History

 

October 9, 2024

Thinking of the man in the High carrying his baby (less than 12 months, I’d think) from work to work in the Modern Art room, explaining and exclaiming. Like Wordsworth, I imagine that some dim recollection of that moment will color, however unconsciously, the child’s life.

Back in Asheville, suppressing rage that the Internet is not restored. A bear defeated the bear-proof lid (or else I left it unsnapped), overturned the garbage bin and took the food, by that time quite elderly. Hope it didn’t make him sick. It was all the contents of my fridge, and therefore a windfall. 

Good news is that T cleaned up my yard and made it look civil again. It was a task that I wasn’t sure I could address. 

Because of the Cone of Silence over Asheville, I don’t know what havoc Milton is loosing upon Florida.

Unable to master my car’s various display mechanisms, I listened to news the whole way, concluding that Conservatism in 2024 is solely focused upon preventing others from achieving the lifestyle and privileges you yourself have attained or aspire to. It emphasizes difference, mocks compassion, adores dogma, has no particular interest in the truth. All Conservative spokesmen (those interviewed by the media, anyway) consciously and knowingly proceed from a dishonest premise.

My three turkeys paid a visit. I think they’re all girls, for none is aggressive or showy. 

Looked up the hurricanes of 2004, the likes of which I imagined I’d never see again. This is what I wrote on September 8, 2004:

Our little hill was so undisturbed, and I didn’t turn on the radio today, so that I didn’t know Biltmore and the River District, Black Mountain and Swanannoa are under water. South and East Asheville are blacked out, and half the city is without water. I finally went to look when I received an e-mail from a patron who was coming to my studio tomorrow afternoon, which said, “Let’s reschedule when things get back to normal.” I snapped on the car radio and heard people howling that someone had given the order to open the floodgates at the Bee Tree Reservoir at exactly the wrong moment, which meant a flood of water came down the Swanannoa just as the rivers and creeks were carrying their full load of hurricane runoff. I drove in a panic toward my studio, but found that the river road was blocked and flooded. I circled around through the city and came down Chicken Hill, and saw the flood plain of the French Broad not only under water, but under flowing water. For ten years the River District has been trying to pull itself up out of the grubby warehouses and dim garages and become the area’s arts showplace. Now it is under water. Who knows what’s gone and what remains. The New Blue Studios are under water half way to the roof. The Warehouse Studios first floor must be at least twenty inches under. Railside Studios stood in the middle of a lake, but I parked and waded through, and the upper room of my studio is high and dry, though the lower room is gone and a thick stack of paintings I had on the floor are lost.  I didn’t care as much as I thought I would when I was driving and hadn’t seen the awful majesty of it all, People were lining the Craven Street Bridge to watch the great brown fury of the French Broad, bearing whole trees and the walls of buildings. The most distressing part was the heavy stench of fuel oil, the red pools of it lying on the eddies, from where tanks had been overturned and storage facilities flooded. The smell is unbearable. I hope nobody lights a match. Tonight’s forecast calls for rain, and Hurricane Ivan is coming.

This is what I wrote on September 18:

The sky is green-gray, a high wind moaning in the tips of the trees, a day and more now after the slamming through of Ivan. I have all the lights on, and the CD playing Rococo opera, tapping away at my computer, just to revel in having power again. We got fringes of hurricanes in Ohio once in a while–Donna, I remember–but they were just a line of especially vivid thunderstorms. DJ and I watched Ivan on the Weather Channel Wednesday night as it poised to strike Mobile. I kept saying “it’s not coming here.” Thursday afternoon I went down to church and helped lift everything off the floor to the third or fourth shelf, in case high water came. I told everyone it was a false alarm, but I kept lifting, because I wasn’t sure. My nature is such that I have refused to cry wolf from time to time even when the wolf was at the door. Thursday night, Ivan came indeed. The lights went off at about 10:30. What followed seemed to be an eternity of dark and noise, though of course it couldn’t have been any longer than the hours on the clock. It was impossible sleep; I was up most of the night. When walking circles in my own floor grew old, I put on my yellow slicker and went out into the storm itself. The trees were swaying like grass. The mountains were great dark harps, roaring. My colossal sweet gum seemed rocked by a series of explosions. Green flashes were sometimes lightning, sometimes exploding transformers, plunging some new part of the city into deeper darkness. What surprised me was that the hurricane was warm, like a flying bath. I liked that part. Waves of wind-driven rain swept like surf across the parking lots. A pine split and sailed into the street, all but grazing the tips of my toes. I stood and watched it, wondering, until the second when the question was answered, “is that thing going to take me out?” Tremendous, roaring majesty, an exultant god whirling in the middle of the air. I stood in the middle of the Wachovia parking lot, the waves of watery wind coursing around me, the hemlocks bending almost to the ground, and I felt solid; I felt like the earth itself, immovable, maybe, in an unfathomable sort of way, merry, with the great wind roaring around as though we were complimentary powers come to visit each other at the edge of the world. It was stupendous. One doesn’t get to use that word very often, “stupendous.” 

I startled Zack when he came out with a flashlight to inspect his porch, and I called his name out of the whirlwind. The air is filled with the incense of shattered pines. Carolyn’s basketball hoop had been uprooted and launched through a back window of my Explorer. But, in truth, what surprised me was that the damage wasn’t worse. Wind like that, rain like that, should have obliterated the world. The epic quest for a cup of coffee at last achieved– downtown had power--I drove to the studio. The river had risen, but not so far as before. The river district had electricity, so I stopped, picked up my brushes, and painted. DJ bought a battery powered radio, and we learned that two lanes of Interstate 40 had fallen into the Pigeon River gorge, that tornadoes and mudslides had wiped out an as-yet-unknown number in Macon County. Flooding closed all highways east and west, though we could probably have fled north if we’d needed to. The street-level businesses in Biltmore and the riverside studios which had just been crawling out of the debris of Frances were hit again. Ryan e-mailed me about a group of students holed up in a house behind Charlotte Street, and a flying oak had crushed all their cars but his. I had been thanking my luck, though luck, as usual, was not doled out equally. As DJ and I were pulling out to go to rehearsal for the bishop’s installation–which even natural disaster is, apparently, powerless to stop–the lights in our houses came back on.

 Found this prayer I wrote for the reconstruction of All Souls:

With Solomon the founder of the temple, with Peter the founder of temples now and yet to come, we acknowledge that all that is built without the Spirit is built for a season or a time, but all that is built with the Spirit is build for the ages. We ask the Spirit which God sends to inhabit the true labors of the human heart to come to us, to abide in our labors, to inspire our bounty to right use, to perfect our skill and our determination, so that in our building all may be as the Spirit wills. May the lines be plumb, the foundations firm, the door open to all who would enter. May we who have received the legacy of the past deliver the gift whole to those who come after. May those who come after remember us as men and women who received the Spirit, who acted by its voice, and raised our roof into the stars.

Paid a $114 water bill. $5 dollars of that was water actually used, The rest was exactly the infrastructure that failed this week, 

Painting to Obrecht masses on the CD. Serenity that would be prized if the goal were serenity.