Things could always be worse.
Reflections on a hurricane's aftermath
You’re amazed at how often you flick the switch on the bathroom wall when the power’s out. It’s muscle memory. It’s a need. Light, after all, is helpful so you can lift the toilet seat lid and not pee all over yourself. I mean, have you ever peed all over yourself? As an adult?
The natural reaction to a dark room is to light the room. But when you can’t, you devolve into a frustrated state. The electricity pulsing through underground wires around our home has gone out before. Minutes, hours at a time even. But days? We might as well be a third-world country.
Hurricanes are fickle monsters. They rip apart one home and leave the neighbor’s house move-in ready. One street is deemed impassable with downed trees and power lines. The next street over? It’s like nothing ever happened.
A few Fridays ago, things were getting a bit nuts here in the Carolinas. There was rain. Lots of rain. Hours and hours of rain. Probably three inches had fallen by the time the darkened sun lit up the world just enough for us to see. But then the winds came. And then the power went. Ceiling fans. Air conditioning. Refrigerators. TVs. The internet. SWEET LORD, HOW DO WE SURVIVE WITHOUT THE INTERNET? And of course, the refrigerator.
I’m no stranger to hurricanes. I was all of 8 years old huddled in a hallway with my family when Hugo blew through South Carolina in 1989. I remember hearing the wind but thinking for some reason it was actually the ocean’s waves pushing two hours inland to overtake our home. The next morning, the road in front of our house wasn’t visible for the thousands of pine needle branches strewn across it. No power for a week. No school for a week. A difficult time for a 2nd grader unable to plug in the Nintendo and work on beating Castlevania II.
Then the first week of college, some storm whose name I cannot remember threatened Charleston enough to where the governor declared a state of emergency, the school shut down, and students evacuated. It was back home for a few days before heading back down to the coast. No power was lost, just hours and hours in traffic trying to escape.
In 2018, the rain and winds brought by Hurricane Florence, or maybe it was Michael, exposed the poor quality work our roofer had done just months before. Water poured from our ceiling. I got the frantic call from my wife while I worked a barely-above-minimum-wage job at a local grocery store. Putting food on the table was hard enough. Repairing a roof that should never have been leaking in the first place was not a viable financial option.
Helene has proven to be a different animal. Downed trees and power lines happen with just the occasional spring thunderstorm. But the war zone atmosphere Helene left the South went beyond the bizarre.
With the power out, there’s little to do but drive around and see the destruction around you. The four of us packed into the car on September 27 to see about a downed cypress tree at my parents’ house. But first, there were numerous other trees to drive around on the backroads heading over there. Some roads were completely impassable. And with a half foot of rain falling in the previous 10 hours, who knew what trees were still left to tumble? The ground saturated well beyond capacity, the roots creeping closer to the earth’s surface, giving way to toppling winds reaching 70 mph.
Before we left the house with no electricity, we discovered damage of our own. Our daughter heard the blinds in her room rattling, a symptom of an exterior window blown out of the frame, clinging to the house by one fragile hinge. What could I do but pull down the shade, close the blinds, and pray for the winds to die down?
The tree at mom and dad’s home caused no damage. But because it was covering a neighbor’s driveway, we pruned and sawed as much as we could to clear it away. Not the way my mom would’ve preferred to spend her birthday.
But things could always be worse.
Hours later we fought massive crowds at the local Publix, seemingly the only place in the northern part of the county with power. “We have 14 generators running, so we’re never slowing down,” the cashier told us. Staples like bread and Pop-Tarts were long gone. We were just hoping for something to get us by for dinner and meals the next day. Perhaps the next several days. The thing about electricity shutting off is that you have no real knowledge of when it might come back on. That may be the most terrible inconvenience of it all. No way to see in the dark, and no way to know when you’ll be able to again.
When we got home and stored away all the non-perishable items in our pantry, my wife looked up at the kitchen ceiling. “Uh oh.” Two brown spots. We assumed at first they were from a bathtub needing to be replaced, but their appearance after such a massive storm was too coincidental.
It was the back of the house. The roof around the bedroom window. Another piece of damning evidence against the miserable roofer that had cost us thousands. But no water leaking from it, at least. Our kitchen floor was spared.
A storm’s aftermath feels equally cruel at night. You cannot see the houses with oak trees forming gaping holes in roofs. You cannot see entire pine trees blocking traffic from either direction. You cannot see the brown spots on the ceiling or the window dangling in front of the house.
You can’t see those things, but you can feel them. You can almost hear them. That Friday night, with no lights to be seen anywhere, the only sound came from neighbors running generators. We walked around our house holding up cell phones. These $800 devices had been reduced to nothing more than flashlights, no longer with any power source to charge them.
The silver lining was the night sky. Without any artificial light visible for miles around, the stars shone brighter. We sat on the back deck looking up. “I think I might sleep out here,” I said, knowing I wouldn’t. The world outside felt too strange to trust with a night of restless sleep.
When you’re just praying for your own four walls to stay standing, it’s easy to discount the trouble beyond your own half acre. So when the power came on late Saturday afternoon and we were able to watch some form of local news, our lips could only whisper “Things could always be worse.”
