So the weather finally changed. As usual when our weather changes in July, the change was a big loud storm, or storm system, that kept on rumbling and doing damage for hours. I was at home, trying to read a PDF of a forthcoming book, suppressing the whole "I wrote something better than this in grade nine, but I burned it" complex, and all the lights went out. Worse than that, the window fan went off.
I lighted a candle and read by candlelight and felt sorry for myself, while knowing that several hundred people were worse off than I was. At the Cat Sanctuary it hadn't been a Code Red day. In cities it had. I don't store food in a freezer. Many people do. I have no cardiovascular problems. Many people do. I thought depending on an ever wider "power grid" was likely to kill any of the older generation who've survived the coronavirus panic. We need to be dismantling that grid. And meanwhile I had the usual short list of twenty things I wanted to do and, without electric light, I couldn't do any of them. I finished that book, and then I read back through a backlog of old newspapers.
Morning came. The lights were still off. The humidity was still about 99%. I put on a clean dress. "Meow?" the cats asked. "It's a very 'meow' morning, no 'purr' about it," I grumbled, setting out their breakfast. I do not like having to make extra trips into town. I did not like the story I'd read on the back page of a newspaper from last spring.
Probably most of you Gentle Readers have already read the sad story of Ralph Yarl, a high school boy who had just reached driving age and been awarded the proud responsibility of picking up his little brother from a play date. Yarl drove safely to the wrong address. He knocked on the door of what turned out to be an 84-year-old paranoid. Seeing an unfamiliar young man at his door, the old man didn't just pretend he was not at home, as I would have done. He shot Yarl. Twice. One shot hit the kid's head and might easily have killed him.
Yarl was generally perceived as a good student. Of course, "good" teenagers, who earn good grades and look after their little brothers and do part-time jobs, tend to be teased and bullied at school; sometimes they want to look more dangerous than they are. Of course, newspapers and web sites chose pictures of Yarl that make him look as if he were about to sing in a church choir. Of course, a lot of people, not all of them old and not all of them even White, see every Black young man as a violent criminal. Yarl happened to be Black but it's not certain that the old man wouldn't have shot him if he'd been White; old people who spend too much time at home alone, watching television, tend to form fears of everybody outside an ever-shrinking short list of acquaintances.
I walked unhappily out in the rain. I saw two big round patches in grass where someone had been carrying a big oldfashioned round sprayer and felt a need to set it down. I had seen person's trail through the not-a-lawn. Person had been in the orchard, spraying poison on the surviving trees. Most of my relatives are good people who put High Sensory Perceptivity and the other gifts that go with it to good uses. Then there's one cousin who is the absolute scum of the earth, who has been sneaking around our neighborhood in the dead of the night, for thirty years now, coveting land, trying to motivate people to want to move away, trying to turn people against each other and especially against the young, playing stupid kid pranks. Poisoning fruit trees is not exactly a prank. Leaving a trail that can be followed is below the Professional Bad Neighbor's standard. His intention was to make me miserable, and I did feel grumpy and lazy this morning, but hello, the night's rain was already washing the poison down to Tennessee. Stupid jerk is doing himself more harm than me. I fully expect the end of this long story to be that I walk out one morning and find this guy lying in a puddle of his own blood, and I hope it's in a place where I can take his stupidphone out of his pocket, dial 911, and say "Hello, police? You wanted to see proof that my cousin's been sneaking onto my property with the stated intention of killing me? You want to see what a bad, really bad glyphosate reaction looks like? Behold."
Since I knew it was going to rain I took my serious umbrella, the big awkward one. Since it was Sunday morning I didn't think about knocking on any private people's doors, or trying to determine whether any of the smaller shops in town had lights, but headed straight for the shopping plaza, which has big backup generators. That route leads me past five houses. None of those houses had visible lights on. That might have been because it was, technically, daytime, although the clouds were dark enough that people might have turned on lights indoors. But coming from the fourth of those five houses was a sound like a gas-powered generator. I walked on, and about the time I lost sight of the fifth house I learned that my serious umbrella had developed a leak. The flimsy folding one I carry everywhere has many visible leaks and a few loose ribs. The serious one had developed the kind of leak good umbrellas tend to develop over the years, not visible, right down the center pole. A good umbrella's first leak can get you much wetter than a cheap umbrella's first half-dozen leaks. Fortunately it was hot enough that being wet didn't matter.
