Ike Carumba!

Your more rational half knows that
Galveston is straight in his path, and you wish the people of that
poorly situated island no harm. You know that evacuating Houston, the
country’s fourth-largest city, is going to be a royal pain, to say the
least, and that there are serious risks for people, healthy and
otherwise. The consequences of these tropical storms are serious,
intense and extensive. 

No one bets on the hurricane, but
everyone I know watches them in fascination and, at some level,
empathizes with the storm, the one force of nature we endow with human
names. We name them like we name pets. Earthquakes rumble in anonymity,
tornadoes touch down in hapless towns and vanish, leaving us only with
the time and place to refer to them, but hurricanes, like puppies and
ferrets, get real names. We even imagine the storm having human sensory
organs. Hurricanes have eyes. They’re looking at us. And we’re looking
back. 

It’s one of those things no one will
admit to. To say that you’re on the side of the hurricanes would be
like saying you won’t vote for Barack Obama because he’s black. That
will be a secret you take to the grave. But didn’t you enjoy this
hurricane season, at least the TV version of it, just a little bit?

Nah. I didn’t either. 

I didn’t like Gustav, who waddled into
New Orleans just as the Republicans were setting up shop in Minnesota,
and threatened to be a rerun of Katrina, but didn’t have enough of a
storm surge, which is different from the Iraqi surge, but brought to
you by the same crowd. I didn’t like Hanna. She just didn’t have much
personality. A little coastal flooding, rapidly downgraded to a
tropical storm. Not much to blog home about. 

But Ike? You want to like a guy named Ike. Although I tried not to, I couldn’t help but feel drawn into the coverage. 

{mospagebreak} 

It was like the invasion of Normandy. It
was like you were filming the opening scene of Saving Private Ryan in
real time, with the fleet working its way through the Atlantic, quietly
moving in on the coast of France, except this time we all had front-row
seats, cozy and warm in our living rooms, while the ball of death
gathered strength, and wise commentators acted as if they could make
sense of it. 

In the world of the 24-hour news cycle,
extreme weather and extreme violence (i.e. war) have this one thing in
common. You can be completely ignorant of how either of them works, and
within a few hours of watching them on TV, you feel conversant with the
topic, even feel capable of arguing about hurricane preparedness or
military strategy. 

Whether it’s a report from the National
Hurricane Center or a Pentagon briefing, it makes us all feel like
we’re part of the action, and we’re in the know. You can go into a
coffee shop or stand on line at Wegmans and hear people talking about
collateral damage, or debating whether the levees will hold. People
drop terms like “target of opportunity” and “storm surge” into
conversation and sound like they know what they’re talking about. It’s
not like sports or politics, two areas in which novices tend to trip
themselves up easily because there are so many seasoned and passionate
observers around. 

So, if I was rooting for Ike (and I’m
not saying I was) when he was a Southern storm, my feelings changed
dramatically when he took off like a rocket up the Mississippi, flooded
the edges of Chicago, took a sharp right through Cleveland and Buffalo,
then dried out and launched a nasty series of gusty wind attacks on my
very own house. You might remember the night a week ago on Sunday,
Sept. 14, when you woke to sounds like chariots racing outside in the
skies. Eerie was the word most people used.

For us it all collided near the top of a
pair of maple trees older than Lehman Brothers, which surrendered to
Ike’s progeny and plopped right on the corner of my house, creasing the
roof, tearing out the electrical wires, splintering plywood and
shingles, and covering the yard with tree branches thicker than Fred
Thompson. 

In the days following the storm I spent
an inordinate amount of time operating a chain saw. If you operate a
chain saw long enough you can slip over into a sort of daze. The saw is
loud, and you focus intently on one thing: the blade and the place in
the tree where it is cutting, for to do otherwise might have side
effects that may last longer than four hours. As I cut more and more of
the large trees around me, I began to feel measurably wiser about
trees. In the same way that you might, by being able to see Russia,
come to feel that you knew something about Russia. Trees and I were
becoming very familiar. There were a lot of them, believe me, a lot of
them.

For two days we were without power, and
in our case that meant without water, too. So on top of everything else
you can start to feel a little bit isolated. Almost like being in, say,
Alaska. So here I am feeling isolated, a bit dazed and very
knowledgeable about trees, and I look up at the sky. The sun is shining
brightly. We have just been witness to the unimaginable power of the
wind. 

And it occurred to me that right here in
my own yard was the solution to our nation’s energy problems. Trees.
Cut, baby, cut. Burn, baby, burn. Take it from a guy whose whole yard
is covered with trees. So let’s get burnin’. Clear-cut ’em. Don’t wait
for the next hurricane. Start now. Cut, baby, cut. Burn, baby, burn.
Stop worrying about Al Gore. Just get out your chain saws, dudes. Gas
’em up.