A hurricane, a haiku, and a little bit of hope

As I write this column, four tropical storms are churning in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

You, likely, will have heard of none of them as this column hits the press. Lala is disintegrating in the central Pacific. In the eastern Pacific, Karina and Lowell may evaporate.

Tropical Storm Dolly also dissipated in the Atlantic before ever threatening land. Of course, had she survived her northward journey, Burke County might have been drenched.

Thanks to Hurricane Helene (September 2024), we know the drill.

If Tropical Storm Dolly had become a hurricane, we might never have forgotten her name like we won’t forget her namesake, the late great Mrs. Parton.

Hurricanes in our extended forecast remind me of the ones that marked my three decades living in coastal Virginia.

In September 2003, I tracked Isabel pinwheeling across the ocean to my front door in Portsmouth. Silt from the Nile coursed through her barometric muscle, swirling orange and red in satellite images, category five, eyeballing landfall.

When I was a child, hurricanes thrilled me. As Isabel crashed ashore, my own young sons vibrated with excitement.

Neighborhood trees convulsed like a restless man unable to get comfortable in his own death bed. The Western Branch of the Elizabeth River, visible from our living room, frothed white through gnashing teeth.

Wind groaned. Trees cracked. Water and worries rose.

She was lovely, this hurricane, like an alligator.

The morning after the storm, an eerie silence and lethargic timelessness took hold. Bright sun. Punishing heat. A million-percent humidity.

Power lines down. Roads and stores and gas stations closed. These were the stilled moments cleansed pristine by nature’s perfect violence — before chainsaws and the clacking of generators growled to life.

Trees were down everywhere. The fabric shell of the downtown amphitheater was blown to bits. Mud coated our communities like a dirty bathtub ring.

But we survived.

Our sons wielded sticks in the yard, jousted, choreographed sword fights, battled aliens. They were relieving stress that comes when the world turns upside down.

A young mother peddled by on her bicycle with her two boys.

“I’m mad at myself,” she said apologetically. “My kids can’t find anything to do without the TV. When I tell them to go outside and play, they hardly know how. And it’s my fault.”

Modern childhood is difficult without personal devices and electricity.

My family took meals on the porch. For the first time all summer, we heard the crickets and frogs — and those clacking generators. We enjoyed the piney air, the bright stars glowing in darker than usual skies. Inside, the airless house was too hot.

I became aware of people I once took for granted. Gas station attendants because we needed gas and candy bars and newspapers. People who delivered ice and bread. City workers who restored the downed pumping stations. Utility crews and arborists from bordering states who swamped our region to help.

After three days, when we got power and groceries, we invited neighbors lacking both to our house for a homecooked dinner. We told stories about subsisting without television and hot water and ice cream. And we broke into something I would never have predicted. We recited poetry we had memorized as children and coeds. “Snowbound.” “Leaves of Grass.” “The Road not Taken.”

Pete, a Navy chopper pilot who had weathered worse storms in Vietnam, got us started with his original haiku: Make waves, for when left/undisturbed, even holy/water will stagnate.

They say in times of revolution poets are the first to be shot. Poets dare to craft language from fear, emboldening us to reach beyond it. Despots hate empowered people.

The storm forced everyone outside.

In my mother’s backyard across the harbor, I watched a tree surgeon from Raleigh remove the wrecked pecan tree hanging precariously over the garage. From 50-feet up, he meticulously dropped branches in three-foot sections, log by log, until he stood on the ground next to the 10-foot-high, branchless trunk.

Watching him work was poetry in motion.

“That’s my church,” he said, pointing up to neighbors’ oaks. “When I’m up there it’s easy to know God is the creator. No man could make a tree.”

He spoke of Alabama after a twister hit a church. He arrived when they were still extricating bodies from beneath bricks, the slate roof, and wet pages of scattered hymnals.

“They didn’t have anything,” he said. “No house. No family. Nothing but hope.”

A few blocks from us, the Nances’ riverfront house had flooded.

By Sunday, scout leaders, church members, and neighbors began hauling detritus into a rented dumpster. Rotting fish, crab, and pounds of bacon and burgers from the dead garage freezer had created a monumental stench.

They lost their whole first floor except for their cooking utensils and pictures on the walls. Twelve-year-old Brian lost all of his shoes. But no one was hurt, and their dog was ecstatic to entertain visitors.

Ink-eating newspaper headlines told the story. Hunkering down: Region girds for Major Hit as Hurricane Takes Aim. Swept Away. The Long Road Ahead. The Big Mess. A Slow Struggle Back.

My mother from Hampton occupied our guestroom before the storm. We didn’t want her to weather its fury alone.

A few days after Isabel, we drove Mom — through the moonscape of downed trees — to her house in Hampton on the other side of the harbor.

Even our three little sons were speechless.

In the rearview mirror, I was wounded by the wreckage on my mother’s face. I watched her in the backseat watch the neighborhood she and my late father loved — disheveled neighbors raking thrashed lawns, sunburned men on roofs crawling like ants tacking down tarps and sawing off leaning trees.

Mom wept quietly.

Our sons, concerned for their grandmother and troubled by her tears, patted her hands.

Mom could not speak, but her cherubic grandsons could.

They whispered her name.

“Roro,” they said. “Oh, Roro.”