Someone pulled over. Tried to back closer, succeeded in getting one wheel onto the edge of the dranage ditch while another wheel was about two feet from a traffic lane. Nasty. I waited, looked both ways, hurried around the car through the traffic lane. A window rolled down. "Need a lift?" asked a relative-who's-become-a-familiar-stranger. I have a couple thousand of those. "Sure do," I said, running around the front of the car, holding on to the car to keep out of the ditch.
People like to think that everyone can tell that they're nice people with good intentions. This is not always the case. I have one relative who is about as far from being a nice person with good intentions as it's possible to get. Why did I expect this relative to be acting like a nice person with good intentions, this morning? Because, in the real world, most people do. Most people are. Only in the news media, which always report what's unusual, do we see as many people behaving badly as people behaving well. Most of the time, most people behave well. The only serious concern in my mind was whether this relative was still a competent driver. Once or twice I have got into a car with a relative and, having gone a little way, said "I want to drive." I hate when that happens, partly because of what it means for the other person, and partly because my eyes were not built for driving. But this person had no trouble going forward, I was glad to see. Anyone might have had trouble backing along the edge of a wet, overgrown ditch.
"I was going into Kingsport."
"I was going to the shopping plaza."
"Do you need anything in particular?"
"A phone would be nice if you have one."
Call the company. Zero through the many annoying robot messages; life is too short to try to talk out loud to other people's computers. "We are experiencing a high volume of calls. Your estimated wait time is 25 minutes. You can speed things up by visiting our web site..."
"If the computer were working I wouldn't need to call you!" We laughed. We were now in the parking lot. "Do you have time to kill, waiting?"
"I have sixteen minutes to get to where I'm going."
"Oh, well, in that case, thanks for trying! Have a good trip!"
At the shopping plaza employees were sitting outside one of the smaller stores, talking about its being closed because of the power outage. I saw lights in one of the big stores, not the other. I went into the one with the lights and reported the power outage. "People all over West Virginia are reporting power outages. I've entered your call into the system. Your neighborhood is expected to have power restored by ten o'clock tonight."
"Have a good day," I said, feeling that that sort of non-response didn't deserve thanks. What has West Virginia to do with my neighborhood? They should have their repairmen, and we should have ours, and I should have seen ours out on the road this morning, I thought as I meandered around the store, enjoying the air conditioning. giving a lot of time and thought to the selection of heatproof food.
Maybe I overdid it. Change was starting to weigh down my pocket. I had time to count my coins and plan exactly what to buy with $4.45. Someone came up and handed me some money. "Sponsoring the moth articles? Thank you!" I said cheerfully, but I wasn't sure the person even recognized me, much less wanted to sponsor anything in particular. Some people just think that a person who wears wet shoes and counts change must be desperately poor. As an Internet writer I am, of course, poor. But not desperate. And I would have been wearing wet shoes, and probably counting change, if I'd inherited the oil fields at the peak of their productivity. Wet shoes because wet day; counting change because I like having a pocketful, but my pocket was getting too full. Money doesn't change those things.
But the person moved on, and if the person wanted to be Lady (or Lord; I'm not telling) Bounti-Fool, it's nothing to me. Some of the moth articles have been funded.
The rain had stopped while I was in the store. When I came out, as I stood waiting for the light to change, it poured. Virginia weather is like that; it's generally mild weather but its timing can feel personal. The umbrella leaked big fat drops right down my neck.
I walked on, noticing how the vegetation along the road verges is changing after years of the (false) belief that it's cheaper to spray glyphosate than to mow and prune. Kudzu actually thrives and flourishes on glyphosate; a whole new field's being overrun. Cinnamon vines are another invasive nuisance that are hard to kill. Spanish Needles, the most annoying species in the genus Bidens, were raising their nasty little claws. Daisies, the chicory whose blooms are so pretty at this time of year, wild garlic, crown vetch, sweet peas, wild sunflowers, both orange and yellow jewelweeds, even the pretty-flower convolvuli, are losing the battle. A patch of Queen Anne's Lace was making a last stand. Raspberry, blackberry, and wineberry brambles had at least had time to drop their fruit before they were sprayed; nobody wants to eat fruit that grew beside a busy road anyway. At least I didn't see much jimsonweed--that nasty stuff likes sunshine, and this has been a wet year. What the chemical companies have sold the Department of Motor Vehicles as "weed control" basically means a lot of vines will soon be pulling trees down into the road.
