Published: February 09, 2008 07:58 pm            

Stephanie Salter: When Mother acts up, the kids are enlightened, for a while

TERRE HAUTE — We are some kind of species.

Life around, above and beneath us operates fairly smoothly, and we go about our business with our heads down and our personal blinders on. Although we know better, this myopia-as-usual leads us to ignore some of the best advice ever proffered:

Don’t sweat the small stuff.

We worry about bills, home repairs and loved ones over whom we haven’t an ounce of control but pretend we do. Hyper-extended and in a perpetual hurry, we get aggravated at store clerks and restaurant servers and downright hostile at drivers who move too fast or too slowly for our druthers.

A glitch in our cable TV or washing machine sets us to swearing. Moles in our yard have us identifying with Job. A busted furnace or water pipe takes on apocalyptic proportion.

Then a hurricane, tornado, blizzard, typhoon or tsunami blows in. Tectonic plates shift deep in the earth, a river rises and overflows its banks, lightning sets a dense forest ablaze or a mountain wall comes crashing down.

Suddenly, we remember it isn’t all about us. We realize (again) that we are part of a vast, complex whole in which our wants and worries are sub-sub-atomic in size.

Only under physical threat do we understand (again) that life and limb always trump house, car and drapes that match the carpet.

Incurable fools for order and predictability, we learn (again) that the forces of nature are capricious and unjust — no matter what some fundamentalist preachers may contend.

If only we could remember these truths all the time. If only we could see, hear, smell, taste and love as acutely as we do when we survive one of Mother Nature’s inevitable fits.

As this week ended and the sun finally came out, I stood in the alley behind my house and watched as six men with chainsaws and a truck with a boom, chain and big iron pincers worked to dismantle a giant hickory tree that had stood for at least 100 years in my neighbor’s back yard.

Tuesday night, like a lot of magnificent old hickories, oaks, pines, maples and other trees in the Wabash Valley, my neighbor’s mighty tree was uprooted and blown down. It took power lines and phone and cable connections with it and smashed onto my next-door neighbors’ garage roof and back fence.

Those neighbors were still on vacation in another country the morning after the storm. Their grown son tracked them down by telephone to tell them about the hickory and about the sorry fact that an oak in their own side yard — a tree just a bit smaller than the hickory — had begun to uproot and was leaning precariously toward their house.

“They’re 30th on the list to get it cut down,” their daughter-in-law told me.

Across the street from my house, the tree row of another neighbor’s home was a 5-foot-tall wall of white pine boughs and logs. A pair of beauties that had risen more than 80 feet had to be cut down. They, too, had been pulled just far enough out of the earth by wind and water to transform them into potential killers.

On our block alone, we lost eight large trees, either directly to wind gusts that were clocked at 82 mph or to pre-emptory chainsaws. A crewman working on the hickory told me they had gotten 182 calls for service the two days after the storm.

A blue spruce in my back yard was one of the pre-emptory casualties. After a different tree crew brought it down, I counted at least 55 rings in the stump. Almost as old as me.

My uncle died the night of the storm, not long after midnight, just as his younger brother — my dad — had passed in the autumn of 2004.

Tornado sirens went off in Vincennes much of the night, but Uncle Gordon probably didn’t hear them. He had been “calling the roll,” as his wife put it, for most of the day from his home hospital bed, talking to his seven brothers and sisters who already had gone ahead.

Two Salters — my Uncle Max and my Aunt Sharon — are left now from a Vincennes clan of 10 kids. This past weekend, two Saturdays after they had gathered in Crown Point to celebrate Max’s 85th birthday, the survivors were back in their hometown to bury their brother.

“The circle of life,” Aunt Sharon kept saying, shaking her head at the size and wealth of the circle.

As I watched the crew at work on my neighbor’s hickory, I found myself thinking, not about the destruction, but about all the things that could have happened and didn’t.

The worst tornado outbreak in U.S. history occurred March 18, 1925, killing 695 people in Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. This time, we in Indiana lost trees, property and a day or two of power. In Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee and Kentucky, they lost human life.

Hundreds of trees fell in populated Terre Haute neighborhoods, but no one was under any of them. No one around here was swept away in rising floodwaters or lost control of a car because a passing semi threw a blinding blanket of water across the windshield. No one went without power long enough to freeze to death in his own home.

One elderly north-end woman, in fact, was rescued from danger she didn’t even know she was in: A Tribune-Star photographer, sent to chronicle her downed tree, smelled gas in the woman’s house and convinced her to get out and sit in his car while he called Duke Energy for help. When the crew arrived, they discovered a broken line that was pumping gas into the lady’s home.

While I know some people were frustrated by the electrical outages, I stand in awe of the swift miracles I saw round-the-clock utility crews perform. About 11 p.m. Wednesday, our block’s second night with no lights or heat, a Duke crew up from Cincinnati finally found the right combination and restored power to a bunch of strangers who would never thank them.

By Thursday night my phone service and DSL were back. The day before I’d reported that mess to Verizon, first via its maddening automated repair system, then to a real person named Sandy. She was in Wisconsin, stuck at work overnight because a blizzard was moving in. We’d wished each other good luck over my cell phone and her office headset.

“It could be worse,” Sandy said, about sleeping in a chair, and I said that was true for me as well.

What I didn’t say was, “True for now.” True until everything is all cleaned up and back to “normal” and I forget (again) about the vast, complex whole of which I am one tiny part. Then, the crystal-clear priorities will get muddy and the instinctive gratitude — for everything from a working stove to life itself — will disappear into its hiding place inside my silly human head.

Until next time.



Stephanie Salter can be reached at (812) 231-4229 or stephanie.salter@tribstar.com.

        

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