Tropical Depression

From this vantage inside the house, view of the street obscured height of the study windows, I watch massive tree limbs paw at the air. Rain appears in bursts. Heavy wet drops, opaque from here. I pretend it is snow and get cold.

I think I look sort of militant today castoff fatigue-hued chinos, despite platform sandals and earhoops. In my radical chic fantasies, I can run the underground press in Capri pants and rhinestones and only my laissez faire attitude toward hairstyles will cue the secret police.

The power flashes; it will go out soon, any minute now, you can sense the tree limbs bouncing on the power lines the way the lights flicker fade and resolve into an uncomfortable alliance with ON. Every time it happens I count backward from ten and double-check the scrolling red severe weather warning on the computer screen.

We’re disaster snobs around her. Visionaries of gravity. We like to see things fall and fall hard—worst possible scenarios, monsoon rains, tornado winds, and the sort of capricious climactic conditions favorable to personal unaccountability and shivering timbers. Once a year, during hurricane season, even those inland in North Carolina carry out a mass delusion that we live in the tropics and don’t want to be foiled by a banal storm. As it stands, I’ve received three phone calls in the last twenty minutes, each warning about the possibility of severe weather, then comparing conditions unfavorably to prior storms—this is nothing, you should have been around eight years ago—now that was a storm.

No one else comments on the oddity of hurricane names. Francis—a round, fey, adolescent boy, who whines over lack of candy. Last year it was Isabel—a precocious eight year old daughter of arty parents or a lesser known, chaste Victorian poet with high button collars and pre-Raphaelite hair confined by whalebone combs and tidy snoods until moments of passions lead her to the crags over the moor to meet Richard or Nigel or whatever Heathcliff happens to be available for a fast fuck in the heather before teatime.

I’m inclined to believe all hurricanes are inherently female. All tears and bluster and grave demands and no consideration for the aftermath. As such, I tend to underestimate the Hugos, Andrews, and Floyds. Who would believe a Floyd capable of such wanton destruction? I’m holding out for Hurricane Medea (a storm that will, if it ever appears, either annihilate the population of New Orleans or some other auspicious low lying metropolis or defy expectation and fizzle out in a fit of self-pity in the wide expanse of ocean southeast of Bermuda.)

A few nights ago at work, I fought off customer complaints and retired to the front of the store to watch the sunset—all blood and fire backlighting the oaks on West Franklin Street. A head shop boy offered me a cigarette and discussed nature’s inability to conform to the promises of nautical aphorism. “Red skies at night . . .” and yet, it’s rained buckets this week. Like the rest of the summer. All gray skies and thick blanket of humidity and puddles that never dry.

I grew up in the mountains and so I spent summers at sailing camp just across the sound from Atlantic Beach, where I burned then browned on the barnacled pier, watching blue lit barges float out to the sea in the company of WASPy blonde field hockey players and their clean cut Lacrosse captain boyfriends. I developed a crush on a childhood friend, Michael, for the softness of his summer hair and the way he sat so silent beside me and we rode around on Catamarans on windy days and held our hands over the sides on the off chance that we would touch the dolphins. I also learned to smoke cigarettes without getting caught (an invaluable tool for surviving prep school) and sing along to the Violent Femmes.

The rationale for sending us to sailing camp likely revolved around some collective parental fantasy of us as young adults sipping on gin and tonics while watching regattas. Sailing, like horseback riding, is no longer much of a utility unless you have the money and leisure to pursue it. And some of the kids at camp with me liked the idea of white polos and deck shoes. Becoming one of those assholes with sun-bleached blonde hair with and eighties girl and a house on the Vineyard. The antagonist in an old John Cusack film. And some of us—like me--just liked the water, the sea air, the weather-beaten cottages tucked snugly between pines and dunes.

My mother always told me my attachment to H2O was borderline unnatural, and worried continually about the fact that I refused to heed the lessons of riptides and swim closer to shore. I respected the water, but didn’t fear it. My nightmares were dry, still, and fiery—utterly lacking in water and wind.

I also had a pirate fetish, a secret. I never knew if my mother found a battered paperback full of stories about buccaneers and plundering blackguards in my bookshelf. I remember reading it in secret—as if I expected some sort of reprisal. Pirates represented the exact opposite of what I—as self-described prissy little girl—was supposed to like, which of course, made them all the more intriguing. At eight or nine years old, I felt a flush of something akin to sexual excitement reading about swarthy buccaneers and their dissolute ways. And I tried imagining myself the helpless captive—the busty governor’s daughter in the dresses I’d always coveted, captive to the whim of a cunning captain—but that never held quite the same allure as its parallel story. The one in which the busty governor’s daughter casts off her silken gowns in favor of a sword and bests the men at their own game, sailing off under the black flag with the captain her willing captive.

That the sailing camp was located sixty miles from the site of Blackbeard’s defeat did not escape my attention. Ghost stories were duly darkened by the specter of Edward Teach. We attempted séances on the pier, hoping our Ouija board follies would cause the Queen Anne’s Revenge to rise as a phantom out the foggy sound. I wasn’t young enough to expect it to work, but I remember my shackles rising when we heard the moaning planks of the pier beneath our feet.

(I did, after all, have extra leverage, a colonial governor of Virginia as ancestor, a man, who, among other things, commissioned the men that would kill Blackbeard. Only appropriate that I should be haunted.)

I pretended my father was a pirate king—he would sail up late one night and find me and I would be blown about the bow in briny gowns, climbing the rope to the lookout under the Jolly Roger and to spy on ships to rob, and wily privateers and all the kings’ horses and all the king’s men. I would never sicken during storms; I would straddle a cut rate cannon and laugh at the unearthly electrical fireworks.

My father would have made a lousy pirate king, and I a worse pirate.

But the image compelled me nonetheless.

Still does.