Night Weather—Fall, Week 5: Wind and Water

Cynthia Reeves, “Bright Day – Swamp Maple Pattern,” mid-1960’s

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In my youth, when I began wandering the woods by myself, one of the things I noticed after a rain was the little pools collected in the cups of fallen leaves. Each pool reflects the sky, the main reason for my attraction.

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rain cupped
in a sycamore leaf
the wind sips and flies

Seeing the reflection of the sky in water is an ordinary experience, possibly a banal image in poetry, but it was an image I could not abandon in my years of trying to write haiku.

after the shower
an inch of puddle
holding the sky

the sky looks
into a curled up leaf
to see itself

river
carries the weight of the sky
and still it moves

morning after rain
the sky
in its blue housedress

Want to touch the sky?
Slip off your shoes
wade into the river

sky
passing through me
like surprise
—Inspired by Philippe Jaccottet

heavy rain
road smudged with sky
night with day

November day
sky and pond
both the same gray
—Imitation of Basho

abandoned house
broken glass
multiplies the sky
—Inspired by a quotation or paraphrase of Chekhov seen on the web: “Don't tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.”

The ambition of such poems is captured in the first four lines of Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”:

To see the world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour.

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Wind and rain are usually benign; at least we who live in temperate climbs tend to think so. But like every natural force they can destroy human life and property. The southeastern US would be quite different without hurricanes to fill aquifers and shape the landscape.

The 98th anniversary of my father’s birth was on Sunday, October 20. When I was a kid, he showed me the high water mark on buildings in the New River valley. One building I remember was on a gentle slope about 80 feet from the river. Its foundation was probably 10-12 feet above the river’s usual level; the water mark from the ’40 Flood was at or above the top of the first floor, probably 18-20’ feet above the river’s normal level. My first cousin once-removed, who has lived all her life in Ashe County, told me that that only bridge over the New River to survive the that flood was the bridge on US 221 near Bob Huffman’s Store, now the New River Outfitters. (My cousin and her husband once owned the store.) The bridge was built in the 1920s or early 1930s and was only recently replaced.

The other great flood that people talked about when I was a kid, the flood of 1916, occurred ten years before my father was born. In Wilkes County, it destroyed railway bridges and wrecked at least one locomotive. It destroyed the flume that brought logs from the upper Yadkin River valley down to Wilkesboro and North Wilkesboro. We used to live on a farm in Wilkes where a 12’ or 15’ deep gulch near the bottom of a holler was said by the landowner to have been gouged out by the ’16 Flood. We have seen from Helene how a mighty storm can suddenly change the landscape—terrifying if you are caught up in it, but fifty years later children will play on the transformed land and they will assume it has always been as it is just then, kind, stable, and beautiful. ​

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I spent Saturday and Sunday (Oct 19 and Oct 20) in Clinton, South Carolina, helping remove trees felled by Helene. In parts of the town, the streets are lined with large heaps of tree trunks and limbs, so we were hardly the first to help out.

We had two teams with a total of around 22 men, women, and youth, all members of our congregation (ward) of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Saints in Raleigh, along with some relations and friends.

I’ve never used a chainsaw and I’m a little old to start, so I was a “puller,” pulling limbs cut by the team’s sawyers and carrying or dragging them to the road for someone—the city, county, or FEMA perhaps—to pick up.

Sometimes the teams worked on projects separately, sometimes together. We worked on several massive oaks and hickories, some too large for us to remove entirely. But we made things better. We removed the limb of a tree that had pieced through the roof of an outbuilding and then we tarped the roof. We removed the limbs of a tree resting on a family’s car. We jumpstarted the car and moved it away from the tree. We removed piece by piece the top of a tree that had broken two sections of a chain link fence.

This area was not devastated like much of western NC, but full recovery will take a long time. Many houses still have trees resting on their roofs. Power has not been restored to everyone.

Here's a picture of the primary team I worked with: