by Ken O'Steen
By nightfall, rain was drumming hard on the cottage roof. When the wind revved up, the gusts would turn it sideways, causing it to strafe unnervingly hard across the window glass on the oceanfront. Lila responded by turning her back to the windows, and drawing, while turning her head at times to look at “Annie Hall” on television rather than merely hear it. I sat beside her choosing to confront the escalating weather conditions by listening under headphones to a consecutive number of extraordinary albums by XTC. A better diversion from, or accompaniment to a hurricane, I couldn’t imagine.
There had been mention on the six o’clock news shows of local authorities considering a call for involuntary evacuations along the coast, but none had been made as yet. The mayor, and the head of the local emergency planning bureaucracy assured us it was, “very unlikely.” While “caution” was “being advised, residents are going to feel the need to protect their property during the storm as best they can, and we think it is important for them to be able to do that; unless we feel it is absolutely critical, so dangerous really, that evacuations cannot be avoided.”
Reporters popped up all over the place, in all manner of protective weather gear, in order to depict precisely what the conditions were in any given area, by standing in them while in front of the camera. We were apprised of the existence of, and the whereabouts of shelters to accommodate those who had evacuated voluntarily, or were just unbearably nervous, with a tour of some of the places of sanctuary, most with concrete floors, brick walls, and cloth cots, that made the hospitality of a hurricane look relatively inviting. Whether the shelters offered cable or satellite never was addressed.
The storm, though intensifying was still a long way from reaching hurricane status as of that evening, and was not realistically projected to reach more than the minimal Category One severity, we were assured by our confidante, Rambo, which he, like everyone else took pains to emphasize, had the potential to “rock a lot of people’s worlds in southern California.”
When “Annie Hall” was over, Lila put her drawing away and moved to the computer, covering her ears with headphones as I had done. Always the contrarian, I removed mine. In fact, the impulse driving my immediate movements was to create a poem. Out with the CD player, in with the legal pad. Either I was moved by the idea of the coming hurricane as an irresistible subject for poetic expression, or the looming tempest was acting as my muse. I pushed a chair as close to a window as possible, planning on resting the legal pad on my lap, and thinking I would crack a window so slightly as to prevent a jet of air from blasting in and tossing the room, while allowing me to absorb the sounds of wind and rain and surf in their agitation, and to inhale the smells of nature borne by the turbulent air. What happened though was that water blowing in ended up making large splotches of water on my legal paper, then pools of it, that eventually ran in little rivulets down the paper and into my lap. It blew into my eyes, so I couldn’t see, the wind finally flapping the pages of the pad like a dealer shuffling a deck in Vegas.
I shut the window, stripped the wet pages off of the pad and junked them, then sat back, and began to will myself into contemplativeness. Light from the television, and the reflection of various colored objects inside the cottage showed up in the window, distorted by the rain actively streaking the glass, bringing to mind the opening scene of “Taxi Driver.” I pursued a suitable snatch of imagery that could be located somewhere in that original source, but after a while, the expected imagery still eluded capture, and I desisted. After a few more minutes I squeezed out a line that had to do with the wrath of god in Manhattan Beach, and shaggy blonde men hanging ten on crosses. Then I scratched it out.
Shortly thereafter an image of a pier spinning in the eye of a hurricane like a clock in an Orson Welles film started to jell, and from that I got the fuel for a string of lines. I had six of them, and was about to add a seventh before calling it a stanza, when Lila took her head phones off to tell me if I wanted another crack at the news, it was about eleven.
Nothing was new about the logistics of the storm, or what was expected of it, but we now were heavy into local tales of preparations. The local news squads had fanned themselves across the southland, seemingly staking out every Ralph’s, Home Depot and Radio Shack under the Pacific sky. There was little that differed with the routine preparations for earthquakes regularly suggested, and depicted by these same channels, videotaped documentation of people with an unusual zeal to make the purchase of batteries, water, flashlights, and masking tape. The only difference here was that people dwelling near the water were in the market for sandbags, as well as the other items. As for us, we were not currently planning sandbagging missions on our little beach. In fact, where bags of sand came from, neither Lila nor I was really sure.
The two of us subscribed to the theory that since we had seen such reports of storm preparations in various parts of the country for many years, channels across the nation simply all reverted to identical pieces of file tape, whatever the “crisis,” whether the threat at hand was earthquakes, El Ninos, even Eastern snowstorms, all the reports virtually interchangeable: citizens standing in line holding all the toilet paper two human arms can cradle, while bread and milk go flying off the shelves around them. It made you wonder if shoppers were equally frantic in their loading up on Grand Mariner and packages of Trojans. If they were…and I suspected they were, you never saw it.
When the report was over, I turned the sound down, and returned to my chair by the window and my legal pad. Not long after, Lila took off her headphones, turned the computer off, and rolled into bed with her book. I made another effort to nuzzle up to nature’s fury, as well as its beauty for the purpose of my art, cracking the window again as minimally as I could. I would put my face close to the screen, I thought, and breathe the air in, and then close it, before l situated the legal pad on my lap again. But a sustained wind, by all accounts tropical force in velocity, forced water, sand, insects and microscopic plant life into my face and eyes with the power of a fire hose, and I shut the window.
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