This Month's Story

How did all of this start? It began at the end of a warm summer in 2005…

It’s early September and, as I turn on Gray Station Road, the narrow two-lane county road that passes the farm, I’m surprised to see the amount of trees in full display of their fall colors.

My seasonal sense says it is still summer, cool weather is not supposed to start until late October. But here, a thousand feet up in the foothills of Chestnut Ridge, it’s fall, and the coming nights will have a coolness in their presence and we will need a light blanket to keep ourselves warm.

I turn off the county road onto the long, steep, gravel drive that leads up to the old farmhouse. The drive shows evidence of repair, but not much and certainly not well. Stella’s heavy, old Lincoln makes it up the pockmarked gravel with a little hesitation, but not as much trouble as the appearance of the road’s condition implies. There is no doubt, however, that the drive will need repair before the winter snows set in.

I park beside a ground-level, wooden porch, setting the hand brake as we are still on the driveway’s slope. The porch is small and serves as a dry passage between the old farmhouse and a shanty that in former years had been the farm’s summer kitchen.

Stella gets out on her side of the car and, walking across the porch, begins trying to unlock the back door of the farmhouse. As in most of the local farmhouses, the front door is on the other side of the house and not easily accessible. Also, as in most of the same farmhouses, this is the main door used by anyone coming to the house.

I get out from my side and stand by the car for a moment, looking around at our surroundings.

The field had evidently been cut back earlier in the summer, and now was a large, flat square of stubble surrounded by a dense fence of tall maples, birches, locusts, and cherry trees, each tree sporting its own brilliant version of early fall color. A large group of black crows suddenly rise from the center of the field and flies as a group, circling, scolding noisily whatever it is in the stubble that has disturbed them.

A brush of wind picks up some of the early fall of leaves and swirls them about in a small dance and then drops them as quickly as it picked them up. Except for the crows and the slight flutter of the leaves, it is essentially quiet.

There is an interesting frame to all this.

Behind me, running up the hill bordering the gravel drive, is a five-foot-high, man-made, stone fence. The drive, with its companion stone fence, continues beyond the shanty, past two more outbuildings in poor repair. The road finally makes a stop about two hundred yards away in a grassy glade at the edge of a right angle turn in the fence. Beyond lies dense woods with the stone fence occasionally visible in the undergrowth below the tree limbs.

I later find out that the stone fence continues on around three sides of the farm. Its origin is as old as the farmhouse, which, I find later, dates from about 1830.

The stones in the fence have accumulated over the almost two hundred years since, their origin from the same cleared field that harbors the quarreling crows.

Stone by stone, the fence has been added to by the generations of farmers that have worked the fields. Stella has told me of walking with her grandfather beside a flatbed wagon pulled by “Dick,” their old horse, picking up stones from the field from the newly turned earth in early spring. These stones, some rather large, were then placed on nearby portions of the stone fence.

As I gaze at the long line of gray stones that make up the structure of the old wall and think of the labor involved in its being, I don’t know that in the years ahead, Stella and I will add our own share of stones to the farm’s surrounding gray wall. Nor do I realize how heavy they are.

I turn from my thoughts of the fence; Stella’s calling me from the house door. She’s finally got the key to work and disappears inside. I turn, open the car trunk, reach in and, grasping the first box, begin transferring things to the house.

There aren’t many things to move.

We had only a few hours advance warning to leave our beach home in Mississippi before the first of the hurricane winds of Katrina started, so what we have with us in the car is very little: a few boxes containing important papers, a laptop, three days of old, but comfortable, clothes, and Holly, our black tomcat sitting traumatized in a carrying cage.

The large, sprawling beach house we left had thousands of things that could have been put in the car, things easily accommodated in the Lincoln’s large back seat between Holly and the laptop and the bag of clothes. The car’s equally large trunk isn’t even full, mostly it contains the boxes of important papers, some of which later turn out to be not very important.

Urgent Weather Message

National Weather Service Slidell, La. / Sun Aug 28 2005

Hurricane Katrina, is a powerful hurricane with unprecedented strength, rivaling Hurricane Camille of 1969.

Devastating damage expected. Most areas will be uninhabitable for weeks or longer. The majority of industrial buildings will be nonfunctional. Partial to complete wall and roof failure is expected. All wood framed low rising apartment buildings will be destroyed. Concrete block low rise apartments will sustain major damage, including some wall and roof failure.

High rise office and apartment buildings will sway dangerously, a few will total collapse. Windows will blow out.

Airborne debris will be widespread and may include heavy items such as household appliances and even light vehicles. The blown debris will create additional destruction. Persons, pets, and livestock exposed to the winds will face certain death if struck.

Most power poles will be down and transformers destroyed. Power outages Water shortages will make human suffering incredible by modern standards.

Only the heartiest of trees will remain standing, but be totally defoliated. Few crops will remain. Livestock exposed to the winds will be killed.

Once tropical storm and hurricane force winds onset, do not venture outside.

Our thoughts then were to leave as quickly as we could. From our previous experiences with large hurricanes, we would be back in a few days or a week at most.

So, in those few brief hours of a rather pleasant, clear-sky, Sunday morning, our decision of what to take was made, and whatever we decided to leave behind, whether by the best or by the poorest of choices, was as good as gone the moment I put the car in reverse and backed out of the driveway.

In less than twenty-four hours the large, sprawling, redwood house, with all its thirty-something years of wonderful memories, was washed away, torn from its foundation by the terrible hydraulic force of the storm’s thirty-plus-foot-high tidal surge.

