. Indeed, I heard from these fortunate ones a new term: power-guilt. My acquaintances who were racked with power-guilt offered meals and light with humble eyes downcast and a slight apology. And when we took a steaming pot of meatballs or accepted an outstretched extension cord, we too looked downward and, with a petulant “thank you,” accepted the largess of the privileged and wondered silently with just a lining of anger that grew over the days: “Why them? Why not me?” This natural feeling of unfairness is a universal rub that produced a spark of resentment that quickly died out. Not being a normally jealous person, I can now understand how the sensation of actual and systemic inequality can so easily catch fire.
Higher on the power pecking order were those neighbors who had families or friends in other towns who had never lost power, and they made quick retreats to those glowing sanctuaries. Even more elevated were those with second homes safely outside the perimeter of the storm. But by far, the most privileged class, the group of people who occupied the highest caste, were those with gas-powered generators. As I stayed up and listened to the 24-hour talk radio station–a station reviled by my liberal friends because it broadcasts Rush Limbaugh-I realized that these generator owners were the royalty of greater Buffalo. News of a shipment of generators to Sears or Home Depot traveled quickly and people lined up for 6 or more hours to buy the few hundred that might have arrived that day. After the night of breaking boughs, the buzz of hundreds of these stationary lawn mowers filled the air of our neighborhoods all day and through the night.
But power is not just a matter of energy. Disasters make you understand that there are various modes and permutations of power. There is the power to establish priorities, e.g. who gets electricity when. The needs of power company workers and the elderly and the sick in hospitals and the water authority trumped all other individual claims. Despite what we saw during the Katrina debacle, in Western New York, utilitarianism did trump elitism as the greatest good for the greatest number and the most vulnerable seemed to guide the decisions of the politicians and civic leaders. The most established neighborhoods, full of stately old-growth trees and populated by doctors and lawyers and bankers, lay in arboreal ruins without power for days and even weeks, while trucks rushed by to serve hospitals and schools and the new developments in the far suburbs whose plots were not old enough to have many trees and were therefore easier to restore.
There is also the magical verbal power of explanations and naming that can change reality with just the application of a new label, as when the angel of the Lord renamed Jacob Israel after their nightlong wrestling match. I have always loved that story in Genesis, because its message is that language and metaphors are instruments of power and change. In other words, reality is about who is in charge of naming. If Erie County gets labeled a “disaster” rather than just an “emergency,” more federal money and relief comes pouring in. We were also at the mercy of the appellative control of the power company, who had the authority to size the situation up and then impose their own generalizations on shivering individuals.
Disasters also teach the power of know-how and know-who. Those who understood the inner workings of the sump pump could prevent further disaster in their basements. Being friends with a tree-guy or knowing someone with a chain saw also gave you a certain kind of power. In addition, understanding how electrical grids work and how the power company organizes its relief corps could break the cycle of anticipation and disappointment that most ignorant citizens experienced. The moral I learned that week was simple: never alienate anyone and be kind to all you greet, for you never know who among them will own a chain saw or a generator.
For me, though, the greatest power, the most healing tool to have in your disaster arsenal, is the transistor radio. Oh tiny wireless, using the most plebian of power sources, the “AA” battery, you connected me, throughout the week, to my fellow citizens via the glory of the talk radio format. You gathered a virtual town square of senior citizens and stranded motorists and shut-ins and angry old ladies and know-it-all electricians and horny young couples and pet lovers and retired teachers. Before the storm, I only knew of talk radio as a political medium that accessed a particular voting block. But now I feel part of a new community. I feel close now to all of those callers. Many of them live lives as Thoreau said of “quiet desperation.” I am grateful that they waited for hours on hold just to get 30 seconds or less to talk with the host. You could say that to wait so long for 30 seconds of very limited glory is the pathetic height of ego. But having spent days and nights with these people, I know that they were reaching out, if only to touch for just a few seconds and to be touched. I promised myself that I would not end this essay with the platitude that storms restore us to our true humanity by revealing how much we need each other. Ideas like that are just too easy, as indexed by how quickly we forget our neighbors when the lights go back on.