Just an hour north of us, flood waters were ravaging entire neighborhoods. Communities that had thrived for decades had been washed off the map. No internet or electricity was but a minor concern when people were standing on their roofs escaping from floodwaters. Helicopters were rescuing entire families. Roads that used to require four-wheel drive to navigate now needed boats. Mudslides have shut down parts of the interstate.
Did you know even with no electricity or internet the emergency alerts still come through on your phone? The tornado watches, the flash flood warnings, uncommon but not terribly frightening notices. Not until the county state of emergency alert comes through, the one telling you that 911 is not operational and that the county’s emergency resources are all out taking care of problems do you begin to freak out a bit.
The world was feeling like a Walking Dead episode, similar to but more localized than 2020’s pandemic. The twilight zone of it all was verified with streaming reports of damage and devastation. The reports of lives lost. Not just in the mountain communities of western North Carolina, but here, just miles from us. Each county’s death toll rising by the day.
A mother in her thirties dead from a tree falling on her roof.
A man dead from carbon monoxide poisioning. His generator was not properly ventilated.
Two elderly women dead from a car accident at an intersection where the lights weren’t working. They were sisters.
Those were just in our county. A few counties to the south, a pair of firefighters died when a tree fell on their fire engine.
“Things could always be worse.”
Last week marked a year since I nearly died in a hospital bed. That sounds dramatic, I suppose, because I’m fine. There’s this weird thing where every few years or so I pass out and my heart takes a brief sabbatical, this time for 16 seconds. They’ve yet to find any real rhyme or reason.
In October last year, I was unemployed, coming off losing a job that I was really, really good at just months before. So maybe stress is the trigger to my heart shutting down. Who can really say?
In 2018 as water poured from our living room ceiling, I was working a mediocre job after losing another job I adored. Maybe these moments are funny to God. Maybe He layers burdens on us sometimes just to remind us how little control we really have. Unemployment when staring at unexpected expenses is rather cruel, if you ask me.
Still, the saying goes: “Things could always be worse.”
Recently I’ve been reading The Year Of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion’s memoir on the sudden loss of her husband and the grief that followed. In brief, the story goes that she was in the kitchen preparing dinner on the day before New Year’s Eve in 2003. Her husband sat in the living room reading. She asked him a question. No response. She asked again. Nothing. She couldn’t have known right away, but he was already gone. Something with his heart.
It was all compounded by the fact their grown daughter was at a nearby hospital in a coma. Didion talks about trying to, weeks later, explain to her daughter why her dad wasn’t there. She talks about cleaning out her husband’s closet, and taking his sweaters and pants and belts to a local second-hand clothing store. She mentions how she was hesistant to give away his shoes. What if he needs them when he comes back, she thought. Grief can displace rationality. Like trying to turn on the light switch even though the power is out. It’s habit. The power is always on. These lights always work. They’re not dead, they’ll be back. These shoes will be waiting for them.
In one part of the book, Joan Didion references a research article on happiness and how people recover from tragic events in life.
The researchers noted that although “research has shown that people can adapt to a wide range of good and bad life events in less than two months,” there remained “some events to which people are slow or unable to adapt completely.” Unemployment was one such event. “We also find,” the authors added, “that it takes the average widow many years after her spouse’s death to regain her former level of life satisfaction.”
Was I “the average widow”? What in fact would have been my “former level of satisfaction”?
A loss of life. A loss of a job. A loss of financial stability. A loss of a bedroom window. Thinking of Didion’s book, the phrase doesn’t seem to work. “Things could always be worse.” But how could they then?
Yesterday, a local news headline read: All 1,107 people in Rutherford County accounted for. Just miles away from our home, a county can now verify weeks later all of its citizens have been found. That feels like a story from the aftermath of a tsunami in a third-world country.
Helene was hell for many people. As I type this, thousands still do not have power. The city of Asheville doesn’t have potable water. People don’t know what their long-term housing looks like.
The inconveniences for us were much less, to be certain. But the stress of money, of repairs, of uncertainty still hangs like a lowered limb ready to split from a tree or a power line fraying at its ends.
No question that things could always be worse. We’ve spoken aloud in prayers the things we’ve long taken for granted. It doesn’t mean we can’t shout our problems. It doesn’t mean we don’t sink in despair occasionally at the weight of everything.
If you drive by our house, you’ll see the window back in its frame. Not because it’s fixed yet. It’s duct-taped in place. Yes, I know it looks tacky. We joke that it works well as decor with Halloween approaching. I tell people I’ll switch out the plain duct tape for red-and-green colored tape as Christmas gets closer.
The roof is fixed. A new window has been ordered. And by the way, our refrigerator that had been having issues well before Helene cut off its power is now somewhat fixed. At least in a way much cheaper than purchasing a new one.
The power is back on. The internet is working. The limbs and leaves scattered across the backyard have been burned. They now exist as nothing but blackened ash, one less reminder of chaos.
Sure, things could always be worse. One of us could be dead. My heart could take another unexpected leave of absence. The bank could repo our car. The HOA could send a nasty letter about the duct-taped window.
We’ll just strive to be thankful. God’s been good to us even if at times He seems to cover us with a dozen wet blankets that make life stressful. I’ll try not to complain. And remember the blessing of electricity as I go around the house and turn off the lights that everyone else left on.