That time I walked in a hurricane.
A meditation on disaster and the shape of the world, at the outset of Katrina.
The umbrella broke almost immediately.
That I had it with me at all extends beyond ridiculousness into a hyperridiculousness documented by science only through hokey simile. Like handing a hat to someone during brain surgery because she looks cold. Like wearing hot pants to a forest fire because it might get hot. Those are tries, and they still exist several dozen degrees below the measurable stupidity of bringing an umbrella into a storm with gale-force winds.
The first burst puckered it like a tulip. I tried to straighten the canvas out and hoped it wasn’t broken. In this moment, the rain felt like it was uppercutting me. I was deeply offended by this apparent breach in nature’s pact with humanity on the direction in which rain is supposed to attack, and I considered filing a complaint. More immediately, however, I was trying not to drown.
I somehow managed to right the umbrella into a more umbrella-like shape. It puckered again. I miraculously flipped it again. It puckered a third time. The wiring came undone as I pulled against something strong I could not see.
When you’re traveling in a severe storm, you can feel like you’re in argument with the wind. It pushes you to stop moving this way. You move ahead. It challenges you to justify your footing. You stand your ground. Thunderstorms can be reasonable. Tornadoes can be fickle enough to let you past.
The winds from Hurricane Katrina rebuked me fundamentally as one of its outer limbs brushed across Central Alabama. Whether I had a rationale, it did not care. I would be moved.
I still had four-tenths of a mile to make it back to my apartment, on foot, in only jeans, a buttondown, and a surely ragged pair of sneakers.
And a broken umbrella in my hand.
Which I did not throw away.
For reasons unclear.
On balance, I have not led an extraordinarily stupid life. Much of it has been in rigid service to attempting prudence. I come from the modest circumstances of Less Than Ideal, and one of the ways the people in my place kept me there was by observing in me a dimness that only seemed to broadcast into their skulls. If you view life as flowing through some kind of a cosmic balance sheet, my response to all that alleged stupidity was to work that a little harder to put a positive figure on the ledger.
Even still, there have been times that I follow an urge to do something stupid. Under the principles of the cosmic accounting system, I considered these my down payments for several subsequent years of outright competence.
Ten years later, I don’t remember there being even any sort of addled logic behind the idea. I only remember waking up the day the storm was supposed to hit, checking the weather, and knowing when and how I would do it.
I even told my roommate.
“I’ll be back in a bit.”
“Where are you going?”
“Gonna head to work for a while, then gonna get my car to higher ground, then gonna walk back,” I said. “Hopefully I’ll get to do it in some of the wind.”
I don’t think he called me a fucking idiot. At least not in so many words. I don’t remember what he said, but I’m sure it was one of those nicer, passive-aggressive things that people who think you’re a fucking idiot say because they know outright calling you a fucking idiot won’t do them or you any good at all. Because you’re a fucking idiot.
The day followed its order. I went to work. I did work things. I had several opportunities to leave sooner. I didn’t.
I parked my car. I tried on a few spaces. The itch in the back of my head told me not to park here or there because of imaginary trees that might float above the landscape until they inconveniently discover my vehicle. I finally put it in a place where I did not itch. I walked thirty steps before I realized I forgot my umbrella. I turned around and pulled it out of my trunk. I took my time.
By the time I got to the sidewalk, the wind’s howl had transferred from “Golden Retriever concerned about his retirement savings” to “Coyote in withdrawal.” It was a half-mile downhill to my apartment. I did not know that distance then. I didn’t care.
I wanted to walk in a hurricane, and I was sure it would turn out fine.
The first half of the walk was like being assaulted by a person who expressed their feelings toward me through creative application of a pressure washer. The last half was something crueler, something more patient. I would have two steps of peace followed by a wind that shoved me from behind so hard I nearly left my feet, then be hosed in the face at the moment I regained a notion of balance.
Where those two halves met was a moment of everything: rain that killed my eyes, wind that ate my breath, and a legitimate sense that this could be permanent. I had felt the moment coming, the way you feel a row of bad thunderstorms in the air the afternoon before they mortar where you live. I could not feel an end.
And then it stopped like the end of a sentence. The cruel harassment stage started, and I felt like I was being bullied by invisible teenagers until I got back to my door, when a moment of everything started again as I felt my way inside.
At some point, I concluded all this had been a poor idea.
There are times in your life when discouragement stops being a feeling and starts paying your bills and confirming your mailing address and complaining about the price of gas when it fills up your car.
One of those times for me was around a decade ago, when the procedure of life became autonomic, and the absence of the foggily defined things I wanted made me feel like a Less Than Ideal person. I said horrible and untrue things, I used people to not feel alone, and I tried to learn how to become a person with the kind of entitlement to which no ounce of my existence has ever furnished a reasonable claim.
Until this point, I had taken big storms fairly seriously. When I was small, a tropical storm passed by Orange Beach during a vacation there, and I watched in delighted terror as a massive bruise of a cloud floated by offshore, tossing water spouts at nothing. No storm, including it, had ever matched my investment, but I was still the person who bought big bunches of bottled water and food and batteries and checked to see if I was in a secure location if a storm looked like it would come far enough inland to get me.
As Hurricane Ivan sheared the Gulf Coast, I was far enough north that all I and the friends I encamped with saw was a persistent gray drizzle. The power stayed on, so did the cable for a while. We watched movies. We drank. We treated the quiet and careful people among us poorly.
In one way or another, Ivan killed more than 50 people in the United States. It killed another 71 in places I did not live.
I had a lovely time.
I shook my head, trying to loose the water from my ear canal, as I left puddles in the hallway back to my apartment. I didn’t care who saw me or what they thought I was doing, or what they thought at all. I walked in and said hi to my roommate, wet in ways swimmers can’t rightly describe. That time he did call me a fucking idiot, or at least I feel like he did.
I undressed in the bathroom. When I came home, I didn’t think I needed to shower, but I did anyway. I was too cold to try anything else. I left the broken umbrella by the toilet to dry.
As I dressed again, I thought of friends from New Orleans and the coast. They stared at doppler images on their computer screens for the last two days, and tried to talk themselves into microscopic tilts in the storm, into believing that it would turn out fine.
There is no cosmic balance sheet. There is no black or red ink that codes the pieces of your existence into something neutral, into something okay. There are only the things you do, and outside of the immediate moment, they occur fairly independent of the things that have happened to you.
I do not feel I have lived anything close to an awful life. Over time, I have been horrified at how much of what I have done has bore into respectability after gathering vintage. Yet, I still wish I had spent as much time pretending to be a better person as I have playing at being someone worse. I wonder what I have lost in people, and I wonder what the world might have given me if I had not cratered into selfish afternoons.
But the world does not care what you do or who you are, or that you are even around.
The world just happens.
It is just there.
That night, I stood at a third-floor window and followed with my finger as transformers exploded down a circuit in blue-green bursts over the tree line.
In the next days, I would hear of people heading into Mississippi with guns stuffed into their jeans to recover what was left on their parents’ land, and I would watch helicopter shots of people begging for help on their shingles. But that night, before I learned how the world would be, I was mildly drunk on vodka I poured myself in the dark, talking to whoever would listen about how the explosions kind of looked like special effects, and trying to ignore that I still was a bit cold.