And yet, I just can’t stop fiddling with the pun that as we waited those nights for our wires to be connected, so many stayed on the phone line (well probably not the phone line but clung to the cell satellite) to connect with others-to gossip, to pass on advice, to thank the police, to remind us to keep our dogs warm, to share heatless recipes, to just thank the hosts for staying up with us and getting us through the night. If only E.M. Forster could have known that his famous passage in Howard’s End would describe an audience that, I think, he would find particularly alien. “Only connect!” Forster wrote, “That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”
I suddenly remember Emerson’s essay, “Power.” It is his most wild and bombastic and energetic and frightening and direct piece of prose. He would have detested my new radio community, whom he would have called “imbeciles.” Emerson, instead, explains that power is derived from the supreme individual who differentiates himself from the horde. “…–the key to all ages is–Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, fear. This gives force to the strong–that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.” In other words, I have the opportunity to be strong because so many are weak. Emerson’s “Power” is a torch song and a jeremiad against England and Congress and politicians and factory owners (whom he calls Mr. Profitloss). His heroes are people who work instead of theorize, practice instead of dabble, who act in the face of uncertainty, who embrace the unknown and enjoy, as a consequence, ruddy good health. The powerful people Emerson mentions are adventurers and resilient children and sailors and foresters and farmers and mechanics and buccaneers and hardy Yankees, and also Napoleon and Michelangelo and Pericles and Colonel Buford, the chief engineer of West Point. The Emersonian hero loves a good storm, too: “Some men cannot endure an hour of calm at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook, on board a Liverpool packet, who, when the wind blew a gale, could not contain his joy; “Blow!” he cried, “me do tell you, blow!” How many of us, in Eggertsville, New York, echoed that Malay cook on Thursday night, October 12, 2006 as we stared out at the thunder and snow?
Emerson is always criticized for rejecting community. His defense, that he was calling for a community of fulfilled and self-reliant individuals, each provoking each to grow and to learn, seems, from the retrospect of this storm, to be a bit thin. Or at least incomplete. My talk radio community, its audience, its patient callers, its goofy hosts, is in no way an Emersonian community of muscular individualists. But neither are they sniveling imbeciles. We were “vulnerables,” if I may turn the adjective into the noun. We were confident that this too shall pass, that we would survive, but we were also bewildered and honest about our need to reach out. There were no buccaneers and sailors calling in those currentless nights struggling to stay current. Nevertheless, by connecting, we created a kind of power–a bridge to the light of morning.
Emerson does mention one hero in “Power” who participated in our storm. It is the tree: “–but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, that agrees with the soil, will grow in spite of blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in all weathers and all treatments.” As I lay in bed at night, listening for the bucket truck to arrive, I look at the sheared tops of the deciduous trees that lent a kind of tropical air to my icy neighborhood, and I prayed that their owners, my neighbors, would not cut them down when the storm had passed. I wanted and still want these trees to have the chance to grow another day. For this is the last form of power I recognized as I sat my National Grid vigil–to see in the now what could be. Emerson gets this idea just exactly right: “A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eyes make estates, as fast as the sun breeds clouds.” This is the power of joy, that is, the ability to appreciate what little you have in front of you and to thrill at the prospect of making something more out of it. The storm made me into a pagan, for I relish heat and light today; I suck both in now and swish them around in my mouth like a good wine. E.E. Cummings says it better: “the trick of finding what you didn’t lose/(existing’s tricky:but to live’s a gift)/the teachable imposture of always/arriving at the place you never left.” What a hard trick this is to learn. Who has learned it? The day after my power was restored, I tuned back to that talk radio station but the programming had resorted back to the national hysterical pundits screaming and panting and sputtering and wildly waving their arms. I flicked my transistor radio off and it is now silent on my kitchen windowsill. Some people may have found something in the storm that they will strive not to lose again. And others lost precious connections they will never regain. And I stand, with most of you, unsteady, in the middle.
