High

 October 8, 2024

The odd energy of waiting for time to pass. Try to sleep as long and often as I can. Try not to eat and use the energy of being hungry as something to think about. Walk from night stand to workbench looking for a place to type; they’re all wrong for various reasons. It’s the workbench now, keyboard tipped against my legs and the screen almost flush with the bench.

Met me grandnephew Stetson, a happy, imperturbable child. He will be a blessing to everyone he meets. His parents seem rightfully to regard him with wonder. Photos of me and Stetson playing, in which he looks joyful and I look incredibly old. Everyone finds them cute.

Spent yesterday in downtown Alpharetta. It would be possible to spend only one day there, having, I think, exhausted most of its scenic and social possibilities. Visited the Arts Center, which is a classroom with drawings on the wall. Sat in a park on Milton Road (the one where I watched the fireworks two Fourths of July ago) and wrote, and wrote a little more in the lobby of the Hampton Hotel, which seems like home to me after several stays. The writing has not yet come to much. I’m trying to write about the hurricane. It’s possible that it will not be written of.

I feel thwarted even in my lamentation, for I am safe and among family and my property is intact and my suffering is immeasurably less than almost anyone I know. But I am totally disoriented, at sea, futile. I think “I cannot endure to the end of this,” knowing I must.

Hurricane Milton slams into Florida. I resent a storm coming so soon, to dilute attention on us. It might be bigger than Helene. I stop myself from thinking “at least it aimed somewhere else.”

Asheville water authority sends out the message that it will charge fees on water bills not paid in a timely fashion.

Drove the perils of 400 into Atlanta to visit the High Museum, where I checked in with my Madonna.

Elegant supper in downtown Alpharetta.

Hasten the Coming

 

October 6, 2024

Sunday morning.

At home I planted the chrysanthemum plants that came in the box, cleared the deliveries off my porch and the mail out of the mailbox. It is not that far. It is not that far.

The drive from Asheville was complicated by the closing of the Pleasant Hill exit from I-85– the only one I know in Atlanta. I drove toward the city center at the right edge of ten lanes desperate to find an exit. Madame GPS led me through bush and briar but finally to Alpharetta.

Who should call to see if I was well but N, my sweet friend from long ago. He filled me in on the demise of classmates whom I knew were dead, but I lacked the grisly details. “The Deaths of Ellet High” could be a TV series. In our youth he was a better friend than I'd earned, and age has not changed that.

This will be the longest month of my life.  

A stern email comes from the Asheville Water Authority trying to correct rumors (which I helped spread) that part of the problem was slipshod construction and lazy maintenance in the past. I stand, if not corrected, silent.

Attended church at The Parish, a mission of the Anglican Church in America. It meets in an office building and at other times in people’s houses. The congregation is young, and child-oriented in a way that would exhaust and dismay the decorum of All Souls. So many handsome young fathers proved a distraction. I found the gathering uplifting, spiritual, the old message made more vibrant for being related in a different way. The phrase, “Hasten the Coming” plucked out of the litany moved me considerably.  Hasten the Coming. Make Straight the Way. Keep Watch from the High Places. They prayed especially for the victims of Hurricane Helene. How odd and unprecedented it is for me to be prayed for as the victim of an internationally known disaster, a waif and an orphan of the storm. It is an honor I don’t care for very much.

Sitting on the McLaughlin’s porch in the shade of an awning, content for the moment, wondering what to do with myself over the next few weeks.

Hasten the Coming

Make Straight the Way

Keep Watch from the High Places

 

October 5, 2024

After early retiring in the silent dark, after interesting dreams, rose and painted– with an idea for the work on the easel which arose directly from a dream. It is not yet full light. Painting and listening to Josquin on the CD player. 

Horrible thought while painting: what if Cheap Joe’s Art Supplies is washed away? It must have been. 

Met the jolly ruddy mailman at the door. Among the accumulated pieces he delivered was the water bill. I don’t believe I’ll be in a rush to pay it this time around. 

 October 4, 2024

I sit at my own computer in my own study in my own house on my street. Drove from Atlanta this morning. Accidentally engaged the GPS, which panicked me because it took us a way not familiar, through farms and obscure neighborhoods, but we arrived, and connected with I-40 one exit before it’s closed. The GPS lady was calm and omniscient. I’m an untrusting individual, and would lead a sweeter life if I’d lean back and let it roll. From the Interstate nothing looks wrong, but once you get on the streets calamity is everywhere evident. Also evident is that the responsibility for clean-up and tending to the needy has been at the first an overwhelmingly entirely community effort. Power line workers heroically restored power to several neighborhoods. If you saw the state of things regarding trees and lines you’d be amazed at any progress at all No Internet. No water. Officials say “it could be a long time till water is restored,” as though acknowledging it were the same as excusing it. 

