Rattle and Hum
'Twas a sunny Sunday when I lit out like Finn on a riverboat, beating down the bike path in lieu of a Sunday picnic.
I'd called my wife and proposed (well, I'd done that almost a decade ago) that either I go now, at noon, without her and sigh from the great height at the private spot at the local park, the one that overlooks a vista of forest that contains a little patch of meadow in the distance, though near enough to seem attainable.
It's a once-a-summer thing. We carry our chairs and take our dog and camp on a deck meant primarily for standing.
She says she prefers to go with me, later, around 5, and so I blaze the bike path veering off of it once to imbibe the sights of old farms and a second time to skirt the edge of new construction.
Then, ditching the bike, I take a short run that took me to the edge of a pond that had become a stream. The wind had picked up strangely though the sun was full. Usually a wind like this precedes a storm, but a storm seemed highly unlikely given the absence of cloud.
My legs protested harshly but I told them that the days were shortening and they would thank me, specifically tomorrow, when no workout would be necessary. The wind blew harder as if in reply.
Back at the homestead, fiercities continued. Now a maple tree swayed in agony and a giant limb broke off and speared the ground, creating a divet in the clay the size of a softball. The limb was so big as to be uncarryable, and I had to get out the chain saw make it into many pieces before carrying them, one-by-one, to the tree-line.
Out front the street became a race track of leaves, an Indy-500 of debris. The neighbor across the street was out, and we shared a shrug of the shoulders as we looked above us instead of below or around us. He pointed down the street and said something but I couldn't hear over the defeaning wind. Later I saw that a tree limb had come down and smashed the garage of a neighbor's house.
I went back in, thinking the best place to read is not under the porch canopy while a nearby tree rages. I noticed the cupboards were bare so I went out in search of dinner.
The $4.99 Dominoes Pizza deal looked good, but the blue-uniformed crew sat askew outside the store. Not open. McDonald's is the last refuge of a scoundrel but I wasn't interested in eating except as a satisfaction of appetite. "Closed! Electric out!" read the sign on the drive-thru.
The drive home was made interesting by large orange barrels that, with alarming randomness, gusted into the street. Drivers alternately swerved or came to sudden stops. Some got out of their cars and moved the barrels, though sometimes in the direction the wind was coming from.
A phone call revealed that 600,000 are without power in Southern Ohio. From West Chester to the west side of Cincinnati to most points in between, they have been without television since 2pm and thus missed the Bengals' loss (pardon the redundancy), proving there's always a silver lining to electrical outages.
Back home, the front yard is littered with new huge tree limbs. The backyard hammock had been twisted so hard that strands were breaking. Bird houses fell from limbs and all the bird seed flew out of the feeder. The white fence in the backyard was twisted and lying partially on its side. On the phone, my wife hears that my brother-in-law had a tree limb pierce a hole in their roof. I look out the window as shingles are being peeled off the shed's roof.
I retire to the book room to the accompaniment of the thunder of the birch tree whipping the siding. Our cat walks in and stops in mid-step upon the crash of the birch. The left paw hangs suspended in mid-air and only slowly comes down. He then moves with hurry, leaps atop the coffee table and atop the couch for a view through the window. His eyes widen in alertness and then he stares for a long time upward, at the ceiling, holding the unnatural pose. This, he thinks, is something unusual.
Hurricane Ike has arrived in Ohio; wind gusts of up to 70mph. How hard to imagine how incredibly worse a hurricane is, with 125mph sustained winds...
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