We have had troubles with other hurricanes, but always managed to get through them. But those were yesterday events, and this dark moment, as I stand on the windy hill of Stella’s old family farm, is ours now.

It is not a pleasant now. If the few reports we have received over the last few days are correct, there is no house to return to, there is no post office, no fire department, no city hall.

There is no town.

All are gone, washed away by the huge, impossibly high, surge of water that heralded the landfall of the eye of Katrina. What little we have heard is of extreme devastation. Very little official word has come out, and the roads to the coast are all blocked by debris, patrolled by the National Guard.

For the moment, we cannot go back.

We can only hope, and Stella and I have, over the last few days, clung to that hope, that the reports are exaggerated and that when we can, we will return to what we think of as our home.

And so, after a week of wandering, first in Florida and then in Texas, we are more than a thousand miles north of where we started. We are in the southwestern reaches of Pennsylvania, tired, disheartened, standing amid a wonderfully splendid flash of early fall color, outside an aged farmhouse, obviously in bad need of repair, that is our sole refuge from the ravages of a terrible storm.

A wind springs up and whirls some of the tree’s golden leaves through the wind tunnel formed between the shanty and the house. I put down the box I’m carrying and prop open the house’s storm door. The door is broken, and I use a brick from a nearby pile to keep it open against the wind.

Stella comes from inside the dark interior of the house, muttering as she goes by me, obviously unhappy at what she has seen. Going to the car, she pulls out Holly’s carrying cage. She talks to Holly in soothing tones and goes back in the house.

I put my boxes just inside the jammed-open door and go back to the car to get more.

On going through Blairsville, the small town three miles away, we had stopped at Walmart and, using our already stretched-out credit card, bought a few things we thought we would need: a large portable ice chest, a toaster oven, an electric skillet, a few groceries, and a large inflatable mattress and blanket, our bed for the next few months.

We knew the house would be empty of any furniture or appliances. These new items had filled the trunk; although light, they are bulky.

Once inside, I find that, as indicated by the damaged front door and Stella’s displeased look, the last tenants have not been kind. The house reeks of cat urine. The single toilet, while usable, is broken, and the makeshift repairs the tenants did are poor at best.

The cloudy, double-paned windows add to the gloom; many sit poorly in their frames, and the tenant used clear plastic sheets to make them weatherproof. These have been removed in a poor attempt at cleaning up, but there are clusters of staples everywhere in the walls and, of course, with the plastic gone, the badly set windows whistle when there is a strong wind.

I wonder, as I walk around, how they could have lived in the house in the condition it is in; all of what I see could not have happened in one day.

Everywhere there is garbage. We will find later that the grounds around the house are littered with years of trash and garbage.

Although garbage pick up is available at an extremely low monthly fee, it is obvious they had not subscribed. Later, I would find garbage mounds of debris scattered in various parts of the property, some even with small trees growing in them. These mounds, when we dig in to dispose of them, are an eclectic mix of trash ranging from disposable diapers to window screens

As I walk around the interior of the old house, looking at the dark walls, broken opaque windows, and empty rooms, I find it traumatic as I realize we will have to live here.

The condition of the house and its rooms affects Stella more than me; after all, this house and its bare rooms had been her family home, a place where she grew up.

Later, when it becomes dark, Stella and I decide to go outside in the cool night air and walk up the gravel road past the old equipment shed. I had looked inside it earlier and found an old tractor with a cracked block. Rusting beside it was a brush hog, half covered by leaves let in the shed by a hole in the roof.

The tenant had put a plastic tarpaulin on the roof to close the hole, but it had not worked well. Now, in the dark, I look at the shed’s silhouetted hulk with the two pieces of aged machinery sitting inside, waiting for when they would be discarded for their worth as scrap.

“Look at the sky, Paul.”

I look up.

The dark, moonless sky blazes; a carpet of endless, carelessly strewn bright stars. Above the tree line to our southwest, the night lights of the small city of Latrobe make a pink glow, visible, but not bright enough to intrude on the immense spread of stars we see above us. Essentially, the stars, Stella and I are alone.

I find the Big Dipper and follow the two “pot” stars to Polaris, the North Star. It’s higher above the horizon than it is at our home in Mississippi.

We stand there holding hands, looking at the night sky and the gray stone fence hulking to one side of the dimly lit gravel road until the night’s coolness makes us turn back to the dark house.

That afternoon when we arrived, we quickly decided the three rooms upstairs will be too expensive to heat and resolved to close it off at the base of the narrow staircase. We would use them for storage and restrict ourselves to living in the first floor’s three rooms.

I blow up the inflatable mattress in what had been the living room, and Stella takes the new sheets and blanket and makes them into a presentable bed. Rather than stay awake using the few ceiling fixtures to light the stark, empty rooms, we lie down and prepare to sleep.

There is a pause and then Holly leaps up on the mattress to sleep with us.

Except for a few excursions outside, he will stay under the blanket on the bed safely hidden from the traumas of the outer world for the next few months.

Before getting in bed, I had propped the damaged window open with a stick. It all feels strange. In coastal Mississippi as close to the water as we were, we seldom were able to leave a window open; the salt and the humid air would have triggered mold and corrosion in the house.

Now as we lay there in the dark, we hear through the open window, the night noises of the farm, the distant flowing of water down by the creek, the wind moving through the tall firs, an owl and, from down by the pond, the distinct heavy bass sounds of several large frogs.

“Paul.”

“What?”

“I was born in this room.”

We lie there listening to the night, each of us lost in thoughts of years and happenings that move as faint, dim shadows in our minds.

Sleep slips in and the shadows and night noises of a farm in early autumn become soft dreams.