Carrier Park, the RAD, and the Swannanoa valley are still under water. 

Decided to stay the night. In the morning I’ll plant some of the flowers that arrived by undaunted couriers in the past few days. Most are bulbs and can wait.

Cleaned out the fridge. The half & half was clawing to get out. Even the iced tea had little floating islands of mold. 

Odd that I creep around in the dimness and have to remind myself the power is on.

The pants I wore to clear trees off the street were covered with wet sawdust and now stink. I had to move them outside. Filled the long-violated toilet bowl with bleach, that it may be washed clean as snow. DJ got his chair back, and is not apoplectic with boredom, so all is well there. People scurry around doing good deeds, making the horrors better. I escaped, return briefly to tend to my little concerns. I hope I have an opportunity to make up for this. 

Every few seconds my hands automatically try to summon the Internet, which won’t be there. What did we do in our youth? 

 

October 3, 2024

Alpharetta, after a tedious but uneventful drive through the South. Wind damage evident as far as Columbia. Had an elegant seafood lunch in honor of L’s birthday. The view from L’s basement windows is almost paradisal, a rough garden, a little stream flowing beyond, shaded by trees and elephant ears. First decent sleep since last Thursday, though the police, looking for an intruder, swept the yard for a while with powerful flashlights. The beam a few times came directly through the window, hurting my eyes even from a distance. I wondered if I could be seen, glaring back. Had to scuttle a spider out of the sink before I used it this morning.  Didn’t want to begin my tenure here by drowning the original inhabitants. Rode to Dahlonaga to look at a house the family is considering buying, a chalet perched on a cliff in the grizzly woods. Met my new great-nephew David Theodore, unbelievably tiny and steadily asleep. In the afternoon J and I were talking in the back yard, and a phoebe approached, brave and unafraid. He hunted and pecked a little in the garden, but seemed more deeply interested in J, and finally perched twice on his hand, pecking it a little as if testing it out for taste.

L is infinitely more family-oriented than I. Duty to family inspires an Ohio trip in a few weeks, and buying the house in the woods is all about family gatherings. I cannot use the word “family” without a slight tinge of irony. I reacted to lack of family cohesion by mistrusting all things bearing that name. She reacted to it by creating her own.

Riverside

 

October 1, 2024

No sleep last night. The earthmovers worked from dusk to dawn, their backup signals the exact pitch and volume as a clock alarm. Did anybody sleep? Was it just me?

Message from A assuring me that the Riverside office escaped unharmed (though the basement under it flooded). Sobbed ugly five minutes with relief. I’d hidden from myself how deep the dread went. I’m sure my dear High Five by the river and all the picnic tables where I did so much writing is gone. The river almost touched it after an ordinary heavy rain. Most everything is gone to some degree. We will have to relearn everything.

Useless, tranquil days spent by the beach. Maybe I’ll return later if recovery drags on, as it appears it might.

Watched a boy, about 13, playing with his little brother and sister on the beach. They were tigers and he their prey. He delighted in his speed and agility eluding them. As a boy I never delighted in anything physical, as breathlessness and exhaustion lay always near. Innocent games of TAG were terror for me.

Reading The Prelude, so my thoughts and observations bend back to me

The ACE has made the beach as straight as the edge of a ruler. That is very weird.

A woman invited me to watch the sunset with her.

Bats pursue dragonflies outside my window. This gives me joy. Now I realize the bats and the dragonflies are pursuing the same (to me) invisible prey.

 

September 30, 2024

The one phone call I got from the world was from L. Amazing.

Trying not to have any shameful emotion about seeing the Marquee, which turned down my work because it was “spiritual” and “spiritual” doesn’t sell, completely submerged. I will think of the hundreds whose work is gone. Terrible thought occurred to me. I assumed the river office was on high enough ground, but maybe it wasn’t. If so, the poems of my youth, all my journals and notebooks and photo albums and theater memorabilia and scrapbooks are gone, the things I cherished most in my possession, perhaps cherished solely. They’ll still be either ruined are well when I return. Sadness fills me hour to hour, intensified by the realization that I’ve lost far less than most. I must force myself to keep making that comparison. 

I liked my life. I see no possibility of returning to it. 

I see no possibility of Asheville’s returning to what it was. The Asheville Era is over. A city that size, whose function is more ornamental than practical, cannot survive four weeks without water.

My mind is like a rat in a box, scurrying from one corner to the other, imagining that it’s missed some way out, that something will be different this time through.

Having brought clothes for three days, I made a trip to Walmart, where the workers were unexpectedly kind.

Wrote a bit of a play about the Army Corps of Engineers. Wandered aimlessly about town at sunset, wanting company but wanting nothing to eat or drink. Many spoke to me. I think I’m probably easy to speak to. 

But sad. Sad as night.