Chicago Day 2 Exploring
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Chicago Walk
A 6:30 flight that necessitates a 4:15 wake-up time might get you to Chicago with a lot of time left before the 5:00 wedding that’s the reason for the whole trip, but it also drains you just a bit before anything even starts. Still, this morning’s trip was completely painless: easy parking at our local Greenville airport, quick check-in, smooth security check, on-time boarding and takeoff started the trip off stress free if not a little tired. Things went just as smoothly in Chicago when we arrived, so that put us downtown with a lot of time, a little cafe nearby, and no real commitment other than to explore the city.
We made it to the hotel without much problem (Chicago seems to be the city of Saturday traffic jams), took showers, and headed out for the wedding. Pictures from that coming only tomorrow…
Helene-Free Friday
We are fortunate indeed that I could even think of titling today’s update “Helene-Free Friday.” I guess it’s not entirely accurate: the Boy and I did go out and get an enormous bit of wood that we’ll use as our chopping block in the future, but other than that, Helene didn’t impact our day that much.
Other than the fact that we still have friends family staying with us.
Of course, we’re more than glad to help those we love, but it does come with certain advantages to us: three Polish women can make a batch of pierogi (we had leftover mashed potatoes from last night — what else would we do with them?) in almost no time at all.
Most of the evening, though, we spent getting ready for our Chicago trip. We fly out at 6:30 tomorrow morning and arrive back here at 9:30 Sunday. We’ve got our walking tour planned for tomorrow,
and Cocia M is ready to take E for his early game tomorrow morning.
Clearly
This image was making some rounds on social media. On Twitter, I’m sure it went unchecked, but other platforms (read: platforms not yet run by megalomaniacal Nazi idiots) took the image down. It’s fairly clear why: it’s obvious AI.
Why do right-wingers fall so easily for conspiracy theories?
They even have conspiracy theories about their conspiracy theories:
Wednesday After Helene
There was more progress in the neighborhood today: the two trees blocking our road no longer are, and more importantly, the power up the street (due to the downed lines of those two trees) has been restored.
“Has been restored” — the most pathetic use of passive voice ever. Linesmen restored it. Men who are working twelve to fourteen hours every day to bring power back to the millions in the south who lost it.
We should all find one linesman and buy him dinner when this is all over. Each linesman would get dozens of evenings out. Probably hundreds. And we still wouldn’t have repaid them.
On our property, I worked today to remove the dam of debris that formed in our backyard creek. It was about five feet high and seemed like it would completely block the water the next time we had a heavy rain — so it had to go. I’ll finish it up tomorrow.
And in the evening, soccer practice and a walk around the fields. Surprisingly little damage there: almost no trees down at all.
One Good Thing from Helene
Tuesday After the Storm
Our street has been blocked since Friday morning when Helene took down the tree I’d expected to fall for at least five years.
“When are they going to take care of that?” L asked. “When are they going to get rid of that tree,” E asked. The answer was simple, like so many things in Helene’s wake: “I don’t know.”
We kept reminding them about fortunate we are: we had power back the same day we lost it. We never lost water. We have a home that “flooded” with about two inches of water at most, and in the basement, where we’d already prepared for just that much flooding.
Today, though, the linesmen began working in our neighborhood. They took care of the broken power pole behind our house and cleared the tree blocking our road (though that was the city’s work, I guess).
And we decided it was time to do some exploring. We headed back along the creek that we’ve always called our adventuring area. There was a waterfall there that spilled over some rocks and enormous roots of two trees that towered over everything.
Those two trees, however, were casualties of Helene. Minor casualties, to be sure: they were tall enough to take out a bit of fencing in a backyard on our street, but that’s nothing compared to the death toll that’s in the Carolinas.
Heading back home, we noticed another change: without the enormous tree that was hanging over our street (and the blocking our street), our street looks a lot different.
It’s not the only thing in the south that looks different thanks to Helene.
Monday After
Today my friend and I took a bike ride over to the school where we teach. We’d heard that our school was completely inaccessible, and we wanted to see what that looked like.
Our route took us through one of the more exclusive areas of our town, a neighborhood where few (if any) houses sell for less than seven figures. Even our house there would be valued probably 2.5 times what it is here.
The road was, at times, virtually impassable:
We saw some startling effects of the storm. One house seemed to have almost a magic power over the tree that fell in its yard. It damaged only a bit of the gutter on both the stand-alone garage and the corner of the house.
Their neighbors, however, were not so fortunate:
We made it to our school and saw just how blocked it was:
Other than some trees that were in the car line (and have since been removed), there was nothing.
But still the announcement came today: school is officially out for the rest of the week. No e-learning. No nothing.
Second Day After
The second day after the devastation of Helene was for me a day of cleaning again. Yesterday I’d started making piles of brush throughout the backyard. Today, I moved it all to the street. I left a couple of piles because they were primarily old wood (as opposed to the mostly-green wood I took out to the street) because I thought we might be able to make an ognisko from it all — or several, in point of fact.
But the most important event of the day was that we were finally able to get in touch with Ciocia M and her daughter C (essentially K’s sister and L’s cousin) in Asheville, a town which had received about the worst of the flooding here in the southeast. Two rivers run though Asheville, and they of course both flooaded. The Swannanoa River swelled to 27 feet above its normal level, wiping out the road that leads to M’s home.
We’d been trying to get in touch with M since yesterday, but we’d had no luck. We finally got to talk to her today, and our message was clear: if you can get out safely (which, from our research, seemed entirely do-able), get down here now. So M and C packed up some of the food in their fridge, put the cat in the cat carrier, and headed down.
Shortly after she arrived, A, another of K’s Polish sisters, arrived.
“Can we get you anything?” K asked.
“Tea,” A said, without hesitation. Her family has been without power since Friday, and a Polish woman who’s lived without hot tea for that long has one thing on her mind. But K, being Polish herself, had other things on her mind: “Of course, you’re staying for dinner, right?”
Soon, A’s husband P called. “Come for dinner!” we said, not making it a request or an option but rather a requirement. A demand, even.
P arrived and it was soon like all the Christmases and Easters our three families have spent together. P and I had a couple of beers and some laughs; the ladies had white wine and some laughs — hopefully everyone felt better when it was all said and done.
It’s a strange feeling having a mini-party in the midst of all this misery and devastation. The images coming out of the area where I grew up, for example, show the far-reaching effects of super-charged Helene. People have lost their homes, and some have lost their lives. But we have to be grateful for what we have, and I don’t think anyone would begrudge us for some relaxing laughs that set everyone’s spirits a bit at ease.
After P and A left, we took Ciocia M to the living room and taught her to play golf on the Switch. And thus we ended our first night together.
The question — the concern — haunting M’s thoughts is simple: how long will they have to stay with us? They’re welcome to stay as long as necessary, but that’s not really the issue. How long will conditions keep them out of their home?
Asheville is bad: Greenville is heavily damaged, but Asheville is simply wrecked. “It’s like the apocalypse,” M said. Water lines are broken; power lines are down everywhere; the winds blew down countless trees; rivers have deposited tons of mud on all the streets; flood waters have swept away buildings and cars then totaled buildings they left behind. It will take months to get everything back to some semblance of normal.
And for C? Her senior year is now thrown into doubt. How will they possibly be able to go to school? How will they make up the lost time?
These are of course questions no one can answer. All the steps ahead of everyone working on the recovery effort: before power can be restored, the damaged lines and poles must be accessible. This means the fallen trees have to go. But can the crews get to all the trees given the bog that Asheville has turned into? So many pieces to coordinate. And this is happening in communities in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Tennessee.
The commentators are right: this is our Katrina,
The First Day After
Yesterday everyone was accepting the fact, I assume, that we’ll be without power for some time. That was what I was thinking. “We’ll be without power a couple of days, maybe three,” I thought. And I was so pleasantly surprised when we got power back yesterday evening. In the back of my mind, though, I thought that perhaps lots of people would be coming back online today. I knew it was unlikely, but what we know to be the case and what we want to be the case often come into conflict, and we like our cognitive comfort, so we choose the easier, less-likely alternative.
This morning passed as every Saturday morning in the house, which only reinforced that thinking. K Skyped with Babcia; I spent some time grading papers; the kids slept. The only real difference was that we were all using cellular data as the internet had gone out overnight. Most of our late morning and afternoon was just like any other Saturday as well: K worked in the house; I worked in the yard.
The main difference: my yard work consisted of cleaning up the mess Helene left behind. And she did leave a mess. Branches were everywhere, of course. But because of the severe flooding in our back yard, all the debris from our yard washed into the back left corner of our yard, trapped by the fence and the debris itself. This meant that that entire corner of our yard was a mixture of previously-mulched leaves, new leaves, old rotting leaves, twigs, branches, and some old logs. It was a mess, and cleaning it up will take more time than I spent today. “A few weekends” I would normally say, but it turns out we have a bit more time than that.
