Hurricane Irene: “Don’t know why, there’s no sun up in the sky, stormy weather…”

This week was sure an exciting one on the storm front, as we went from playing will-she-won’t-she with Hurricane Irene; to she’s on her way and New England is wearing a big “kick me” sign; to the downgrade from Category 3, to Category 2, to Category 1, to just plain old vanilla tropical storm (yawn!), and the attendant mixed emotions of relief and disappointment; to the actual reality of the situation. Which, as I write this post on Sunday morning, means lots of heavy wind and lots of heavy rains.

Unless there’s a ‘where were you when the lights went out’ type of shutdown of the Northeast grid, we’re unlikely to lose power. The last time I remember downtown Boston going without for more than a few minutes was during the Blizzard of ‘78. But we could, oddly enough, lose our land-line. The connectors are somewhere in the same below-ground that our building was erected on 150 years ago. As this is land that was reclaimed from the sea, it is subject to flooding, and sometimes the phone lines get soaked out of business. So much for the advantage of perpetual dial tone that land-lines are known for.

So far, so good, but you never know. A while back (a couple of years? a decade? a couple of decades? yikes, it’s easy to lose track o’ time), we lost phone service for over a week because the connectors were under the weather, which we’d had a lot of.

I kept calling (on my cell, so couldn’t have been a couple of decades ago; I’ve only had a cell since 1998) to check on when the service would be restored, and when I made my final call, I was informed by a chirpy support person that I’d be happy to know that my phone was one of only a dozen still not in service. Actually, that didn’t make me all that happy, as I would just have soon someone else be part of that particular dirty dozen. But then I reminded myself to be neighborly, and not begrudge anyone their phone since, after all, I had one of those semi-new-fangled cell phones. (As I recall, my first one, which was given to me by a colleague who was upgrading to something a bit spiffier, and smaller, was the size of a Luger – did it actually come with a holster – and one step above rotary dial.)

We prepared for Hurricane Irene by buying a bunch of D batteries, picking up a couple of bottles of prosecco, one of which we broke open Saturday night, and hauling the pump out of the storage closet.

I got the D batteries for an empty flashlight, as well as for my boom box. Apparently, the nodes of my twenty-year old boom box are all worn out, because it doesn’t work on battery. The boom box takes six, so now I have a whole slew of batteries which fortunately don’t expire until 2017. I should probably replace the boom box, anyway, as I have to coddle and cajole it into playing a CD, loading and removing the disk multiple times until it’s just-so, and leaning just-right on the lid. I guess twenty years is enough use to get out of an electronic item…

While, anticipating hurricane tropical storm season, I helped with the dress rehearsal for the pump a few weeks ago, pumping water out of the bathtub and into the bathtub. So we know it works.

But that was a few weeks ago, and,  since then, one of our fellow owners – but one who doesn’t live here – dropped off a more industrial-strength pump. Which, of course, we had to test.

The good news was that the bigger pump worked. The bad news was that, when we tested it yesterday morning, the hose blew off, dousing us both. The fun news was that I got to slosh around in my pink and purple flowered Boggs boots, which had saved me from the slush and slosh many a time last winter.

After some trial and error with the new pump, we decided to go with the devil of a pump that we do know.

Personally, I’m not a big fan of the combo of electricity and water. Nonetheless, I am willing to work as the sorcerer’s apprentice, so I will leave manning the pump to my husband, while I work the towel brigade. That is, if we do get some flooding. Our condo is basement and first floor level, and we have had occasional lower level water in the past. If it gets to the first floor, however, our little pump and supply of old towels will not do us much good.

I did notice on Saturday that someone a half a block or so up Beacon Street from us was also doing the Be Prepared thing, only a bit more aggressively. They had barricaded a sidewalk-level window with plastic tarp and some sandbags. We live on what is known as “The Flat of the Hill”, the area at the foot of Beacon Hill situated between Charles Street and Back Bay. The building in this picture is about one-quarter of the way up the Hill, on the incline. Sure, there could be street level flooding if the storm drains overflow and water starts sluicing this way. And maybe this person is barricading from experience. But if the flooding is this high up Beacon Street, I do believe it will be a while before I get to live in my home again.

So far, however, so good.

Meanwhile, I do get to play the old lady, memory lane game, and recall the hurricane’s I do remember.

Carol (1960) knocked a lot of trees down in our neighborhood. Somewhere I have a Brownie camera snapshot that someone took of a bunch of us neighborhood kids clambering over a downed tree, which I am, off to the side, pointing at. This picture is interesting for a couple of reasons. For one, in it I am wearing a dress, something which I never, ever, ever, ever, ever in a million years wore out to play. So what was up with that? It’s not as if I would have been coming from school, in which case I would have been wearing a green jumper. And it’s not a Sunday dress, either. It’s an “other” dress – dark brown with a white collar and big white buttons on the front - probably the only “other dress” I had, which would have been worn on occasions such as taking the bus “down city” to go shopping at Denholm’s with my mother, or to see a Walt Disney movie (think “Darby O’Gill and the Little People”) with my friends.

The other interesting aspect of that picture – in a majorly ick- factor sort of way – is that the picture includes a neighborhood boy who is now in prison for kiddie porn. (He was always quite a bit on the sneaky-creepy side. My father called him “Eddie Haskell” because he was such a fake polite suck up to an adult’s face kind of kid.)

I remember Gloria because they canceled work on the day we were going to have a going away party for my friend Peter, for which I had baked chocolate chip cookies. Which never did make it into work.

Peter was heading off to a fancy, prestigious, all-the-smart-people- work-there AI company that had wooed a lot of people from our company. I had interviewed there, but it was felt – or so I was told – that I was “apparently not ready to leave Dynamics”, and, thus, would not have brought the correct level of 100% surety and enthusiasm with me. Peter assures me that the real reason was that I had asked a question of the emperor’s new clothes variety about why people were going to pay a whole boat-load of money for an AI box cum AI software to perform a task (evaluating alternative capital investments) that could be accomplished for a few hundred bucks using a spreadsheet, or for free using a cocktail napkin.

I will say I was not entirely disappointed when this place imploded.

Hurricane Bob blew in on a weekend and, oddly, I decided to go into work that day. I remember looking out the window and watching the wind sweep tons of water along the street. While I had been foolish enough to go into work on that Saturday, I wasn’t foolish enough to stay. Anticipating that the T might get flooded and stop running, leaving me with the choice of walking 5 miles home during a hurricane or sleeping on the floor at work and living off whatever was in the office refrigerator that wasn’t six- month old yogurt, I made the executive decision to go home.

Where, I believe, I got to watch Jim operate our handy-dandy pump, while I backed him up with towels.

As for the weekend’s “weather event”, as I write, it is still a few hours before we get to sing “Goodnight, Irene” and do a walkabout to see what damage this storm has done.

Later the same day….

Irene caused plenty of damage in New England, but in downtown Boston it was mostly one big fizzle, at least in our back yard: not much rain, not much wind. But, when I stuck my nose out the door, I found that the wind was apparently enough to knock down a 112 year old tree across the street, taking a good swath of the brick sidewalk up with it. I hate to see these “old soldiers” go, because they’re so beautiful. I also saw lots of downed branches in the Public Garden, but didn’t go in to check on the Ducklings or the Swan Boats.

This was parked in front of our building when we went out. Made me feel kind of like Paul Bunyan is in the ‘hood. But there’s certainly much to be grateful for here. We have power. We have water in the taps and not on the floor. We have no broken windows. But after all the hype and build-up, I have to confess that it’s all somewhat deflating. But better to be deflated than to be powerless or shelterless or crushed by a falling tree or bailing out my basement with a teacup.