The Darkness that surrounded us

In which our Hero has his spirits, lawn and city dampened

So a few weeks ago, there was a weird weather artifact where [science things happened] and a storm parked it’s surly self on top of the city for a few hours instead of strafing it’s way across the region like a normal storm would do. It was remarkable. We got more rain in two hours than the average month. And we got more rain that day than the previous record set during a hurricane. It was a lot of water. It was a lot of damage. The insurance companies will be coming for all of us, because they’re certainly not going to pay for it.

We lost power for the night, and I wrote an entry about dealing with it and coping, but this entry too seems to have vanished on me. But this time I’m not nearly so upset because I really don’t think it was a good entry, focusing too much on the “I did this, I did that” in a way that would amuse me and few others. So I’m returning to the topic a little more removed, but with a lot more focus.

Yet losing power came with a funny little moment. All my gadgets were low on battery so it was a low tech day at the household. But going to the basement in the pitch black to get candles, I noticed lights and realized that I’d forgotten about three heavy battery-backed uninterruptible power supplies that, in my genius, I’d never gotten around to hooking computers up to. But I *had* hooked up my internet modem. So I had internet in a dark and quiet house, ironically, and yet no devices with power to use it.

It turned out that my father hadn’t quite run down his iPad, which was when I found out how bad the storm had been, and how bad the power outages were. So my father and I got to finding other emergency items like some water, flashlights, etc.

Which left my mother free to sit down at the tablet we’d left behind, and, for no reason that I’ve been able to identify, decided to start reading about tomatoes. Every once in a while, she’d start reading out a fact she’d discovered from the article, like how tomatoes are a great source of Lycopene and Vitamin C (true) and how they’re actually citrus plants (false and not even close taxonomically).

Wandering in the dark was interesting. The tomatoes were just funny. But the reason I wanted to write the entry was actually just to capture two stories, little anecdotal glimpses into the parents

The first was just a simple story about my mom and her grandfather. I learned he was a homeopathic healer, and when she was very young and living with him, my mom was apparently prone to instructing him on what to give the visiting afflicted. Some how the face that even as a child she was the boss of them. Or maybe I have the causality reversed, and it’s the future registered nurse formulating at a very early age. Either way, I could see it.

The second story is… well I guess I have to explain. My parents grew up in a place that I’ve described before as trailing into the past, so that their close to the turn of the century here. Cars existed but were too expensive for all but the richest. Buses existed but in farm country, the bus is still going to be miles of walking from home. Also, the bus is the route to the far away city, so for people in the area, they walk. To church, to school, like the jokes about the horse-and-buggy set, getting up half-an-hour before going to bed and walking up-hill both ways.

Except the uphill part is less of a joke. My dad grew up in country that’s called hilly only because they had to save “mountains” for the bigger things to the north. (My favourite place on the lands he grew up on is a rock that’s about a 30-minute walk up a 40° grade. And there’s snakes. I’m told. Well, scolded, really. Ain’t been bit yet.) Going to school, he’d be up before dawn to get food and hike the miles to schol. And afterward, he’d be hiking in the true-night of forrested tracks under the cropped trees. (That’s cropped as in farming, not cropped as in cut. In case that phrase made you smile too.)

Humans have standard tricks for dealing with these kinds of terrain so there are stone-walled terraces where the slopes are too steep, and there are drainage channels too, six-foot deep stone-lined trenches cut through the earth. There are steps cut into them at places to make them accessible, but when you’re a kid, you’re not going to go find one. You scramble down and climb back up the walls unless you’re too small to do it, and then you usually just whine and wheedle till one of the bigger kids helps you.

But at night, in the wet season, my dad and his ilk would be coming home in the pouring rain, soaked to the skin, and there’s even less reason to go around. Instead you climb down one soaking wet wall, wade through the insta-river of run-off, and up the slippery other side. Again, in the dark of a starless, lampless wild, mostly steering by which way is up.

Not that rain was the only hazard. In trackless timber, the only things that get there, get there walking. And when you need more horsepower than a man’s back can give, you get the heavy-duty equipment. Which in that horseless region is an elephant. Not a wild elephant, but a working elephant, chained, with a mahout not far away. I won’t say the mahouts are cruel, but their job is to make an elephant who’d rather elephant things do people things on people time, so I wouldn’t call them kind either. Which makes working elephants a combination of wild and surly and habituated. I’ve seen pictures and video of what happens when one of them decides to make it’s displeasure known; it was tossing over a car at the time. They are not actively hostile, but they are not to be considered tame pets, and they are to be approached with respect even if they know you.

Well, one of the neighbors had an elphant on the property for work being done, and so added to the black of night and the uphill climb and the roar of wild animals is the fact that four of the tree trunks between here and there are the legs of an resting elephant that you don’t particularly want to startle.

And that was a little of my father’s daily walk home from school as a child, told with a reminiscent grin over the patter of falling rain, from more than a half a century and a half a world away.