The wind came through town last night. It took everything with it. The power was out everywhere. Electrical wires hung limp from splintered poles. They did not even spark; the power had been cut off some time during the night to prevent fires.
My car was down the street, lofted in a neighbor’s tree.
No one else was outside. I could never sleep through the wind, and as soon as it ended I walked out into the aftermath. The first thing I noticed was that it was hot. That dry, breezeless midsummer heat, times two. The grass did not even move between my toes. It appeared that Mother Nature had used up all her breath in that crescendo of a tantrum. The next thing I noticed was that it was quiet. Absolutely quiet. No birds chirped, no wind shook the leaves. There was not even the sound of insects. All the animals had left; those that hadn’t were probably blown away.
Which brings us back to the silence. I never experienced silence like that before then. I rubbed my arm as a chill ran down my spine. It was like I was living in a dead world. I shuffled my feet just so that I could hear the grass crackle beneath them. I needed to remind myself that sound still existed.
That was why I jumped when a screen door creaked open. The reemergence of normalcy to this stark scene was a jolt. I turned my eyes to the source, and saw my neighbor, Mister Moore, walk outside, sipping a mug of coffee in his bathrobe, as if nothing were out of the ordinary. Behind him, the screen door floated shut. It didn’t slam.
I was perhaps more shocked by his nonchalance than I was at the silence that I had just experienced. He looked over at me and raised his mug in greeting. Mister Moore was about fifty years old, his thin hair gray, but only recently receding.
I mentioned before that I couldn’t sleep through the wind. Older folks like Mister Moore and my parents could sleep like it was any other night. They had lived through it a few times.
The last winds came when I was eleven, and I spent the whole time huddled under my doorway with a blanket over my head. To be fair, my reaction this particular time was no different.
Mister Moore surveyed the damage, the belt on his bathrobe eerily still. He raised his hand above his eyes and peered down the street. I did likewise. It was like some kind of highway nightmare. Cars piled on top of each other; none looked at all salvageable. My eyes flitted back to my car, a few houses closer, lofted in a tree. Compared to those in the pile it appeared immaculate.
Briefly, the image of my car as some kind of holy emperor, more majestic and beyond the paltry problems of its inferiors played across my mind. I laughed almost immediately. Yesterday it had been the cheapest hunk of junk on the block.
Mister Moore must have been looking at my car too. “You got lucky, we should be able to get that down today. You’ll be the envy of the neighborhood pretty soon.” I smiled at him as a courtesy. Again, the imaginary immaculacy of the car played through my thoughts.
I wanted to drive off and leave this town behind. All of its bizarre avoidance of the eventual, annual fate had grated on me more and more every year. I thought about leaving last night. Taking that car that hung so calmly from wooden branches now and racing away. To what? It didn’t matter— just out of this town. I hated this coordinated disaster and I hated that no one did anything about it. I have known for years that I didn’t want to repeat what my parents have done—to live here and simply deal with problems as they came and constantly avoiding what would eventually come.
I began to wonder why anyone stayed here. Every ten years this wind came, and every ten years the people who lived here had to clean up this mess. How had his town even survived so long?
Needless to say, it has been my plan to move away at my first opportunity. Maybe the fact that my car survived unscathed was the universe trying to tell me something: that I’m not supposed to deal with this, that I still have a chance to escape the fate of my parents and Mister Moore and not have to rebuild my life every decade. How did they afford it? Why would you even bother?
Mister Moore was in disturbingly cheerful spirits and so was my dad when he came out, in almost an identical fashion to my neighbor. My father’s eyes squinted against the sun, which beamed down with severe intensity because there were no clouds to veil it for once.
Pretty soon the front lawns of the block were specked with a gaggle of robed, coffee-drinking, middle aged men. I tried to retreat back inside, but my mom intercepted me and began to explain to me how the clean up process worked.
First was the gathering of all the debris. Most people who lived here now had figured out ways to minimize this damage but some people never bothered. My dad never bothered—he seemed to enjoy the cleaning process.
As I watched him survey the scene nonchalantly sipping coffee, I was furious. Why was my mom still talking to me? I felt that my supreme bitterness had to be emanating in waves from my pores. I’d be gone in a month for school, and I’d be away from all this mess. I hated it here. It wasn’t just this wind or the cleanup—it was this whole place. It was stagnant. No one in this town ever did anything new. The same thing every day, every month, every year. I wanted no part in stopping progress. Whatever my mother was telling me fell on deaf ears. Why should I help?
