The eye wall of Hurricane Isabel moved fitfully through southeastern Virginia in the late afternoon hours of Thursday, September 18, 2003. She made landfall as a category two, weakening considerably in her approach to North Carolina’s Outer Banks. By the time she arrived in Norfolk she was at best a puny category one. Her much-anticipated arrival coincided with high tide, unleashing flood waters swollen by five inches of rain and a storm surge of seven feet.  Our quiet residential neighborhood was briefly transformed into a canal city, as overflow from an otherwise staid inlet known as The Hague flanked the stone masonry of century-old houses that have impassively withstood worse than this. Isabel’s rains were not nearly as drenching as those that have accompanied weaker coastal storm systems, Floyd for example. Her winds were not the stuff of hurricane legend--no Andrew, no Agnes she.  Most of us never even saw gusts over 74 miles an hour, a fact that technically reduced Isabel to an overwrought tropical storm, a drama queen. In short, for all her bluster Isabel did not turn out to be “the big one” that residents had dreaded, doubted, or hoped for, prompting some to evacuate, others to let in the cat, and most, like me, to make ready as if the messiah herself had appeared on the national weather radar.    

When I relocated to this area thirteen years ago, I discovered that Norfolkians live intimately with water and accept its mercurial qualities. You won’t find them huddled in padded closets during severe storms. Nope, in fact, folks in their hurricane finery could be seen in droves during the afternoon of Isabel’s immanent approach, some promenading with small children in bright yellow rain slickers and fashion flip-flops, others trolling the shorelines with expensive camera equipment. My neighbor, Justin, released from his shift at P.F. Chang’s, went storm-watching along Olney Road, a busy commuter thoroughfare, and reportedly wound up ankle-deep in water alongside a bobbing jellyfish.  Another neighbor, Leigh, a former NASA meteorologist, was waist-high in brackish Hague-waters, with her beer can carefully held aloft, when she decided to give it up and head home for a hurricane-sized bong hit.  At first, Isabel was a lark, a spree.  But then the trees started falling--huge, stately trees--and all those frolickers who had not stowed their cars in garages began to panic. With the windows shuttered, I peered out between the slats from my second story apartment as one intrepid SUV after another chugged slowly up the white-capped street in desperate search of shelter from the grand magnolias and hoary oaks that without warning or fanfare began keeling over, one after another, like drunken Fleet Commanders at a Tailhook convention. By the end of it all, five trees had fallen within view of my window: an oak crushed a Toyota Camry, flattening both its front tires; a cranky sycamore blockaded the entrance to a private elementary school, and brought power lines down across the swing sets in its playground, all in one fell swoop; a magnolia was graciously caught by the eaves of a neighbor’s roof; two tall, lithe elms collapsed side by side only inches away from one other, a lover’s suicide, one suspects.   

Four days after Isabel, I went to have my teeth cleaned at the office of Dr. Vernon O’Berry.  It felt good to keep an appointment. It was grossly humid for the first days of autumn.  The air was heavy with the smell of root rot from the craters that had been opened when slabs of pavement were ripped out of the earth by the weight of falling trees. These violent eruptions were everywhere, as if we’d been carpet-bombed by disgruntled dendrologists.  The trees themselves were reduced to tilted stumps, their trunks having already been amputated and cut into timber blocks by rogue work crews who lined our once-shady streets with piles of storm debris: plastic bags stuffed with leaves and twigs, oversized branches, piles of unsalvageable rugs and deck furniture.     

When I arrived at the dentist’s office, my conversation with Manuela, the hygienist, was typical of the conversations I’d been having repeatedly since the storm.

“You got power?” asked Manuela.

“Not yet.  And you?”  

“Last night,” she said.  “But I couldn’t believe this morning.”   

Manuela went on to tell me that she had awakened to discover that her $600 generator, which she and her husband bought in preparation for Isabel--in order to keep the sump pump in the basement going--had been stolen out of her backyard.  “Didn’t hear a thing,” she added disbelievingly, tipping my chair back with the foot pedal control.   

“People have lost their minds,” I said, closing my eyes in anticipation of the steely click of her instruments against my incisors.  “It’s from not having cable.”   