Someone stopped and honked a horn behind me. I turned back. This person was much younger than I am and didn't look like a relative. I spoke politely, took a closer look, and identified the person as a relative of someone a relative had married. Not someone I'd ever actually met, but someone to whom I might have been pointed out. By person's grandmother, who went to a church near my neighborhood, while living.
"Could I offer you a lift?"
"If you want to/"
What I worry about, when young people drive, is that so many of them talk on the phone while driving. This one took off and immediately got into a phone conversation, but that was not a problem since the phone was the hands-free kind. Everyone in the car can hear a conversation on that kind of phone. That is the driver's problem not mine.
I had used up only about four hours of a day with neither electricity nor sunshine. I went in and drank some water. I was still thinking about Ralph Yarl, and why some older people are so insanely afraid of the young.
Some have always said it goes with the territory. Nobody likes knowing that our careers have probably peaked, that people young enough or even too young to be our children are going after our jobs. If we're not careful we start blaming the young for the timing of their birth.
I like the young, in theory. I see this as a common baby-boomer reaction. We still think of ourselves in terms of identities we formed as rebellious adolescents. We would like to like and understand the young. The young don't particularly want to be liked and understood. Maybe they sense that their purpose in life is to raise our blood pressure. But I personally like to find incidents of Youth Behaving Well. I like to listen to small amounts of what they call music, even their inane phone conversation. They do raise our blood pressure, now and then, but I don't see a lot of possibility for enjoying our old age without learning to enjoy the company of younger people.
I still blame the Daily Feed of Alarm & Despondency from the commercial media, especially television. People who watch television get to the point where they think the greatest danger to them is other people.
We stereotype "the crazy preppers." What's the difference between sane preparation for emergencies, as recommended by the federal government and major religious groups, and "crazy prepping"? Very simple: sane preppers are prepared for the realistic dangers of family or weather-related emergencies; "crazy" preppers are preparing for their fantasy of inter-household wars over the last few cans of food in the cellar. You're sane as long as your focus is on having enough generators to get through a month without electricity, having a year's supply of canned goods for everyone in your family (and, be realistic, some cans to trade with the neighbors), having a way to filter water if the water service grid breaks down. You're in trouble if your focus is on shoot-outs with fellow survivors.
Seriously...most people my age have witnessed a few real-world local emergencies. The Clinchport Flood, in my early years. Takoma Park's Great Storm. Hurricane Katrina. The attack on New York City in 2001. Others, depending on where we were. So what actually happens when life as a town or neighborhood have known it comes to an abrupt end? Even if it's flippin' New York. Nobody liked being in New York, nobody wants to go back there, but when the news broke that the city everyone in Washington loves to hate had been attacked, it was "Do they need places to go for the winter?" and "Where can we send the money?"
But on television "survivors" kill and eat the weaker members of their tribe, because making "survival" seem like a total testosterone fest raises the emotional tension...
That's what people forget. What we see on television is not what really happens, not what ought to happen, not even what we should realistically prepare to prevent happening, but what will keep people glued to the set through another commercial.
In real life, I've seen what happens when a madly mixed neighborhood with young and old, rich and poor, every possible ethnic group, majority-minority, as-if-cast-for-TV sort of people has every road blocked, every light shut off, every house damaged, by a freak storm nobody expected. What happens is that the young take sick days and go around sawing up the trees in the road. A lot of conversations between people who don't normally speak take place. A lot of people whose religious identities differ find religious meaning in their storm stories: People whose apartments have just become unlivable get invited to move in with friends.
On TV, that story wouldn't work. Wholesomeness feels good but it does not keep people glued to the TV set through boring commercials. So, the story needs to be about looting and shooting. No looting or shooting happened in Takoma Park. TV is not interested in Takoma Park. They'd invent a fictional neighborhood where people would smash what the storm hadn't smashed and steal each other's stuff and fight over it.
