Wednesday, August 31, 2011

Why Hurricane Irene made me think about John Cusack...Yep

With apologies to Mark Twain:  Letter from the Earth:  humans are not in charge.

Well, dang.

As I write this, the water in Tranter's Creek is receding.  Our small pier has floated away, several large trees and their branches are lying around the yard and on our outbuildings, our power is back on, and the mosquitoes are breeding.  On the way to work this morning, I saw houses destroyed by falling trees and branches, storm debris everywhere, and wood neatly cut and stacked on curbs awaiting pickup.  In my first class this morning, one of my students talked about losing her car to a tree, and another student talked about losing her home to the Pamlico River.  On the news, people in Vermont and in North Carolina are stranded on little islands that did not exist before Irene.  Roads are washed away.  Homes are lifted off their foundations and destroyed.  Patterson, New Jersey is flooded.  People across the Northeast have lost everything they owned.  Some have lost their lives.

Lately, it seems that just about every day, nature brings her fury.  We are inundated with scenes of destruction through our televisions, our computers, and our phones.  What amazes me is that we refuse to give up.  We humans are determined to go on, to rebuild, to live our lives despite, or perhaps to spite, Mother Nature. 

I'm a bit at a loss here in this post.  Thoughts of 2012 keep crossing my mind, and not just of the Mayan apocalypse variety that people are talking about every time there is a major natural disaster these days, but also of the film variety with John Cusack, who I have loved since Sixteen Candles.  And what does that have to do with the price of apples?  I don't want to make jokes or make light of Hurricane Irene.  I know what it did to people and their lives.  But my brain just...goes...there.  John Cusack playing a dork and wearing a light on his forehead.  And perhaps this is what we humans do in response to not being in charge.

Or perhaps the synapses in my brain are faulty.