In the Land of Good Living

by Kent Russell

  “This storm will kill you,” the governor added. “Time is running out.”

  The sky above turned cloudy and unfocused-seeming as we marched inland. The westbound lanes of highway became clotted with wide-load trucks towing double-wide trailers; with meeping family sedans; with so many recreational vehicles.

  “You know,” Glenn said amid the honking horns, “I always hated walking.”

  “You’re just realizing this now?” Noah asked.

  “Somehow. In Toronto, I always try to bike everywhere. Even the coffee shop two blocks away. Walking always seemed like a monumental waste of time.”

  “We could buy bikes at the next Walmart,” I pointed out. “Attach one of those children’s trailer-buggies to the back. Tow our gear.”

  “I’ve been voting for this,” Noah said.

  “I still don’t know if I’m there yet,” Glenn said. “But, I mean, if a bike just gets me away from some of this.” He spun once with his arms outstretched. “All of this Rebel flag, meth lab, Breaking-Bad-slave-compound militia business. Like, ‘I got a God-given right to defend my crappy, ignorant life! You wanna make my existence better? You wanna send my kids to school? You wanna give me healthcare? Fuck you!’ ”

  On the empty, opposite side of the highway, a couple of phone trucks sped east toward the fray.

  “I apologize for that,” Glenn said. “The road scrapes away your personal and political mythologies.”

  Come late afternoon, a cold wind was gusting into our faces. The sky had gone corrugated with low slate clouds. Under such auspices, we entered the depressed city of Perry. Like a lot of formerly bustling midsized communities in north-central Florida, Perry is where all hope for modest mastery over practical lives has been obliterated by larger market forces. Vocations, economic identities, solvent businesses that aren’t dollar stores or chain pharmacies—these things are gone, and they aren’t coming back.

  The place was unsettling in part because it had been unsettled. Most of those who could leave, had. Those who’d stayed behind did so because they wished to live by the old ways; they found meaning in their order. But the narrative which had assured these people they’d be all right if they remained loyal to what had been given—this narrative no longer obtained. Industry needn’t be loyal to anyone beyond the boardroom. Industry pushed the plunger whenever it pleased, exploding mills and factories. In due course, the human remainder thumbed their own plungers.

  “Man am I glad to be entering through the black part of town,” Noah said.

  “Absolutely,” I agreed.

  “I will take chuckling derision over flint-eyed enmity every day of the week,” Glenn said, waving to a group of laughing older women standing on a porch.

  We walked miles of cracked, sloping sidewalks. At one intersection, a grease-streaked younger woman wearing a flapper’s feathered headdress approached. She had a rather large pinecone tucked under her right arm. Something about her seemed spring-loaded. I expected at least one trash can neurosis.

  “You boys homeless?” she asked.

  “Are you?” Noah responded.

  “You going to the Gandy then?” she wondered. “To the hurricane party?”

  I shrugged. “Lead the way, ma’am.”

  The flapper walked us past the vestiges of economic optimism: shuttered bookstores, auto shops, internet cafés, family diners. She said, “People been pulling up all day.”

  We arrived at the Gandy Motor Lodge. It was a formerly trim, now derelict fifties motel spread out under oaks stoled with moss. These trees thrashed in dumb assent with the wind, working their forked limbs as if spellbinding the dozens of trucks and RVs packed into the parking lot. All very foreboding, yet clusters of people were milling about drinking from red Solo cups, maybe dancing a little, crossing in and out of open rooms. Our flapper said see ya and went to join them.

  We booked the last vacant suite. While Noah and Glenn readied our gear for the hurricane party, I spent some time in the bathroom washing and scrutinizing a face that no longer resembled my own. The skin was as tan and burnished as a well-oiled Rawlings mitt. In contrast, the scleras were startlingly white, fried-egg white. Cheekbones and a jawline had resurfaced, I saw. The mullet had gone blond and feathery from exposure. This visage was not radiant, or sun-kissed, except insofar as a man marooned on a desert island could be said to be radiant or sun-kissed.

  I did not want to film with strangers. I wanted a reprieve from dynamism.

