The Perfect Storm?
Blow, winds, rage, blow! (Not here, please.)
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Friday, September 19, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110004032
NEW YORK--Weather is often the only subject innocuous enough to raise in an elevator or at a stuffy dinner party. "Yes, isn't it awful, raining again," we muttered day in, day out, all spring and for much of summer.
Yet the elements still have the potential--sometimes, literally, earth-shattering--to overpower the bulwarks of modern civilization. A few degrees of temperature, a dozen increments of wind strength, a slight shifting of rock and mud can mean the difference between life at its most banal (Oophh! Très chaud, time to pack up the Peugeot and head for the Alps, so au revoir, grand-mère!) and tragedy (a lethal heat wave, like the one this summer in Paris that hospitalized and killed hundreds, including grandma from the last parenthesis).
Monsoons, droughts, deadly heat--such misfortunes still wipe out villages in places like India, where power blackouts are common and the inevitability of natural disaster helps reinforce Hindu resignation, the stoic acceptance that allows a farmer or bricklayer to start from scratch, over and over again.It's a comfort for an Indian, therefore, to live with American children who look forward to nothing in life so much as a "snow day" or a rainstorm with the potential to disrupt adult routines and become a thrilling event. It's amusing, too, that urban shops like Crate & Barrel sell "hurricane lamps" as decorating accessories, romanticizing the idea of hunkering down with survival equipment, bringing the bad weather indoors, as it were, as part of an urban aesthetic.
The Western world suffers natural disasters, too, of course, and its spiritual imagination is also shaped by them. The Lisbon earthquake of 1755 killed some 15,000 and was taken up by philosophers as evidence of the power of evil. Indeed, the weather--deafening thunder, streaks of fire from the sky--must have been the progenitor of religion itself, of the idea of a puissant God. Even now, in an age of air-conditioning, modern engineering, and predictive charts and graphs, sudden visitations from the heavens have the ability to inspire in us a premodern awe.
Who could help but shudder at reports from contemporary Baghdad, descriptions biblical in their language, of a freak storm that "blackened the sky" and "flattened date palms" as tanks rolled in, earlier this year? How else to explain our practice of giving feminine names to hurricanes but as an effort to soften them in our minds, to tame them as they gather strength. (Masculine names were added to the log as a concession to feminist objections, but doesn't "Hurricane Desirée" or "Hurricane Esmeralda" inspire, while "Hurricane Bruce" leaves us cold as beached flounder?)
Hurricane Isabel is the latest termagant causing a stir. Less ominous than the storm itself but moving was the sight of senior citizens in wheelchairs being evacuated from a coastal nursing home on Wednesday, probably frightened and disoriented by this unpredictable menace, this change in the daily routines to which the elderly cling so stubbornly as their ultimate end approaches. Many of them must have vivid memories of Hugo, which left devastation in the Carolinas and elsewhere some years back.
But often the "Perfect Storm" fails to live up to its advance publicity, and it's the news coverage, not the rain, that leaves us saturated. There's the inevitable on-air reporter in foul-weather gear, shouting into a microphone over the roar of crashing breakers, and we sometimes suspect that he's positioned in the windiest possible spot for greater effect. There are the Breaking News updates and always a camera shot of a roadside "evacuation route" sign. But we never tire of the dramatic buildup, and maybe that's a healthy sign that we haven't become completely alienated from nature.
Yesterday morning in New York, a strange light and relentlessly stirring trees seemed to foreshadow violence. Fortunately, the hurricane then "lashing" and "lacerating" Southern coasts--meteorologists being among our most florid modern poets--had already been reduced by a few levels of magnitude and looked unlikely to cause as much mischief in the Northeast as had been feared. Still, weather always wins in newsroom triage, since it is the thing that affects the lives of most people, the most directly, inconveniently and uncomfortably. Or inspirationally.Perhaps our ambivalent fascination, our stocking up on water and candles, is a vestige of primitive fears and excitements, of our human anticipation of both evil and beauty. Or perhaps, and I prefer to see it this way, it's all just a good wheeze, assuming danger's not too near--and a chance to play at Boy Scouts once again.
Mr. Varadarajan is editorial features editor of The Wall Street Journal. |