Isabel was my first hurricane.  It would be nice if all our first experiences had lovely names to remember them by.  If this were so, my first serious love affair with a fellow graduate student in 19th-Century American literature would be Buckminster. My first martini would be Esmeralda.   But really, when you think about it, naming hurricanes makes about as much sense as naming lab monkeys: the name grants a false air of permanence to passing weather systems and doomed primates.  We name them anyway, though, not because it allows us to humanize them but because doing so affirms us--the givers of names--in our humanity and may even free us from the burden of guilt.  “This Isabel has become a full time job,” a department colleague complained to me, on the fifth day after the hurricane, as if he were grumbling about a colicky infant.  “I am at least a week behind on this grant proposal.”  The university had finally reopened and everyone was there, even faculty on sabbatical, to access their e-mail, breathe in the fluorescent lighting, and find out how others were faring.  It was there I learned that a former colleague who is retired and caring for an 80-year-old husband with advanced prostate cancer lost her house when the Lafayette River filled it with fourteen inches of foul, primordial muck.  She took this as a celestial sign that the time had come to sell.  She claimed that Isabel left them no option, although her husband continued to insist, weakly, that he would die in that house and nowhere else.  Even a category one hurricane, properly named, can withstand the blame for decisions that we may one day finally accept as the product of our own brute yet invincible common sense.   

The problem with Isabel was that her decisiveness seemed almost ludicrously disproportionate to her actual strength. In Virginia alone, more than 17 deaths were attributed to her.  The causes varied: some drowned, including two Mennonites, a man and his daughter, who were swept away in their horse and buggy while trying to cross a flooded bridge; several were killed by falling trees; one woman, who was indoors, was crushed when a tree cleaved her house; many were killed in Isabel-related car accidents, some crashing their automobiles into fallen trees, others skidding off the road into standing trees; in three separate incidents men died of heart attacks while cleaning up tree-debris after the storm; one man, along with his two dogs, was found dead of carbon monoxide poisoning; an elderly woman without electricity fell down her basement stairs and was discovered dead by her husband in the middle of the night; one boy burned to death when the candles he and his mother were using for light caught fire; and one suicide was attributed to the prolonged power outage, although I have to think that this victim had been toying with the idea long before Isabel turned off her lights.   

Then there were the minor indignities wrought by Isabel, the most widespread of which--and the one popular memory will memorialize for years to come--was loss of power and all that tends to go with it: hot showers, refrigeration, home-cooking, and countless daily electronic rituals.  Why, I wonder, did we not see this coming?  The heavy rainfalls of summer had left the earth mushy as over-cooked grits.  Top this with some zippy hurricane-force winds, bake for 12 hours, and sure enough you’ll get Blackout Casserole, enough to serve a befuddled populace heedlessly unaware of their reliance on poorly-maintained above-ground power lines.  One week after Isabel, approximately 175,000 residents of Tidewater, myself included, remained without electricity.  Dominion Virginia Power assured customers that they were “working around the clock” with backup crews  from Florida, Oklahoma, Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Louisiana, Ohio, Georgia, South Carolina, Alabama, and even Canada. Isabel may have been small potatoes in hurricane terms, but the mess she made of the power grid was the worst in Dominion’s recorded history, “horrific,” as one dumbfounded utility spokesperson put it.  Who knew that so many trees could be toppled by such a girly storm?   

The city instituted a curfew for the first weekend following Isabel.  Most residents, however, were disconnected from electronic news sources and remained blithely unaware of any restrictions on their behavior. That Saturday, I attended a cookout sponsored by the International Graduate Student Organization--mostly students from Russia and the former Soviet republics--which recently began calling itself “Doctors without Visas.”  An Uzbek chemist took over the Weber grill, contending with the diverse cuts of thawing meat that we had managed to pool from our respective freezer compartments.  Maybe it was the atmospheric tikki torches, or the enticing aroma of grilling food, but everyone let their hair down.  An under-stated yet distinctly lawless current coursed through the party.  Senior faculty bummed cigarettes off their research assistants.  A couple of recently-arrived students from Kiev spoke openly of their disappointment in the United States--so fat its people, so bland its architecture--and recalled, with sweet nostalgia, the rolling blackouts of their youth. Everyone got smashed on lukewarm beer and danced ridiculously to “Tatu” on a battery-operated CD player.  I made it home at 3:00 a.m. , driving drunk to the BBC World News and the more ominous call of distant sirens that we heard almost continuously in the days following Isabel as cars unwittingly charged through intersections, ignorant of the etiquette of nonworking traffic lights.   

"We are restoring power to customers at a rate that is twice as fast as any previous restoration effort this company has ever mounted," said Jimmy D. Staton, senior vice president of Dominion’s operations. Still, at day eight and counting, the slowness of the recovery effort became a scandal. On that day, the Richmond-based political commentator, Michael Graham, reported on his Web site that Dominion Power had lied to the public about the intensity of their restoration efforts.  They had forbidden linemen to work more than 12-hour shifts and, by their own admission, never actually had crews “working around the clock.” Graham asked southerners to join him in publicly expressing their outrage.   