  “Let’s go, funboy,” Noah said, knocking at the door.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I muttered. I reached down to my left big toe, pinching its nail between thumb and forefinger. I pulled it up and out like the gull-wing door on a DeLorean.

  I tossed the nail in the toilet. I took a last look in the mirror. I hoped that what was hard to endure in the present moment would be, one day, sweet to recall.

  Dispersed about the parking lot were grill stations manned by drumstick-shaped dads in shorts. They were jabbing at and flipping the meatstuffs they’d brought from home, which would have spoiled in a power outage. Strangers handed them mixed drinks, a tacit barter for the barbeque. Many of the drinks were (bluck) White Russians made with milk brought along for the same reason as the meat. A litter of children was chugging this whole milk straight from the carton in between bouts of winging footballs around the parking lot at groin level.

  “Hooo baby,” Noah said, grimacing as he calibrated our shotgun mike. “In lotso foot pain, brother. Gonna drink it far away.”

  Glenn had me interview a few of the older women ringing the pool, which was drained and somewhat suggestive of an open sarcophagus. They weren’t worried, they said. They were from Ormond Beach, Flagler Beach, Daytona. A couple of them seemed to be of Eastern European extraction, for they gave off a turnipy warmth. “He can blow me, this Matthew,” said one. She followed a grunted laugh with a long slug of her drink.

  Their disregard—it reminded me of the hurricane parties I attended in my youth. Let me preface this by saying that at my Miami Catholic school, we didn’t have snow days, naturally. We had hurricane days. A lot of them. Tropical storm days, too, and flash-flood days. Days in which the cancellation of class meant less “where shall we sled” and more “will we have a place to sleep after this?”

  Which is not to say that these days were gloomy. Oh, no. As you can see, a strange glee arises throughout the peninsula on these worst days of the Mean Season. A kind of swaggering, both-hands-beckoning, devil-may-care attitude. This attitude filtered down to kids like me. I came to understand that, every year, Mother Nature would try to tee me up, knock me out—and there was honor in not flinching.

  I knew little of hurricanes’ actuality. For example, I did not know that the Spaniards had appropriated the word huracán from the native Taínos of the Caribbean. They did so because el huracán was a force the Spaniards had never before reckoned with. The phenomenon was so much more powerful than Mediterranean storms, so seemingly purposeful and directed. Each one acted as if it were an agent carrying out orders from on high, settling debts and relaying messages like a mob enforcer, or the accuser who toyed with Job.

  The colonists learned to identify the signs of its approach: aching bones, severe headaches, premature births, ants climbing up the walls, saw grass blooming like crazy. Such were the results of plunging barometric pressure. I wonder now: Maybe that’s where our giddy bluster came from? The hydrostatic mass rushes out to sea, and everything in nature runs, hides—but not us. Even when the mandatory evacuation siren sounded—not us. We hunkered down, painted phrases on our plywood as if el huracán could read. We jutted our chins and pointed at them.

  And we threw parties in honor of our audacity. Outside: a monster whirlwind born from a vacuum. Inside: Life! Rollicking hubris! The candles as well as the booze got brought out as soon as the bathtub and washing machine were filled with water. The bes
t part, for a kid like me, was when the eye passed over us. An eerie jaundiced truce in the middle of the tempest. If the adults were shithoused enough to go with us (or shithoused enough not to care), we kids would tour the damage. We weren’t property holders! It was fun! It was like seeing Santa’s list made manifest: who’s been naughty, and who’s been nice.

  I got a lot of muddled theology at my Catholic school. Some of the nuns held peculiar heterodoxies regarding Limbo and the presence of aborted babies therein. As to the question of theodicy, or why God allows bad things to happen to good people—it was rarely if ever broached. So, imperfect in my understanding, I’d race around the storms’ destruction in order to see for myself the divine hand of providence. Our neighbor, Arnold the barber, was spared! That made sense. The mean abuela who pretended like she wasn’t home every Halloween? A tree fell on her car! The world added up. El huracán shook down wrongdoers for things owed, penances gone unsaid.