Before I realized it, I had asked that “Why?” out loud. My frustration with the whole situation had boiled to a point where it began to overflow. Keeping my mouth shut wasn’t an option. “Why bother? It’ll cost more to repair all this damage than to move!”
“This is home, dear,” my mom explained, and the voice she used attempted to be so calming that it just made me angrier. “Your father has lived here his whole life, why would we leave just because of a minor setback?”
Minor setback. We owned three cars. One was sandwiched in between a telephone pole and a Volkswagen Beetle, another had fused into a T-shape with a decrepit truck, and the third was stuck in a tree. Not for the last time, I imagined myself driving my lofty chariot down that silent road away from here, the only sound echoing in the air my defiant laughter.
My dad came over and put a hand on my shoulder to calm me down. “It’s alright, we’ve got plenty saved away to fix all of this up. Besides, I’ve been needing an excuse to fix our landscaping.” His smile felt more condescending than reassuring. Was this why I was driving a car that was older than me? Because my parents were saving all their money to repair and replace things they knew would be ruined? Was that why they had never taken me anywhere farther than the lake for our family vacation?
I tried to pass off my gritted teeth as a smile. I don’t know that it worked, but either way my parents continued onto their business and in a horrifically synchronized manner, the cups of coffee had been finished off, and all the older men of the neighborhood retreated inside. My mother was circling the house and surveying the damage. I wandered over to the tree that held up my car. The branches looked slumped beneath the weight. On a normal autumn day the tree looked barren enough, but especially so today. Some of the bark had been stripped, and the branches looked weak around the trunk. In the unearthly silence I could hear the faint sound of the wood creaking.
Mr. Moore from across the street was already dressed and trying to sort out the mess of cars. His house had been wind-proofed, so he wasn’t concerned. I always thought it was funny he had spent so much on renovations over the last few years but still drove a powder blue Nissan Stanza. I felt like an idiot for never realizing all of this before. Suddenly, my always-lingering desire to leave this place became more immediate.
No one else my age lived in this town. It was like an entire generation realized the futility of having to rebuild every decade. I had every intention of joining them. My closest friend lived in the next town—this one didn’t even have its own school district, I went to regional schools. I was never bitter about it before the wind, but suddenly every slight injustice felt like a history of oppression in the face of futility. It took me 21 years to get to this point, and all I had to show for it was a car flipped upside down in a tree.
My mother told me stay nearby for school; I knew before I was out of high school that was not going to happen. My family couldn’t afford to send me too far, though, and I settled for a small private school about an hour away. Far enough to pretend for at least a little while that I was not tethered to a place of such unavailing monotony.
My father and most of the rest of the block had come back outside, and began to pick up their lawns. “Little help here, son?” My dad requested. I pretended not to hear him, and walked over to the pile of cars.
I wished mine were down from its height. I looked up at it again. Logistically, I couldn’t see how to get it down. A branch looked like it had lodged in the axle of one of the wheels somehow. But more than that, it just seemed like there was no way to keep it from falling. Maybe the car wasn’t special or lofty; maybe it was just the last to crash.
I turned my eyes to the rest of the block again. Most people were working hard on gathering up the debris. A few had begun to try to sort out the mess of cars. There was still not even a slight breeze; the air was just as motionless as it had been when I came out. Other than the sounds of the clean up, I could hear no animals. There was still a chance this was all a dream, because it certainly felt unreal.
I looked back at my house and my mother came back around to the front with a long list of damages. Curiosity took the better of me and I retraced her steps into the backyard. A tree from next door had destroyed our fence and pieces of roof from well down the street littered the grass. Leaves from all over had mingled together, while the cherry tree in our backyard stood naked but somehow still standing. As I looked at the piles of leaves they didn’t so much as wave. One of our windows had been shattered by something, but luckily we had boarded them to keep any glass from getting inside.
I turned my attention from the house itself to the rest of the yard and then my breath left me like a punch in the gut. Ripped right out of the ground was our old swing set. It was older than my memory, and here it was splintered and sprawled across the yard. One of the seats hung limply from the cherry tree branch, but the rest of it was almost beyond recognition. Something deep and visceral went through me at the moment my eyes surveyed the remains of that once-wondrous source of joy.
I can’t say why I felt this way; it had been years since I had touched the thing. The chains were rusted and the noise it made when someone tried to use it was like the dying sounds of some large animal. Every part of it swayed with the movement of the swing. Even in normal wind it shifted.