We received a phone-blast from the school district informing us that schools would be closed on Monday and Tuesday. They posted essentially the same thing on the district website:
Greenville County Schools will be closed on Monday, September 30, and Tuesday, October 1. With widespread power and Internet outages, eLearning is not possible. Once we have better estimates of when power and Internet will be restored, we will announce plans for Wednesday.
So we’ll have at least two more days to work on the mess in the backyard. I only segregated everything into piles: wood we can eventually burn on the firepit, brush that we need to take to the roadside, and twigs that fall somewhere in between.
The website message contained details missing in the short phone message, details that make me think it’s all but certain we’ll be out for the entire week:
Stable power and safe transportation are the main factors necessary for resuming in-person school. Once power is restored, cafeteria food supplies must be restocked, which will take a minimum of 48 hours. While clearing roads is necessary, transportation cannot be provided safely with so many traffic signals not working. As it is safe to do so, we are physically checking our locations and prioritizing repairs. We currently have at least 90 schools and offices without power and Internet, with inconsistent power at the other locations.
There are so many trees down that officials have been unable even to reach our school to check on its condition, I learned. Given all the challenges facing us, I doubt we’ll be back in school the following week.
After dinner, we took a walk around the neighborhood and saw how lucky we were. We have a literal forest in our backyard, and all the trees were sitting in completely saturated ground for hours, with the prevailing wind blowing straight through the trees to our house. That not a single tree fell in our yard is almost shocking.
Others were not so lucky. During our walk, we heard chainsaws in the distance, and as we made our way up a curved hill, we saw what was going on: several men were working on a roof, cutting the branches off an enormous tree that had fallen right in the middle of their house. And their neighborhood still has no power, and will likely not have power for a week according to Duke Energy’s estimates.
And that’s to say nothing of the folks in Florida who lost everything. We have family in just that situation: K’s brother’s brother-in-law and family, whom we visited this summer. Their entire house was completely inundated, and just as they’d finished renovating after the last catastrophic loss.
It puts our slight flooding in an entirely different perspective.
Helene
It was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm. We’ve heard that before. Ivan was supposed to be a once-in-a-hundred-years storm, and by the time it reached us, it was some light wind and a bit of rain. So we were probably all a bit skeptical about what would happen when Helene rolled through.
As with Ivan, we canceled school (rather, it was an “e-learning day,” which means little work in a practical sense). I thought it would be a relatively easy day with few stresses.
And then Helene rolled through: winds up to 70 miles per hour. Eight inches of rain in our city. It was, in short, a disaster. There are trees down by the thousands throughout the city.
The adventure began last night: I stayed up to make sure the rain was not getting too heavy and flooding our basement. I kept checking our sump pump in the crawl space, and every time I looked, it was dry.
“Maybe we’ll make it,” I thought.
This morning K got up early for work and when she saw the basement was still dry, she did some yoga, ate some breakfast, and checked the basement one last time. That’s when she came to wake me up. Surely she envisioned the normal routine: shop vacs going like mad in a desperate but ultimately doomed effort to keep ahead of the flood. That’s surely what she was thinking as she came to wake me up.
And then the power went out.
We spent most of this morning, as a result, trying to get water out of our basement with towels, buckets, and brooms. We worked for hours and seemed to get nowhere. The water in the backyard continued to rise, reaching its highest level ever: a good bit over our trampoline. Still we fought. Eventually, the rain slowed and then stopped, the water went down in the backyard, but we still had water coming into the basement. Around eleven this morning that finally stopped, too.
We went out for a ride to see if anything was open and to see how the town looked. Not good.
Especially Conestee Dam. Conestee is our favorite local park, but it has a dark side: the dam that makes the lake (though now it’s more a swamp with the sediment that has gathered there over the decades) holds back untold tons of toxic waste that textile mills upstream dumped into the Ready River a century ago.
The century-old dam’s structural integrity has been a topic of much discussion locally and in the state capital, and the powers that be have finally taken the first steps to solving the problem. But when I saw what was happening there today, I feared it might be too late.
In the early evening, we saw power company trucks working on our street, and within a few minutes, we had power again. But it’s spotty: the houses on the street that intersects ours are still without power. In the neighborhoods around us, some streets have power and others do not.
