For one reason or another, I didn’t hear about the Hurricane crawling towards me on the river until it was already beating the Gulf Coast. My dad told me, and he described the intensity and potential disaster. He said the eye was headed straight for New Orleans. That fact combined with some information I absorbed many years ago – that New Orleans was a colossal disaster waiting to happen, a soggy city below the level, left my spine momentarily chilled. “That’s awful,” I replied, “God, I hope it isn’t like they say.”
But further beneath that feeling, I must admit, there’s a part of me that is willing to see vehicles overturned in the streets and entire neighborhoods beneath the surge. It isn’t the rational side of me, and I shudder at the thought when I have it. But I’ll admit it’s there. It isn’t for a lack of sympathy either, I hear the survivor descriptions and silently declare I can’t imagine. But I still feel a rush of something that can only be called pleasure when I turn on the set and see a reporter being slowly blown from one side of the screen to the other. Or a Super Dome being tested to its core, despite the children inside, poor as they are.
If people were innocently hurled across the gorge at Niagara, dozens at a time, we wouldn’t pay to see it happen from three sides. We wouldn’t send mother illustrated postcards with Greetings from Niagara Falls. But would we recognize and even appreciate the power of the water? A power that can only be truly measured by what it destroys.
I’ve no desire for people to hurt, suffer, or die – and what I speak of isn’t anything close to such thoughts. But when I allow myself to visit the deep that has decided to huddle and expand, unleashing its own breed of power, I am compelled to stay. To continue imagining a state of affairs in which air and water become one violent thing – gushing, screaming, and pouring towards a stationary coast full of tiny fragile things. For a time today, an entire swath of this nation was unreachable. A society of connected peoples, with their figures and charts, their science and power, left untouchable by us on the outside. As if they were taken into a cosmic sound-proof room. I imagine a man soaking in his poncho, measuring the storm’s pressure at landfall for the sake of a science that for an hour or two must have seemed as arbitrary to the reality of it all as karma, our Myers Briggs personality type, or the historical Jesus.
I see the clips and images, and at first I am as I should be. Nodding my head no. Then I pause for a moment, watching a street-turned-torrent lined with palm trees that are beating the asphalt in unison with a rhythm that’s so fast it’s slow. Something we’ve built tries its hardest to stay together amid something that is more than a storm, and so large that it doesn’t seem like an attack. I imagine the existence of unwritten music that we’ll never be allowed to hear. I nod my head slower, changing direction. I think of good nice people like me or my mother, or the people that may not have cars, food, or a home. But I nod affirmative still, ignoring these concerns for a moment. Not with joy, but in the way that you might nod if a brave student finally stood up and shot the confident and commanding professor who had been teaching for years that two plus two is five. Even though nobody needed to die.
When nature reintroduces itself to We the People, I can’t help but solemnly nod the unnamable feelings that such a clash ushers in. Now and then I chastise myself, giving into the sort of shame I’ll probably feel for publishing this days before I hear the death toll, and months before we know the damage to our precious economy. But even more often I think of something else soon after such guilty feelings that forces me to reconsider. Like the birth of a nova, or something that similarly blurs the line between the order of things and what we have named destruction with our language that expands the meaning but limits and assigns powers we cannot grasp. When the images are beamed back, and the nova is born, nobody calls such an event a tragedy. Even though it takes place in a galaxy that is arguably as tangible to us as Louisiana was today. They call it science.