Virginians responded by politely defending their utility in the press, and remaining silently stoic in the face of reports that power in some areas could remain out for weeks, maybe even a month longer.  The problem, I then realized, was not Isabel.  It was the south.  I flashed back to a bumper sticker that I had spotted not long after my arrival in Norfolk: “Shit Happens.” And I recalled mentioning it to my class during a lecture on regionalism and assuring them that one would NEVER see a bumper sticker like that up north where I was from, because shit didn’t simply “happen” there.  On the contrary, up north we knew that somebody was responsible for that shit, and when we found out who we’d make him pay for it, or at least transfer him to another department.  It got a laugh at the time, but it occurred to me that there might have been some deeper truth to it. There was something wrong with these people, a fatalism with possible roots in the vagaries of an agricultural economy, or in Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, but wrong.

After that, I became obsessed with the restoration project.  Hit redial on my phone and you would be automatically connected to the recorded voice message of Dominion Power’s Customer Service line. “Please listen carefully as our menu has changed.” My days were spent at work behind closed doors, scanning the Dominion Power website and all local news outlets for any word of what concrete actions were being taken to rectify this injustice.  Understandably, health and safety facilities were the first priority in the restoration project.  This made sense.  But after that, from what I could gather, it appeared that retail centers, strip malls, and indoor shopping malls, some with multi-screen movie complexes, were getting serviced.  I imagined hordes of frantic women and unshaven men storming the Regal Cineplex, desperate for tales of love and atonement, air conditioning, hot nachos, and a screen to fix their eyes upon.  Next, I began to read of entire blocks restored, sections of neighborhoods, sides of streets, catty corners.  And I began to see the city as stratified and divided in ways that defied my crudest prejudices and secretly-held assumptions about the nation in general and the south in particular.  A housing project inhabited by low income blacks was restored before the block where the mayor lives.  A part-time lecturer got power before the University Provost.  Prison inmates got it before the vast majority of the law-abiding.  A stupid person got it back before a rocket scientist. And almost everyone I work with got power before I did.  Some of them appeared to gloat as they invited me over for a shower. I thanked them cordially, but secretly marveled at their insensitivity. Others, I noticed, had difficulty looking me in the eye as they admitted to having lights.  They were experiencing “power guilt,” or the distinct sense that it is wrong to take pleasure in one’s electric while others remain bereft and desolate.   

I began searching for people who had been similarly de-prioritized.  I didn’t take long to find them: Jo and Anna, a lesbian couple in library acquisitions. And they had a real problem. Here is how Jo described it: the fifth night after Isabel, she and Anna had been sitting at home in the dark sharing a cigarette when their lights suddenly flickered; the major appliances began to hum and the minor ones beeped and blinked like newborn chicks.  “Aw, right!” they both exclaimed… and then just as suddenly everything died again.  It turned out that in that moment of grand illumination--the tripping of the switch--an explosion somewhere on the grid fried the transformer, and now Jo was all but certain that they would be among the last ten percent to be restored. The frustration of this was almost more than she could take, making her hostile and uncommunicative.  Anna had suggested they leave town and spend a week with her sister in Michigan, but Jo could not tear herself away from the house, not under these circumstances. “I hope you get your power back,” she said to me as we parted. “But at the same time I hope you don’t.  Just promise me one thing,” she begged.  “If you do get it back, don’t tell me.”  And two days later, when my power returned, I kept it to myself out of respect for Jo and Anna.  

“Shipwrecks are apropos of nothing.” You may recognize this as a line from Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat,” a story in which four men shipwrecked at sea are cognitively transformed by their recognition of nature’s indifference to their plight.  The men are nameless; we know them only by their functions: the cook, the oiler, the Captain, the correspondent. They learn to think as one and they survive.  And so it goes in American naturalism.  But these days, as I fight the impulse to slip dopily into the American myth of transformation through deprivation, or the saccharine belief that hurricanes make us appreciate one another, I find myself thinking that the opposite is also true: shipwrecks, like hurricanes, are apropos of everything, germane to human consciousness itself, and applicable to all the tools we have at our disposal for tracking its narcissistic, melancholic wake.  By naming hurricanes we acknowledge that they are never out of place while we remain exhilaratingly uprooted, a dislocation that is the constant shadow companion of our bright and fragile selves.  It will take more than electricity to restore those selves to their ill-suited complacency: it will take the voluptuous powers of the imagination, new tales of loss and atonement.  Mine begins like this: Once, I wished for an extraordinary hurricane.  I longed for something that might vindicate the forecasters of great tides and lift me out of my daily trafficking across bridges, through tunnels, and along buoyant, boring waterways.  I longed for it, and I never discovered its name.       

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