In the real world carjacking by hitchhikers is not even statistical. It happens, but it's not common enough to be counted as a category of crime. Actual pedestrians, people who are walking beside the road and accept a lift when one is offered, are not carjackers. Actual hitchhikers, people who are standing or sitting beside the road signalling that they want a lift but not walking, are almost never carjackers. Kidnapping of hitchhikers by drivers is a little more common...but at least 99.99% of incidents that involve unplanned car sharing are simply unplanned car sharing. Carjacking (as a serious crime) usually occurs on the scene of other crimes. (Carjacking is also a frequent topic of nuisance calls to police, and/or jokes, of the "Help, my wife's stopping at another store!" variety.)
Planned car sharing is even safer. It's not altogether unknown for people to advertise car sharing with evil intentions, but it's very rare. Most Uber drivers are motivated to earn good references and go out of their way to be helpful. Most passengers are motivated to be nice to their drivers.
On TV, car sharing is not (yet) taken for granted as a way of life. (Sponsors are still trying to sell the idea that a motor vehicle built to hold six to twenty people is somehow analogous to a horse, a particular pet with whom riding alone is a bonding experience.) When a TV show mentions car sharing, it's usually in the context of a crime show in which the sympathetic character is going to have to kill a few baddies in self-defense.
Local warming is real--we've all felt it by now, this summer!--and it's getting worse. Fighting it could mean reversing population growth so that there were no more paved roads, no more drivers, no more parking lots, than there were in 1940. Or it could mean that, now that so many more people own cars and so many of those people are in the same places, we all reverse the adjustments we've made to the American "car culture." Insurance companies could easily make it happen: say, by insuring every seat whether a passenger is in it or not (no incentive not to share!) and adjusting rates to reflect miles driven (more road time = higher risk). One way to fight local warming is to confront the fear so many of us have absorbed about car sharing. The more comfortable people are with car sharing, the less TV they're likely to watch.
Same with home sharing, with talking to people on the mall or in a bar or even after church. People who watch a lot of television have not just absorbed the concept of "stranger danger" for situations where there's a great imbalance of strength between themselves and a new acquaintance. If they think about it they don't consciously believe, but until they're pushed to think about it they unconsciously act on the belief, that just about all other humans are predators, eager to pounce on them. When there is an imbalance of strength, as between an 84-year-old man and a teenaged boy...
As an introvert I would never brightside you with twaddle about how "a stranger's just a friend you do not know." Bosh. Most often, a stranger's just a bore you do not have to talk to again. But very few people, strangers or otherwise, are predators.
The man who shot Ralph Yarl was Andrew Lester. The final outcome of his case has yet to be revealed. I'd like to see it be flexible, individual, something like "Lester was released in the custody of a son, on condition that he not be left alone in the house, not be allowed to answer the door, have no access to firearms, not drive or go out alone, and have any medication he uses specially monitored for any patterns of interaction with his mental condition." Meanwhile people are soaking up their fifteen minutes of fame, telling the press: Lester was an anger-addicted cardiovascular patient, easily provoked to anger at anybody. (That's common.) No, Lester was a racist, drawn to racist web sites. (That's not common, because there aren't many genuinely racist web sites. There aren't even a lot of web sites for legitimate whining on the part of White male writers who've been told that publishers want to read the work of "diversity hires" only, again, this year. There are a lot of web sites that get called racist by people who don't know what racism is and think it means "not agreeing with our party about everything.") Or maybe he just thought too much about that "crazy prepper" idea, common to TV shows that aren't about preparation for emergencies at all, that other people want to beat you up or kill you and take your stuff. Or could it be that Lester was just an old man who spent too much time reliving his memories of conflict with other men, watching violent man-against-man melodramas, on television?
If television producers started trying to teach men about "tend and befriend" reactions to danger--well, the late Michael Landon did try--ratings would drop. The shows would be tagged as, oh how terrible, wholesome family shows for children. There would be a fair question whether shows that men refused to watch could possibly be of any benefit to men.
But what if the families of men like Andrew Lester paid close attention to their condition? What if they had noticed the point at which "Grandpa doesn't try to control his emotional reactions to anger; Grandpa screams and swears at people who call or knock on the door" turned into "Grandpa has frothed up out of control and threatened a gaggle of Jehovah's Witnesses," before it reached the point of "Grandpa shot a schoolboy who came to the door, by an honest mistake, looking for his little brother"?
Seriously. Nobody's grandfather needs to spend his last days living in that kind of fear.
