me, my wife, and the derecho

My wife and I have been happily married—not giddily happily, but happily enough—for 40 years. From time to time I have been asked what our secret is. My father always said, in respect of his 50-year marriage to my mother, that while love comes easy, a marriage was something you had to work at. So that’s the answer I usually give: hard work. That is true, I suppose, as far as it goes, but how far is that, really? There are so many intangibles. There’s sexual attraction, for one—romance, if you will—but that business, most know, will only get you so far. You do have to like the person you’re married to, I will say that, otherwise the whole thing will end in misery—and if it doesn’t end, so much the worse. A generous spirit goes a long way—that should be obvious—though it is often overlooked. What else? Space, people need space. Sense of humor? Necessary, but alas, not sufficient. And so on, and so forth. Point being, I’ve given this a fair amount of thought lately, trying to come up with an honest answer, and in the process learned that there is actually a whole lot that goes into a successful marriage, if you want to call it that. But why think it to death? When all is said and done, what it really comes down to is this: it helps to be married to someone with a forgiving heart, the kind of person who doesn’t keep score. I am married to that kind of person, as it happens. Were it otherwise, take my word for it, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. For my part, following her example, I am working at being that kind of person also, I really am. It’s hard work.

Take the derecho. Wait, sorry, you know what I’m talking about, right? Because I wouldn’t have myself not too long ago. I mean, I know the Spanish word, first heard it back in the 70’s on a spring trip to Mexico, when a friendly street vendor employed it, augmented by vigorous pointing, to indicate the way from the Guaymas bus station to the nearest hotel. I’m sure I embarrassed myself with the stream of abject gracias I let loose when the light finally came on and I realized what he was saying: the hotel was straight ahead. But what can I say, I was that grateful. The thing is, though, despite the fact its usage in meteorological circles goes back to the 19th century, I personally had never heard the term applied to any kind of weather. Not until the summer of 2012, that is.

That was the summer that featured what has been called the deadliest, most destructive thunderstorm complex in the annals of North American weather history. This thing started in Iowa on the morning of June 29, crossed over Chicago before noon, hit a cruising speed of 60 mph as it blew through Indiana—by then a squall line a couple hundred miles wide with winds gusting upward of 90—and just kept right on going, petal to the metal, through Ohio, parts of Kentucky and Pennsylvania, all of West Virginia, Virginia, D.C., Maryland, Delaware, and southern New Jersey, then out into the Atlantic, where it finally petered out sometime around four the next morning. If you look on a map of how the storm tracked, the image you get is of an enormous tornado lying on its side, with the tip of the funnel in Iowa and its mouth spread across the eastern coastline from New Jersey to North Carolina. That’s exactly what it was like too, in its speed and fury, a tornado (derived from the Spanish for “turning”), except instead of turning, or twisting, this wind—bowed out across hundreds of miles as I say—came straight at you. Hence the name.

We live in a northern Virginia suburb of Washington, D.C., my wife and I, and we were at home watching the ballgame on TV that Friday night, the night of June 29. Now, our almost half-acre corner lot happens to be fairly private, in that it is surrounded by big trees and abundant shrubbery, so it’s not unusual for me to go outside to relieve myself under cover of darkness when the urge strikes. It was around 10:30 when the urge struck, and out I went. We were in the middle of a heat wave—the summer of 2012 broke all kinds of records—so it was quite warm and humid. The air seemed completely stagnant. To the northwest, though, the sky was glowing and glowering, as if a battle were being fought in the distance with heavy artillery fire but a sound shadow prevented our hearing it. When I went back inside I asked my wife, who is a bit of a weather junkie, if we were expecting any weather. She said, no, she hadn’t heard anything. I said, huh, that’s funny, or words to that effect, it looks kind of weird outside: the sky is lighting up, but there’s no wind, and no thunder. She immediately changed over to The Weather Channel, where dramatic warnings were being issued with great enthusiasm, but we had very little time to digest this news before the thing was on us—boom!—slamming into the side of the house like a giant wave. The wind was of hurricane force, the rain horizontal. We retreated to the lowest most sheltered part of the house, anticipating the kind of siege we’ve become accustomed to, living where we do—summer thunderstorms can be fierce and, especially with all our big oaks and maples, fraught with danger. But the thing of it was, like a tornado, the worst was over in minutes, and we soon emerged. Up and down our street, trees and telephone poles were down; power lines were on the ground; a transformer at the corner had caught fire and was quietly burning itself out. The sky was still pulsing all around us with silent lightning—the only source of light in our now pitch-dark neighborhood—and it was still raining some, but a warm trailing breeze was all that was left of that savage wind.

So, that was the storm. The hard part was the aftermath. I mentioned the heat wave. Daytime temperatures, which had already been scaling over 100°, didn’t come down as Friday melted into Saturday, Saturday into Sunday, Sunday into Monday … but now we (and four million other folks, apparently) had no power. I got a good two and a half cords of premium red oak out of the two trees that had come down in our yard, and with nothing else to do, spent my time in the mad-dog sun hauling and stacking it after our tree man bucked it up for me. We’re old campers, my wife and I, so we managed well enough those first couple days, behaving like models of composure, or so I’d like to think, despite lacking that trinity of modern-day essentials: electric light, refrigeration, and air conditioning. This was at least partially due to the fact that, in addition to a Coleman lantern and stove, we had a pretty decent stash of party ice left over from the time of Hurricane Irene, which had come through the previous August, just after the earthquake but before Tropical Storm Lee. Somewhere in the midst of those events, our only son got married, and he and his lovely new wife moved into a tidy little row house on Capitol Hill. I mention this because, by Monday, our ice supply was exhausted, and the demand being so great, the few stores with back-up power in our vicinity were selling out within minutes of any deliveries, which were sporadic. Coincidentally, I have to admit, the heat was definitely beginning to get to us. Capitol Hill power lines, it turns out, are underground, so our newlyweds did have power. Now, the thing of it is, they happened to be out of town, visiting her family in Wisconsin. We—God bless ’em—had been entrusted with a spare set of keys. My wife managed to reach them by phone. By all means, she was told, feel free to stay at our place. And that, my friends, is exactly where we were headed the first time I heard the term “derecho” applied to weather. Well, actually, that first time, to be honest, I misheard it.

