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Hurricane Watch: The Waterfall In the Kitchen
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Andrea’s Story (Written By Andrea)
The Waterfall In The Kitchen
Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the LORD’s purpose that prevails. Proverbs 19:21
As of 3:00 a.m. on Sunday, September 5, when the heavy wind and rains hit our house hard enough to wake my husband and me, our plan was to get up in the morning, shower ourselves and the children, clean the bathtub and fill it with water to use for washing and flushing should the power go out. I had fixed a huge breakfast casserole the night before and planned to stick it in the oven in the morning so we could munch on it as we finalized preparations for Hurricane Frances. So we were caught by surprise when at 9:00 a.m., with just light rain and the occasional wind gust, the power went out – with no one showered, the bathtub empty, and my lovely casserole only half-baked.
We had felt like we were prepared for the storm. We had our plywood for boarding up the windows, which we didn’t end up needing to do. My husband, Max, had secured all the deck furniture and built a sturdy shelter for the dog. I had washed all the laundry and done a fair amount of cooking and cleaning. But when the power goes out before you expect it to, and you realize that a big, fat storm slogging along at only 8 miles per hour is approaching your neighborhood which isn’t really a neighborhood at all but merely a handful of houses out in the boondocks at the very end of the power company’s priority list, you still feel vulnerable. And isolated. And unprepared.
We sat down a short time later to the first of many very strange meals, designed not at all for enjoyment but for the purpose of consuming food in the refrigerator before it spoils. The children were good sports about a breakfast of salmon chowder with bologna sandwiches and chocolate milk. The little one, Christiaan, who turns 2 next month, will eat just about anything if it will earn him a few raisins.
The good thing about having no power or running water (because the well water is brought into the house by an electric pump) is that you can’t wash dishes. Or more precisely, I can’t wash dishes. So we used paper plates as often as possible and scraped the rest, filling the sink with bleach water to soak cups and bowls in and keep the bugs at bay. (This being Florida, one must always consider the critters.)
Meanwhile, the children were both excited and apprehensive about the storm and the new adventure of living without power or water. This manifests itself in extraordinarily annoying behavior. Christiaan whined and clung to our legs. Raoul, 8, had a small recording device he yodeled into and then dashed around the house replaying – like a roving dance remix of some sort of Middle Eastern keen-fest. Max finally confiscated the device. Then the stomping began. Raoul started it, his heavy footsteps echoing through the large unfinished basement below us, and his little brother quickly caught on. They had wonderful fun. It was maddening.
It drove me to the window, where I found my husband with his nose also pressed against the glass. There we stood seeking solace. But all we could see were our tormented trees, live oaks and enormous pines whose remarkably flexible trunks bent almost parallel to the ground in the relentless winds, then sprang upright again when the wind changed direction. At the tops of the pine trees, branches and tufts of needles looked like the unkempt hair and wildly-waving arms of a fed-up woman. “I’ve had it up to here!” they seemed to screech, to no avail, and I could relate.
My husband, being an adventurous sort, asked if anyone wanted to go kayaking. I, being a chicken, declined. So he and Raoul carted a sit-on-top kayak down the 50' bluff on which our house sits, and set off in the water. Christiaan and I watched from the house as they blew south/southwest along the shore of Cowpen Lake (so named because it once served as a cow pen for ranchers transporting cattle by rail), then struggled to paddle against the wind back to our dock. They had a ball, and enjoyed some semblance of a shower.
A few hours after they returned, however, after the baby took his nap and when the mid-afternoon sky had become almost too overcast to read by its light, the stir-craziness set in. You forget exactly how much of your life depends on electricity until you are deprived of it. Despite the wind and rain, north central Florida in early September is quite hot with no air conditioning. Or toilets that flush without someone having to trudge down the steep slope to the lake to bring back water in a bucket. When the batteries for our laptop wore down, we felt disconnected, uninformed. The worst part was knowing that it would likely be days before the weather let up.
One of the greatest blessings turned out to be a leak in the wall. We have a log home, which is perfectly watertight when the rain comes down. But when, in hurricane force winds, the rain comes sideways, it gets between the logs and comes in the house. The children were fascinated by the waterfall in the middle of the kitchen wall and, suddenly well-behaved, they begged, “Can we play in the water?” Why not, we figured. I gave Raoul a stack of empty butter and yogurt tubs and deputized him the Bucket Patrol, with orders to prevent any water from reaching the carpet. This entertained them much longer than it should have, and hours later Christiaan was still splashing happily, sporting a plastic tub on his head and looking like a miniature Shriner.
We went to bed at 8PM, when it became too dark to do anything else. With Christiaan’s crib at the foot of our bed and Raoul curled up safely in our bed, we were lulled to sleep by the steady pounding rains. Going to bed so early was another unanticipated blessing for two normally sleep-starved parents.
We weren’t able to locate our flashlights, probably still packed up from when we moved in last summer. But during the night we discovered that the display screens on our Sprint Sanyo cell phones lit the way to the bathroom in the dark very effectively. It was fun to make such discoveries together, and we began to feel like a real pioneer family.
The next morning snuck in, not much brighter than the evening before. We enjoyed a breakfast of peanut butter and banana sandwiches with apple and cheese slices on the side, with raisins, of course. No coffee or tea unfortunately, due to the lack of hot water, but we endured.
“More wee!” was the baby’s insistent cry by mid-morning. “Wee” is what he calls it when Max, a.k.a. Papa, swings him around by the arms. It makes me nervous but in true Huisden male fashion, the baby loves it. After several gratuitous wee’s, we turned it into a game. Christiaan correctly identified the letters A, B, and C on a puzzle piece and earned a wee. Raoul answered five times-tables correctly and earned a wee. Max got a reasonable workout and I got some peace and quiet.
Families throughout Florida were certainly devising similar strategies to keep one another entertained and happy. At almost noon on day two, with the eye of now-tropical-storm Frances all the way over in the Gulf of Mexico, it was still raining and blowing in Hawthorne. It was odd but the storm brought no thunder or lightning, just boredom, isolation, and this intense inconvenience.
Crankiness and impatience have been our worst enemies. Six days later and we still don’t have power at home. With Hurricane Ivan due to reach the area early next week we figure we’re not going to have power anytime soon. We try to do our complaining in hushed tones, however, since we know that many in our community have not been as fortunate as we are. One man lost his roof. A woman was killed when a giant tree fell on her mobile home. My co-worker’s eight-year-old daughter had to be pulled from the rubble when a tree fell on her apartment complex. The flooding that followed the hurricane has stranded many families and entered the homes of others.
This bizarre torrent of natural disasters probably seems just as unreal and un-life-changing to people outside of Florida as most far-away disasters seem to us here. It can be numbing to watch the sensationalized television coverage of people looking listlessly at their demolished homes and rain-drenched belongings in the wake of overwhelming, unstoppable wind and rain. But it is real, and for the vast majority of Floridians, it is a test of our patience, and an opportunity to look beyond our inconvenienced schedules to those who are lost, hurting, and in need.
Ultimately this whole ordeal will be to the glory of God. All-powerful, all-knowing, all-good God. In each moment of powerlessness, waterlessness, boredom, and uncertainty is an invitation to follow him to someone who needs to be ministered to. Please keep us in your prayers. If not that we’ll continue to stay safe and dry then at least that our eyes will be opened to those around us who are in greater need than we are.
In his heart a man plans his course, but the LORD determines his steps. Proverbs 16:9
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