On the first Thursday of what is now known as the “October Surprise,” the forecast called for rain and perhaps a few wet snowflakes. I flew back to Buffalo that morning from New York City, where the Yankees pitcher, Cory Lidle, had flown his plane into an Upper East Side apartment house and thrown the city into a panic over the possible return of terrorism. I was glad to get out of Manhattan to the sweetly safe western New York way of life. As I drove to work from the airport, cold Canadian winds began to sweep across the warm waters of Lake Erie, turning the moisture into two feet of heavy, wet snow. The winds, with their huge payload of snow, began strafing and then bombing Buffalo and a narrow band of towns and villages to its north and west. The trees were not quite ready for the fall. Fully leafed, most were holding strong to their summer green with some reluctant but realistic admissions of red and gold highlights. Peak fall foliage was a week away. Throughout the night, as the combination of leaves and dense snow proved too much for the trees, they split and broke and fell. Thunderstorms exploded. At times, the lightning was so intense that it was as if the spotlight of a prison guard tower had suddenly been trained on my house. All night, you could hear the agonizing groans of the trees falling. Pop–pop–pop. Sometimes the cracking branches sounded like mortar fire and other times you could hear what sounded like the echoing cries of an anguished mother. Oh, the sadness of fallen trees. Though the oldest tree in the region survived, so many did not and for days afterwards mothers and fathers and sisters and brothers and all of their neighbors mourned the death of their willows and maples and birches and sycamores and even a redwood. The birches in the cemetery each snapped in the middle and formed spindly wigwams over the tombstones. Against a slate grey sky, this scene looked like a Matthew Brady photograph of a distant Civil War battlefield.
With the fall and crash of each limb, another electrical line hit the ground and the lights went out for 400,000 people. In what amounted to both a mea culpa as well as a historical report, National Grid, one of the power companies, advertised that this was “the most destructive storm to ever hit our region.” And in the morning, when we saw what had happened and when we heard that some of us would be without light and heat for more than a week, we knew that the task at hand was to locate power in whatever form we could find it. We tunneled out of our homes and nakedly pursued power–proudly, without apology and with growing bravado. A class system quickly developed around different sources of power. The least of us had batteries and flashlights, though, among the battery users, those with “D” batteries held a higher station than “AAA” and “AA” users. At one point, there were no “D” batteries to be found in any local stores. We lost phone service early, so if you had a cell phone you were doing well. That is, until it lost its charge. So, really, it was those of us with cell phone chargers in our cars who were considered well off. Of course, you needed gas to run the car to charge the cell, and the gas stations were closed, so those of us who had thought to fill our cars felt especially rich. Those with wood and working fireplaces also felt fortunate, though logs demanded the constant labor of lugging and dumping and lighting; ashes and smoke clung to our clothes and our nails grew black with soot. In the pecking order of post-storm society, we fireplace tenders were still just laborers. For, as in any civilization, the less dirty you were at the end of the day, the better your station. Some never lost their power or their juice returned quickly. These folks knew not to lord their good luck over anyone; I did not meet any power-Calvinists who saw their lighted doorways as signs of election. Indeed, I heard from these fortunate ones a new term: power-guilt. My acquaintances who were racked with power-guilt offered meals and light with humble eyes downcast and a slight apology. And when we took a steaming pot of meatballs or accepted an outstretched extension cord, we too looked downward and, with a petulant “thank you,” accepted the largess of the privileged and wondered silently with just a lining of anger that grew over the days: “Why them? Why not me?” This natural feeling of unfairness is a universal rub that produced a spark of resentment that quickly died out. Not being a normally jealous person, I can now understand how the sensation of actual and systemic inequality can so easily catch fire.
