I have watched the footage of the news helicopter's flyover of the island several times. I have read the notices regarding the evacuation orders, and the cautions not to try to access the island. I have reviewed the photos that are posted on the Facebook pages several times...
I have avoided calling those I know who are full-timers....it has seemed like pouring salt into the wound, though I am not sure whether the wound is theirs or mine. But I finally broke down and called the woman who had befriended me as I was clearing out mom's houses. She makes a serious pasta with meat sauce--not a surprise for someone born in Sicily. There was a "mailbox full" message on the only number I have for her. I don't know whether the phone was damaged in her house, or whether it is the failure of the cell phone system or whether she lacks power to charge the phone, or whether in fact she is indeed fielding too many calls from friends and family to keep up with. She was having headaches the entire week that I was out there. She speculated that her Coumadin dosage needed to be adjusted. I wonder where she is tonight and whether she is ok.
I think I wrote earlier about someone else I spent time with when I was out at the beach packing mom's things. I instinctively liked him, even though I only know him in a limited way. He was kind and generous when I was out there. Turns out he's the Mayor of the town and there is footage of him on every video and facebook page related to the disaster. "Please don't come out here," he is saying. "It's not safe."
I broke down and called him. "There's probably 4 to 5 feet of water in your houses," he said. And then we talked about nothingness... What is there to say? There is a foot and a half of water in his house and his place of business. He has been staying in a hotel on the mainland with his wife, and his daughter and son-in-law, and their kids, and the dogs. They were staying in one place and then had to move because that place lost power and water. And he is going over to the island every day.... He sounded tired. Thrashed. I offered him an escape to a dry place with flannel sheets and a wood stove, and told him I'd feed him. He asked how our cats are.
Our friend Matt was here working on the room over the garage for Herb's pool room. He has been working for a friend with Parkinson's who wants his house finished before he is too immobile to use it. His wife wanted it finished by their anniversary which is two weeks away. It isn't likely to happen.
I filled the wood box twice and looked again at those pictures.
I had a difficult phone conversation with a close friend who wanted the election to go the other way. He is worried that he will have to move if the health care plan increases his share of medical coverage. He is worried about the purported "death panels" and about immigrants who are straining services that "we" have to pay for. He is worried about a country where kids spend more time communicating electronically than in person. He thinks that the severity of the storms that we have been experiencing, is some kind of wake-up call to belief in his god. He is convinced that the Social Security that he paid into will be broke because of the people coming from somewhere else. And then there is the military...."It's like someone coming in and sitting down to your table and expecting you to cook them a meal. And then they bring their friends and you don't even know them..."
I wanted him to know that even though we have vast differences in politics, we share a lot of common ground on what we want to have happen in the world we live in. I don't think I did much good.
It snowed here and I got the news of a weekend meeting in New York of residents and homeowners to share pictures and information.
It snowed 6 inches on top of the two feet of water in the downtown of the beach community where I grew up. There were 65 mile an hour winds. The town looks like Venice without the vaporetto or the architecture (ok ok, so there isn't much of Venice left without those... but just so, I am not sure what is left of the beach community I once knew....)
*****
When H and I were together last week, we talked about the last 500 days and the fact that it has seemed more... what shall I call it?...more dramatic than most people's lives...but maybe that's because we don't see the way people live until disaster hits.
Some of us are on Coumadin and have headaches all the time. And some of us are living in a hotel, even though we own a business, and play a role in town politics. We are suddenly homeless, not because we don't work hard or do community service.
Herb is even now giving a presentation in Kansas City. He was invited to do so, after a successful presentation a few weeks ago for one of his professional organizations. He got an email saying that the transcript of the earlier talk had "gone viral" in Washington D.C., and that some of those who had seen it had sent it on to the White House. (I wonder whether my mother had a hand in this from "the other side".)
Herb is talking about "wicked problems" which are the challenges we face, where solutions can't ever "fix it" but we cannot ignore them and hope they will go away. He is talking about climate refugees and sustainability, homelessness and shrinking cities that have depopulated but have vast areas of uninhabited housing. He is talking about the need for citizenship, and leadership and collaboration in a warming wicked-problem world, and about architecture and urban planning and the role of other disciplines from mathematics to physics to chemistry, and yes, liberal studies, in addressing those problems. He is talking about the need to include students in real world problem-solving rather than training them to be slot-fillers in vocational tracks. He is talking about the need to develop curricula that address the increasingly high stakes problems that all of us face.
But I find myself thinking about more personal wicked problems. I find myself thinking about how we help a friend feel safe and "heard" when he believes only the bogeymen of false media prophets. I find myself wondering how we help someone we barely know, who is thrashed by his efforts to stick a finger in the dike of erosion and climate change. Should we rebuild second homes and businesses on a sand bar stuck out in the ocean when they are wiped out by the storms of a warming climate that we have created? And what are the consequences for those who are caught in the crosshairs of the insoluble?
I wonder whether there is something abnormal in all this or whether this is the new normal. I wonder whether the extreme storms that have come with global climate change have parallels in the extreme events in our lives, and whether we are experiencing a human equivalent of global climate change. We know that our wars have resulted in massive increases in birth defects and cancers in children in Iraq as well as a record amount of post-traumatic stress disorder. We know that our financial industry and the housing bubble has made tens of thousands of people lose their homes and there are economic and social service implications to that. But there is also a deepening sense of incapacity that impacts which political candidates we support, and our reliance on religion and community to get us through. There is a conviction that we can't influence the outcome and a distrust of others who seem to have gotten their "entitlements" when we keep scratching a persistent itch.
We aren't talking enough about the emotional impacts of these wicked problems. One friend has asked whether there is data on what it is like for a child to grow up on the stripped and depopulated streets of industrial and economic disaster in places like Flint, Michigan. There isn't. We could also ask what impact a string of climate disasters has on the children of agricultural and rural communities. If we are challenged in solving wicked problems to build coalitions of experts who can take on the insoluble, how are we to support the First Responders and the children of disaster, and those who live each day afraid of losing the battle they have fought so hard to win?
Makes habit seem attractive sometimes. I think I will go out and get some more wood for "hte" fire..
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