Hurricane Weather

Yes, that’s me walking the streets of Chicken City in the evening when smarter folks are turning towards bed or watching that final TV program. I see the blue glow of your television as I walk past, shuffling to favor the knees that are, after all these years, beginning to complain. Don’t get me wrong – I’m not peeking into your windows. I already feel vulnerable out there without having to worry about being taken for a Creeper. Every time a cop cruiser passes me I try to amend my posture and gait so I present a figure of innocence and an aura of The Good Citizen; every time I see a lady walking from her car back to her house in the pools of light thrown off by the front porch light I try to radiate Goodness and Wholesomeness. Don't worry, lady! I hate rape!

Last night, due to the hurricane bearing down on Tampa and the GOP Convention with Biblical Wrath, the air was thick and humid, though it was cool and lacked that tropical warmth that you tend to associate with hurricane weather. Autumn is in the air and the light, cleaning the tropical heaviness away. Though I found myself panting as my worn lungs tried to break down the thick humid air, I did not mind: in that same air I could taste the ocean and sense the force of a storm that was built over vast miles of the Atlantic.

People who grow up on the coast are aware of the vast presence of water even when they can’t see it. It’s always there, pushing at your subconscious – the biggest thing on earth. It’s in the pressure of the air and the saltiness you smell; it’s in the weather and the light. You can hear it if you listen, and the sound of the tide describes Relentlessness like few other sounds.

When I was young our house had a line of fir trees which even now I can’t identify as to type or species: they were taller than the house but utterly unlike the straight, slash pines here in Georgia. These were Childhood Memory Firs which can only be found in Connecticut in the 1970s. They billowed out with figures like the women you now find shopping at Wal-Mart – full and round – and their branches were mahogany red,sticky and spicy with sap. These trees were made to be climbed, up their trunks hand-over hand along the limbs that came up like radial spokes. The boughs laced together so completely and densely that  if you poked your head through the interwoven needles and branches, and pulled your body through, you could find yourself supported on a springy canopy that gave a good view out over the roof of our house, over the trees that lined Route1 and then further, as if the land was sloping up towards the coast. The ocean was out there, a dense and silvery line like mercury. You could see it, but more clearly you could feel the weight of the ocean and everything that lived in it pushing back against you. Salt crystals were present in the air when the light changed and you could see them spark like God Particles. When I lay in bed at night the sounds of traffic on North Ave. were enough like the sound of waves washing in and out that I, a child raised on the coast, could make that connection and feel the ocean even in the metaphors that came into my bedroom.

Every now and then a seagull will be blown inland from the coast by some far off storm and I'll hear it before I see it - that high, plaintive cry. I know that sound like I know my mother's voice, though I haven't heard her speak in twenty years. The gull will nearly always be circling up overhead as if he can't believe he's spotted me this far from the coast, and calling out in surprise. Is that you? What the heck are you doing here? 

People who grow on the coast are always aware of the presence of the Vast Water, even when it’s not visible; and when we grow up and move away we are aware of the lack of it, a vacuum that can be filled from time to time by weather that blows in from the Roaring Forties and fills the air with salt and the density of the ocean so that walking in it feels like swimming.