Higher on the power pecking order were those neighbors who had families or friends in other towns who had never lost power, and they made quick retreats to those glowing sanctuaries. Even more elevated were those with second homes safely outside the perimeter of the storm. But by far, the most privileged class, the group of people who occupied the highest caste, were those with gas-powered generators. As I stayed up and listened to the 24-hour talk radio station–a station reviled by my liberal friends because it broadcasts Rush Limbaugh-I realized that these generator owners were the royalty of greater Buffalo. News of a shipment of generators to Sears or Home Depot traveled quickly and people lined up for 6 or more hours to buy the few hundred that might have arrived that day. After the night of breaking boughs, the buzz of hundreds of these stationary lawn mowers filled the air of our neighborhoods all day and through the night.
But power is not just a matter of energy. Disasters make you understand that there are various modes and permutations of power. There is the power to establish priorities, e.g. who gets electricity when. The needs of power company workers and the elderly and the sick in hospitals and the water authority trumped all other individual claims. Despite what we saw during the Katrina debacle, in Western New York, utilitarianism did trump elitism as the greatest good for the greatest number and the most vulnerable seemed to guide the decisions of the politicians and civic leaders. The most established neighborhoods, full of stately old-growth trees and populated by doctors and lawyers and bankers, lay in arboreal ruins without power for days and even weeks, while trucks rushed by to serve hospitals and schools and the new developments in the far suburbs whose plots were not old enough to have many trees and were therefore easier to restore.
There is also the magical verbal power of explanations and naming that can change reality with just the application of a new label, as when the angel of the Lord renamed Jacob Israel after their nightlong wrestling match. I have always loved that story in Genesis, because its message is that language and metaphors are instruments of power and change. In other words, reality is about who is in charge of naming. If Erie County gets labeled a “disaster” rather than just an “emergency,” more federal money and relief comes pouring in. We were also at the mercy of the appellative control of the power company, who had the authority to size the situation up and then impose their own generalizations on shivering individuals.
Disasters also teach the power of know-how and know-who. Those who understood the inner workings of the sump pump could prevent further disaster in their basements. Being friends with a tree-guy or knowing someone with a chain saw also gave you a certain kind of power. In addition, understanding how electrical grids work and how the power company organizes its relief corps could break the cycle of anticipation and disappointment that most ignorant citizens experienced. The moral I learned that week was simple: never alienate anyone and be kind to all you greet, for you never know who among them will own a chain saw or a generator.
For me, though, the greatest power, the most healing tool to have in your disaster arsenal, is the transistor radio. Oh tiny wireless, using the most plebian of power sources, the “AA” battery, you connected me, throughout the week, to my fellow citizens via the glory of the talk radio format. You gathered a virtual town square of senior citizens and stranded motorists and shut-ins and angry old ladies and know-it-all electricians and horny young couples and pet lovers and retired teachers. Before the storm, I only knew of talk radio as a political medium that accessed a particular voting block. But now I feel part of a new community. I feel close now to all of those callers. Many of them live lives as Thoreau said of “quiet desperation.” I am grateful that they waited for hours on hold just to get 30 seconds or less to talk with the host. You could say that to wait so long for 30 seconds of very limited glory is the pathetic height of ego. But having spent days and nights with these people, I know that they were reaching out, if only to touch for just a few seconds and to be touched. I promised myself that I would not end this essay with the platitude that storms restore us to our true humanity by revealing how much we need each other. Ideas like that are just too easy, as indexed by how quickly we forget our neighbors when the lights go back on.
And yet, I just can’t stop fiddling with the pun that as we waited those nights for our wires to be connected, so many stayed on the phone line (well probably not the phone line but clung to the cell satellite) to connect with others-to gossip, to pass on advice, to thank the police, to remind us to keep our dogs warm, to share heatless recipes, to just thank the hosts for staying up with us and getting us through the night. If only E.M. Forster could have known that his famous passage in Howard’s End would describe an audience that, I think, he would find particularly alien. “Only connect!” Forster wrote, “That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its height. Live in fragments no longer. Only connect, and the beast and the monk, robbed of the isolation that is life to either, will die.”