  It was apocalyptic, this understanding of mine. Apocalyptic in the true sense of the word: apokalypsis, from apo, meaning “un-,” and kalyptein, meaning “to cover.” I thought hurricanes uncovered what had been lying beneath all along. My brashness in the face of such storms flowed from this belief, too, I think. Me and my family were fine people. What did we have to worry about?

  Now, prior to the latter half of the twentieth century, this connection between hurricanes and those affected by them had remained private. Acts of God came and went. You suffered through them or were spared. You held out little hope that human vulnerability to “natural disaster” could ever be eliminated. You simply weathered each storm in turn, hanging on to the understanding that human beings and forces of nature stand in a relation of complementarity and interdependence and, consequently, must be granted equal respect.

  Technological innovation, bureaucratic growth, and evolving public consciousness post–World War II changed that. Hurricanes were transformed from private catastrophes into public events of the first order. Florida-based research facilities, tracking and warning systems, emergency management teams, and the Weather Channel’s Jim Cantore all worked to promote a sense of administrative control that stood in sharp contrast to the acknowledged unpredictability of earlier eras. More than ever before, it seemed, people and property were protected from cyclonic fury.

  Then came Hurricane Andrew in 1992. Peak winds: 175 miles per hour. Storm surge: 17 feet. Death toll: 51. Homes destroyed: 80,000. Total damages: $30 billion. My neighbor Arnold—wiped out. The rectory across the street from my grandfather—a shambles. The farming folk of Homestead, as well as the Air Force base there—sayonara. Homes built by a subsidiary of the Walt Disney Company—as good and pure an enterprise to my young eyes as Holy Mother Church—these homes folded so fast under Andrew’s strain that the builders were class-action sued for fraud. My own house was halved in the storm.

  Before I could process this, I was bundled off to live with some relatives out of state. My parents repaired. When I returned to Miami, my Catholic school placed me in a kind of group therapy for kids who’d lost everything. Here, they finally taught us about theodicy, albeit in a roundabout way. Through talk therapy, we were made to understand that we were not bad people, or even half-bad. Nor, though, was this imbecile chance. The counselors did not want us to think of Andrew as accident. God was here, they told us. His hand was in this. But we can’t know how till Judgment Day, since we are but humans.

  Thus did a crack appear on the surface of my childish faith. This crack widened into a fissure and finally a break when I was teenaged. I refused to read into Hurricane Andrew’s wreckage. I would not divine it as if it were tea leaves. Find the small voice of God in the storm? No. What happened to us was an accident within the economy of dumb matter. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more.

  And, don’t worry, I won’t delve into how I came to reexamine theodicy, and make my peace with it, and forgive my younger self for being so obtuse. (Once my Ivan Karamazov moment had passed, I realized: By complaining about injustice and evil of this world, I was tacitly admitting that this world is not as it was intended to be; I was affirming the existence of a good Creator via the intensity of my complaint.) I will merely make clear that I still refuse to believe that the pitiless circle of nature becomes intelligible, endurable, and even morally beautiful because of some belief in a general happiness arising out of individual miseries. I still refuse to assent to the idea that every up and down along the sine wave of the Universe is solely the effect of a single will, sans any deeper mystery of created freedom. Suffice it to say I now understand that the Good Book does not ascribe any meaning or purpose to suffering and death. Suffering and death are privations of the good—they mean literally nothing in and of themselves—and this fact is perhaps the most liberating and joyous and good aspect of the Good Book. There can be no moral justification of the “natural” evil inherent to the present cosmic order. Evil’s here and will continue to be till kingdom come. To say so doesn’t deny evil’s horror; it denies the possibility that we can abolish it.

  Well and good. Yet I must confess that I felt the ol’ end-times titillation circling my nipples when I saw Matthew draw nearer on an RV television. I was once again anticipating revelation. Not in the moralistic sense, though. This time, I had faith el huracán might reveal something different.