But I could still remember spending whole afternoons on those swings, pretending I was in flight high above the rest of the world. Above the feeble troubles of schoolwork and chores. For years that swing set had been my sanctuary. I slept a number of nights in the lookout above the slide. Escape. Freedom. But that had been a long time ago.
It seemed like there was no escape anymore. Dad needed me to help out with the clean up. Next time the winds came he’d need me even more. I began to realize that even if I moved out there was no getting away. Was that it? Was everyone just resigned to this absurd fate by obligation? My car came back to me again. It had done the same as the swingset used to. It meant freedom. It meant escape.
My feet took me to the limp swing hanging from the tree branch before I could even process that I was moving. Apparently it was very precariously balanced. As soon as my finger brushed against the plastic seat, the metal chain slid off the branch with a metallic hiss followed by a thump with the weight of a fifty-pound sack hitting a padded floor. Maybe I was projecting.
“We’ve been meaning to get rid of that for years—it’s been such an eyesore. But we figured we’d save ourselves the trouble.” I jumped at the sound of my dad’s voice; every sound this morning was still so loud as it hung in the unnaturally still air. I said nothing. “Here, can you help me with this?” he asked, as he lifted what had once been the lookout’s roof. I stared at him for a moment, then at the piece of wood. I wanted to refuse, but also knew it needed to get done. Silently, I picked up the plank of wood with him and we carried it over to a corner of the yard. My dad proceeded to collect wooden debris and carried it over to start a pile. “We could get a lot of use out of this for a while,” he explained, all smiles.
I was still speechless, and I began to notice something about my dad’s behavior this morning, and Mister Moore’s, for that matter. They weren’t just going through the motions. Something about this for my dad was enjoyable. I couldn’t figure out what, or why, but I wanted to find out.
“You want to come with me to look at cars tomorrow? We can finally go ahead and replace that old Taurus. I never liked that car, it was such an ugly color.” I shrugged. I wasn’t feeling particularly committal. But I paid attention to what he was saying. The words seemed so much clearer than they would have on another day; maybe it was because there was nothing in between him and myself except the dead summer air.
Something about that simple proposition struck me. I had always thought that for my dad the Taurus was like my swing set, some old object he had some kind of sentimental attachment to. In that way, I guess I was wrong. But much like that old swing set, he had utilized the wind to take care of the work for him.
As I gathered the leftover plastic of what had once been my sanctuary, I felt the weight of the years that had passed in each piece. I let out a deep breath while I piled the various pieces of plastic on the side of the lawn. My childhood was laying at my feet in a very real way. And as that deep breath left me I felt a tension I hadn’t even noticed before leave me. I turned my eyes to my dad who was already moving onto another project.
I knew that this day was coming for years, but I had always just assumed my parents were being stubborn about it or ignoring it. I assumed that cleaning up would just be futilely mending fences and waiting for things to break again. But despite the leaves on the ground and the various and sundry broken parts all over the place, I realized what my father saw: a renewal.
The swing set had been torn down because it was time for it to come down. It had ceased to be an escape a long time go and had been for years tying me to a past that no longer existed. I hadn’t used it in years, and the only reason it had held on so long was because I wasn’t ready to let it go. Any time the subject of taking it down came up I protested, but I never really had a valid argument for it staying.
Dad wasn’t avoiding reality by staying here; he was making the best of it. In that way, he even had me beat, because all I wanted to do was run away. That’s all I ever did.
A crash came from down the street and the sound swept down the row of houses like a shockwave. I knew what it was before I went and looked. The branches of the tree had given way, my car’s precarious loft had given out and it had landed hood-first on the blacktop.
The dream of pulling out of this desolation in a victorious laughter shattered in front of my eyes. So much for an emperor’s chariot, now it was once again just a piece of junk.
Mister Moore, still in his bathrobe, was probing his Nissan Stanza for things that may have been left behind, but it seemed like he wasn’t turning up much. I looked down at my own car and peered into the window, but the only thing that had been in there had been my hopes of getting away from this place. I wondered what Mister Moore was hoping to find in that wreck, but didn’t ask. Much like myself with the swing set, he was probably just looking for hope that he didn’t have to let go. Mister Moore complained about that car a lot, but he took meticulous care of it.
Meanwhile, my dad was gathering up the broken pieces of our house’s exterior. There wasn’t anything he was looking for. . There wasn’t anything he was holding onto—he accepted that this was his chance to get ready for whatever the future held. Dad struggled to roll a pillar that had broken off of our porch out of the bushes. “Here, let me help,” I called across the yard, and I felt my words taken away in a summer breeze.
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