I suddenly remember Emerson’s essay, “Power.” It is his most wild and bombastic and energetic and frightening and direct piece of prose. He would have detested my new radio community, whom he would have called “imbeciles.” Emerson, instead, explains that power is derived from the supreme individual who differentiates himself from the horde. “…–the key to all ages is–Imbecility; imbecility in the vast majority of men, at all times, and, even in heroes, in all but certain eminent moments; victims of gravity, custom, fear. This gives force to the strong–that the multitude have no habit of self-reliance or original action.” In other words, I have the opportunity to be strong because so many are weak. Emerson’s “Power” is a torch song and a jeremiad against England and Congress and politicians and factory owners (whom he calls Mr. Profitloss). His heroes are people who work instead of theorize, practice instead of dabble, who act in the face of uncertainty, who embrace the unknown and enjoy, as a consequence, ruddy good health. The powerful people Emerson mentions are adventurers and resilient children and sailors and foresters and farmers and mechanics and buccaneers and hardy Yankees, and also Napoleon and Michelangelo and Pericles and Colonel Buford, the chief engineer of West Point. The Emersonian hero loves a good storm, too: “Some men cannot endure an hour of calm at sea. I remember a poor Malay cook, on board a Liverpool packet, who, when the wind blew a gale, could not contain his joy; “Blow!” he cried, “me do tell you, blow!” How many of us, in Eggertsville, New York, echoed that Malay cook on Thursday night, October 12, 2006 as we stared out at the thunder and snow?
Emerson is always criticized for rejecting community. His defense, that he was calling for a community of fulfilled and self-reliant individuals, each provoking each to grow and to learn, seems, from the retrospect of this storm, to be a bit thin. Or at least incomplete. My talk radio community, its audience, its patient callers, its goofy hosts, is in no way an Emersonian community of muscular individualists. But neither are they sniveling imbeciles. We were “vulnerables,” if I may turn the adjective into the noun. We were confident that this too shall pass, that we would survive, but we were also bewildered and honest about our need to reach out. There were no buccaneers and sailors calling in those currentless nights struggling to stay current. Nevertheless, by connecting, we created a kind of power–a bridge to the light of morning.
Emerson does mention one hero in “Power” who participated in our storm. It is the tree: “–but the one point is the thrifty tree. A good tree, that agrees with the soil, will grow in spite of blight, or bug, or pruning, or neglect, by night and by day, in all weathers and all treatments.” As I lay in bed at night, listening for the bucket truck to arrive, I look at the sheared tops of the deciduous trees that lent a kind of tropical air to my icy neighborhood, and I prayed that their owners, my neighbors, would not cut them down when the storm had passed. I wanted and still want these trees to have the chance to grow another day. For this is the last form of power I recognized as I sat my National Grid vigil–to see in the now what could be. Emerson gets this idea just exactly right: “A feeble man can see the farms that are fenced and tilled, the houses that are built. The strong man sees the possible houses and farms. His eyes make estates, as fast as the sun breeds clouds.” This is the power of joy, that is, the ability to appreciate what little you have in front of you and to thrill at the prospect of making something more out of it. The storm made me into a pagan, for I relish heat and light today; I suck both in now and swish them around in my mouth like a good wine. E.E. Cummings says it better: “the trick of finding what you didn’t lose/(existing’s tricky:but to live’s a gift)/the teachable imposture of always/arriving at the place you never left.” What a hard trick this is to learn. Who has learned it? The day after my power was restored, I tuned back to that talk radio station but the programming had resorted back to the national hysterical pundits screaming and panting and sputtering and wildly waving their arms. I flicked my transistor radio off and it is now silent on my kitchen windowsill. Some people may have found something in the storm that they will strive not to lose again. And others lost precious connections they will never regain. And I stand, with most of you, unsteady, in the middle.