RUDIMENTS, pt. 1,278
(I felt the same way)
I am witness these days to
many of Nature's occurrences -
the seasonal and the constant.
It's different here. It's raw and
it's unfiltered. The sounds go
on all night, all dark night. The
stars and the silence too. (How
come I feel I'm jinxing myself)?
Moon phases, planets, wildlife
and greenery. I have to admit,
too, that not too much of this
actually interests me. I consider
Nature to be on 'Automatic,'
and the less Humanity has to
do with it, the better off Nature
is. That 'peaceable kingdom'
that Nature is supposed to be
runs pretty well on its own,
notwithstanding - or maybe
even in spite of - earthquakes,
volcanoes, tsunamis and floods.
It certainly doesn't need me, nor
any other dumb human, interfering.
The last thing I'd ever want to do
is kill, which is mostly a human's
wont - fishing, shooting, trapping,
and the rest. For what authentic
end-result I'll never understand,
no matter what rationalization
is given.
-
It's been 50 years this week - since
we're on the subject of 'Nature' -
that a fierce storm named 'Hurricane
Agnes' swept through the Elmira NY,
area,where we were living. It swamped
the entire area - the Susquehanna
River, the Chemung River, Columbia
Crossroads, Towanda, Sayre, PA, and
many other places. The rivers were
raging for days, progressively in an
acceleration even after the storm had
passed - because the accumulating
of upriver waters just added more and
more flow and swirl and depth to the
already out-of-control rivers, long
past bursting their banks. The raging
Chemung River - right through the
center of town - swept away the
'Southside'. The poor people lived
on the Southside - it was lowlands
and basin areas where, with great
ease the newly-raging waters
threaded and gouged their ways to.
Homes, shacks, and buildings were
uplifted, off their foundations; toppled
or simply broken apart and splintered.
The factories and scrap-yards and the
rest, of that area, met the same fates
but survived and, by 5 years later, had
revived and been resuscitated. By any
chance of logic that had to be considered
good, for it at least gave back the options
of local jobs, and for the locals. For
myself, the place I worked was shut
down for near a year, and it was
quite some time before I got the call
for returning. Too unworldly to seek
some sort of unemployment or flood
and lost job assistance, I simply took
on other jobs in the interim - as
farm-assistant, milking, haying,
running tractors, tending livestock,
and driving a school-bus route
through some of the craziest
rural roads you'd ever see. I
learned a lot, and money
stayed scarce.
-
Hurricane Agnes was nature unhinged.
People had died, been swept away, or
had their accumulated heart attacks and
panics do them in. The great waters had
ripped open graves and the local flood
commemoration books and brochures,
(yes, they abounded, quickly enough,
and for 1972, in black and white), each
managed to always have 2 or 3 photos
of swirling caskets or flood-opened
graves. The flood was a true devastation.
That peaceable kingdom run amuck.
-
Driving in that storm, the windshield
wipers on my 1967 Ford Cortina were
lifted right off the windshield (while in
motion) and torn from the car, just
washed off. Unbelievably, I had to
drive some 30 miles without them -
peering through a massive sheet of
rain/windshield through which not
much of anything real could be seen.
Elmira, being closed up, was unreachable
that night, and we wound up staying
in a Red Cross shelter station that had
been pitched in a mucked-up mess of
a field somewhere between, Towanda,
Route 17, Waverly, and Elmira. Free
coffee, and cookies too! Kids on
benches. mothers bewailing their own
fates and situations, and a number of
the usual, local, Chemung County sorts
of indigents staring listlessly. How did
we get here? What was all that? (And
you know what? I felt the same way).
-
Eventually making it home (the next
morning's daylight answered the
question of what, if anything, had
happened to my parked-in-the-mud
amidst pouring rain and in the
middle of a grassy field, car. The
answer, most happily was
'nothing!'). Those next 30 miles,
through untold devastation and
muddied ruins, answered all our
questions about the storm. Driving
local roads became an eye-opener
wreckage, sadness, and caution -
each roadway was clammed up with
something : downed trees or tree
limbs, twisted buildings intruding
on roads, backage up sewer-drains,
automobiles everywhere akimbo,
washed up on lawns, floated by waters
into building walls, embankments, or
other cars. The scenes were unearthly,
and with surly National Guardsmen,
police, and even Park Rangers onhand,
orders and direction were barked,
not spoken. It didn't even look
like the same place we'd known.
-
We finally made it to Columbia
Crossroads. Our home still stood and
was undamaged, though the grasses
and trees around it had taken a
beating, and mud and silt were
everywhere - roads and farmpaths
all showed the power of rain, wind,
and the storm itself; though we
were quite fortunate.
No comments:
Post a Comment