“Wait, what did he just say?” We were listening to the weather news on the car radio as we were driving across the 14th Street bridge. Since the storm hit, it was the only news we cared about.

“He was telling about the widespread outages.” With all the hours my wife has logged watching The Weather Channel over the years, phrases like “widespread outages” fall trippingly off her tongue.

“Yeah, but no. What was that word he used to describe the storm? Did you catch that? Wait—there—he said it again.”

“I can’t say that I—”

“Durocher?”

“What?”

“You know, Durocher. ‘Nice guys finish last.’ ‘Win any way you can.’ The Dodgers. The Giants. Leo Durocher.”

“What’s that got to do with the price of bacon in Belgium?”

“What?… Never mind.”

Now, I have to tell you, campers or no campers, spending a few nights with only one light source to speak of (fireflies don’t count) imposes a kind of … I won’t say intimacy … call it proximity on a longtime married couple that they will have long since learned to prefer living without. Sharing a succession of poor night’s sleeps on an unfamiliar and undersized basement bed, resorted to in desperation as the hot and humid atmosphere rendered upper-story rooms uninhabitable, doesn’t help either. So, yes, irritability had become an issue.

Imagine our relief, then, when we turned the latch on our son and daughter-in-law’s front door and stepped into a fully operational modern living space. We cranked up the air conditioning, transferred our soggy provisions from our “cooler” to the refrigerator, powered up our laptops, turned on the TV—and one of us poured himself what he considered to be a deservedly generous libation (on the rocks!), kicked off his sandals, and besat himself in his son’s sublimely comfortable leather chair.

“Aren’t you going to water the plants?” My wife was in the kitchen, making preliminary preparations for our first real honest-to-goodness dinner in three nights. It is true, some of the plants in the tiny front yard had appeared wilted.

“I guess I should,” I owned. The first sips of my adult beverage had mellowed me. I got up, went out barefoot.

I tended to the front yard first, then the back, a small, enclosed garden plot, backing on an alley, which is accessed from the kitchen. The grass felt soft and cool underfoot. An oak-leaf hydrangea, if I remember, required particular attention. When I attempted to go back inside, the kitchen door was locked.

“It locks automatically,” my wife informed me when she answered my knock.

“So I see,” I said.

I went back to my son’s chair and my icy beverage. The Nats game—pardon me, that’s our team hereabouts, the Washington Nationals—was just getting underway. When you’re not taking the power grid for granted, you realize how blessed you are with all your not-so-simple-after-all, electricity-dependent, comforts. I sipped my drink, began to feel an almost spiritual peace. After the first inning, I went out back again to savor the contrast between the two worlds, man’s and nature’s.

It was a nice evening, you could say, if your mood was elevated, as mine now was, and you had a ballgame, a comfortable chair, and a cool drink waiting for you in an air-conditioned house.

My wife poked her head out the door. She was in a good mood now too. “This is how I would like to live when we retire,” she said.

“It is nice, isn’t it,” I said, grinning, and extended a hand to her. “Like a little love nest.”

She smiled, took a step, reached, and I gently pulled her to me.

Click.

“Oh,” she said then, ever so softly, “no.”

Men carry things in pockets; women don’t. The car keys were in my pocket. The keys to the house were in her purse. Her purse was in the house. We were locked out.

I slumped down into a lawn chair. She hung her head. I couldn’t speak; she didn’t try. We had a longish walk ahead of us, in my case barefoot, down the glass-strewn alley and then around the block and back to our car. There was no way around it.

The silence that descended upon us then and there abated during our somber ride home only long enough for a brief question-and-answer session, which, fortunately, was not recorded.

I only remember the final question. It was my dear wife who asked it.

“Do you think the day will ever come when we can laugh at this?”

My bare foot slipped off the gas pedal, but I recovered. I knew how bad she felt. I wanted to say yes. More than that, my better self—the part of me that knew that walking on glass was nothing compared to the hours she spent in labor bearing the child whose house we were locked out of, for example—wanted to pull over and kiss her full on the mouth. But all I could think about was: ballgame, chair, ice-cold drink—not necessarily in that order. Cold day in hell, my inner Durocher prompted, but given climate change and whatnot, that actually seemed possible by comparison. Also, it made me think of air-conditioning, which I was trying not to do. I said nothing.

So. There you have it. Not my best moment by any stretch, but then again, sorry to say, not my worst. Into each life some derecho must fall. But here’s something you have to continually remind yourself about marriage: you can’t win. What you do, if you’re smart—this being the point I’m trying to make, I think, but even this is not exactly easy—you play for the tie.

The third anniversary of the derecho was three months ago. We had our first laugh about it last week. It can only get easier.

Thomas Shane is a contributing editor for Arcadia. His stories can be found online at Per Contra, Mount Hope, and trans lit mag. Other publication credits include Aethlon, American Way, Elysian Fields, Light, Other Voices, River Oak Review, Slippery Elm, and Trajectory, and the anthologies Fresh Water and When Last on the Mountain: The View from Writers over 50. He has also been runner-up or finalist in a number of writing contests, including the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the International Imitation Hemingway Competition, and the Dzanc Books Short Story Collection Contest.

For more work by Thomas Shane visit his page at Online Sundries site.