Other areas have gotten it worse, though. Asheville, where we used to live and where Cocia M and her daughters live (although the oldest now lives in Charlotte during the school year) got pounded:
Shopping Center
Every morning, I drive up Mauldin rad until it intersects August. As I cross Augusta, I always catch sight of the strip mall on the corner of Potomic and Augusta and wonder how any of the stores there possibly stay in business.
Many of the shops are vacant, and the few that do have businesses seem so neglected that their demise seems imminent.
And then, out of the blue one morning, the whole thing is gone. A pile of rubble, with only a short a news report about it.
The comment at the end of the report about pushing people out of their homes without giving them any affordable options was likely not a comment about the shopping center but about the neighborhood next to it — the neighborhood that houses my school. There has been noticeable gentrification taking place over the last decade or so. A quick look at Zillow estimated property values in the area tells the story:
Reminders
The dump truck was a highlight of a birthday some years ago — his fifth? sixth? seventh? It was all he was dreaming of, and he loved it so.
Then he outgrew it, and K thought of using it for a planter. She had a potted plant in it, replaced every now and then, for a couple of years.
Now it sits by the side gate of our fence, neglected and forgotten until I walk into the yard, happen to glance back down.
International Festival Dancing
Decisions
Sometimes, there are no right decisions; there’s only a queue of increasingly wrong — sometimes increasingly harmful — decisions, all standing patiently in line for us to inspect them, reinspect them, obsess over them, fret over them, stress over them, reexamine once again, reconsider yet again, and constantly feel crushed by them.
Sometimes, there are no good decisions; there’s only a pile of increasingly worse decisions — often increasingly harmful — and we just have to look them over and decide which of these awful decisions we will take, which of these awful harms we will inflict.
It’s never something as morally abstract as the trolley problem. It’s always direct harm to a relationship we treasure. It’s always choosing one hurt to inflict over another to someone we don’t want to hurt at all. And so it always doubles back on us and causes us as much pain as we doled out. Perhaps more. Perhaps it’s only with a little experience and a few years that we see that.
Sometimes, there is no way to juggle all the things we’re required to keep flying overhead in never-ending arcs. Focused on keeping the chainsaw’s roaring blades away from our hands, we lose sight of one thing or another, and the knife comes clattering down to the floor, damaging something. Or worse, someone.
I feel like this teaching throughout the day: there are little decisions I have to make constantly (Do I let her go to the bathroom now or would it be better later? Do I let him go to the vending machine?) and some only seem little (Do I call him down now, knowing how he’ll react and knowing the disruption that will cause — which will be the bigger disruption? Do I correct her writing now, even though her mistake has only a tangential connection to the topic at hand? Do I try to force this kid to work with someone or let her work on her own again this time even though we’ve had the discussion about the merits of collaboration and made an agreement to try the next time we’re in groups?). But there is always — always, always — a decision just lurking.
Nowhere else is this more true than in parenting. Things glide along fine until they don’t, and then someone is always going to be disappointed; someone is always going to be hurt.
This is especially true, I’m discovering, as one’s child moves closer and closer to that magic number: eighteen. It’s especially true, I’m seeing, as one’s child becomes increasingly cognitively developed and is no longer making arguments like, “I just want to,” but sound, logical arguments that acknowledge their own shortcomings in the present situation and yet make a good case for getting what she wants. It’s especially true, I’m learning, when she fights back tears of frustration and tries her level best to keep her emotions in check and act like an adult.
“Because I said so” is no more a legitimate reason than “I just want to.” At least it’s not anymore, because the power of logic: what’s going to change in the next two and three-quarters months? Is she going to be any more cognitively developed? Emotionally developed?
K and I love being parents, truly we do, but even after nearly eighteen years of it, we’re still wondering if it will ever get any easier.
Portrait
International Festival 2024
At Work
These three kids are among my best workers. Z, the boy in the middle, wasn’t the best worker last year.
This year, he is. When I told the seventh-grade administrator about the change, she threw her arms up and proclaimed, “Hallelujah!”
Old Friends, Old Teammates
They’ve known each other for years. They’ve played together on at least three different teams. During high school season, they’ve played against each other for four years.
Two years ago, when he Mauldin girls took state, L’s team beat S’s and E’s team in straight sets.
Tonight, the roles were reversed. Woodmont is a regional powerhouse this year just like Mauldin was two years ago.
But no matter who wins, the after-game picture is always the same.
Weezer
First (and maybe only) full family concert.