  I was hoping that, for all the “natural” evil wrought—the blasted homes, lost lives, swamped hopes and dreams—el huracán might clear out some overgrowth and uncover a bedrock truth: We cannot estrange ourselves from this world, no matter how hard we try. We are and always will be dependent, contingent, interknit creatures. To delude ourselves about this is destructive in the extreme. Believing ourselves exempted from nature is the kind of misperception that leads to a ruthlessly utilitarian vision of the earth. Seen through this lens, Mother Nature appears distinct from us. More than that, she looks like she was made to serve. From her we take raw material and shape it into whatever we wish. We can, say, uproot mangrove swamps, fill them in, build luxury condominiums along the ersatz shoreline, pressure-cook the atmosphere by flying to those condominiums every winter—and then we can act surprised when a naturally occurring phenomenon emerges out of that warmed water to knock it all down. We can rebuild in the exact same spot, just as willfully, just as unsustainably, certain in our delusion that the storm won’t be back, at least no time soon, and anyway there’s honor in the chin jutting.

  El huracán is a destructive force, but it can also spur growth. It overwhelms and inverts, like a wildfire. It shakes stuff up, à la earthquakes. Wipes the slate clean, flood-like. Behold, it makes things new.

  “We cannot welcome disaster,” Rebecca Solnit wrote, “but we can value the responses.” This is, I believe, the true meaning behind “natural” evil. It is not the facile response—that these things happen for a reason. Suffering and death are not morally intelligible. Christ, they would be far more terrible if they were. No, suffering and death come and go on the wind. But what we choose to do in the aftermath? That means the world.

  * * *

  —

  Glenn, Noah, and I had nothing to contribute to the hurricane party, materially speaking. But we learned, canvassing the scene, that that didn’t matter. Drinks were passed to us like relay batons. RV burgers were on the house. People were grateful that we were recording this, regardless of whether they’d see the footage someday. They acted as if they had to live up to it, this posterity. They were doubly inflated—by the booze as well as the camera.

  Laurent over there was leaving behind two classic cars in his garage in Coquina Key. Darryl told us that he lacked flood insurance but wasn’t scared. There was much woo!ing and razzing. A lot of flipping Matthew the bird. These partygoers described how they had acquired property, had raised children, had had decent unsaintly lives grow up around them until, now, they rattled around inside of those lives like they rattle around in their RVs. Like marbles rat
tle around in spray-paint cans. It was clear that some of them wanted to be emancipated from those lives.

  Noah took frequent breaks to rummage through Igloo coolers. He invented a signature cocktail for the occasion: pouches of Capri Sun squeezed into clear plastic cups half-transluced with cold, cold grappa. Contrapuntal streams of music blared through open motel-room doors, the Scorpions’ “Rock You Like a Hurricane” doing battle with Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks.” Women wearing coral lipstick handed us paper plates piled high with Ruffles. We were given Gatorades to go with our hybrid aperitifs.

  The evacuees recognized that we were weirdo dirtbags, and they loved us for it. We were bohemians! The closest thing to bohemians they’d seen in north-central Florida! We held some allure. And Noah leaned into this. Hard. Deep into his cups, he fronted like he was some undiscovered hilljack Errol Morris. He started flirting with one free-spirited woman who’d outfitted herself with as many leather tassels as possible. “A creative person doesn’t stop at anything,” I heard this woman say, pushing a fingertip to Noah’s chest. “And you’re a creative person, aren’t you?” The dark ecstasy of eclipse was creeping across Noah’s face. “I am a true admirer of life,” he answered.

  Witnessing this, Glenn said: “Eeeee.”

  Nearby, the tasseled woman’s…fella? old man?…lugged propane tanks, handles of rum—anything with a handle, mostly. He laughed, shook his head. He himself had struck up a rapport with the flapper, still carrying her pinecone like a running back with a football. Glenn was impressed that she remained upright. I shared with him some words of wisdom: Do not underestimate the stamina of the psychologically unwell. They will exhaust you long before they exhaust themselves.

  Glenn and I pulled Noah away from his fringed ladylove. Together, we drank heinous milk-based cocktails, we investigated the open rooms. In one, elderly were playing pinochle. In another, preteen boys had set up their Xbox. “Hey, my guys,” Noah said. “You know what I call my old girlfriend?” The children blinked at him. “The ex-box!” he cried.