The Hurricanes of November
By: Petr Swedock
Tags: Election2020, Politics, Elections, Anger, Medium Rare

It is November third, election day, and I’m sitting in the backyard, casually scrolling through stories on Medium, drinking my morning coffee, finishing a plain bagel. Today’s Medium stories are the usual mix of dire, loopy drastic, hopeful and lunatic optimism. Eric J Scholl makes a plea to ‘love thy neighbor,’ and I wonder what he thinks he means by that. Susan Orlean, as she usually does, nails it. Roz Warren notes that she made $700 dollars writing about the worst day of her life and I shake off considering the worst day of my life and if today will top it. Jessica Wildfire writes about orgasms, and it occurs to me that I haven’t had the least bit of physical contact — not even handshake never mind orgasm — in a time too long to sanely contemplate.

The day wouldn’t be that cold, except for the crisp sting of a blustery wind out of the North kicking up leaves. Between wind, cloud and sun, the temperature wavers. I put down the phone and put my hands in my pocket to warm them. I’m still thinking about Eric Scholls exhortations to love thy neighbor. Taking a deep breath I look up and notice something. I’ve lived in New England for many years, and I’ve never seen this in November.

One tree is completely denuded of leaves, its Autumn turning complete. An other tree is bright green, no single leaf either dropped or turned, its fall job not yet started. A third tree is in the process, some green, some red, some yellowing leaves, and a few fallen. Often you can see the different stages side by side in late September or October.

Not in November. At the very least, usually, all the trees have started turning by early October. Some may not finish by November, but to have a tree not yet start by November? I look back, farther, into the woods and see lots of green leaves side by side with red and yellow amid the bark-brown bare branches.

The second siren of the morning wails in the distance.

I go back to thinking. To love someone is to wish for them — and to work towards — what is best for them. That’s what love means to me.

Idly, curious, I pick up my phone again and open the weather app to check the temperature and the forecast for today. Big news: Hurricane Eta, at category four, is about to make landfall on Nicaragua.

A category four hurricane, in November? Now, as sure as I write this, I’ll get some weather nerd in the comments to tell me that, historically, the hurricane season has always extended into November. This may be true. However, I don’t ever recall worrying much about hurricanes, even when I lived in Florida in the ‘70’s, much past September. Now, it appears that, first, we’ve had so many storms this season they’ve gone deep in the Greek alphabet for nomenclature, and here it is November third and we’ve got a category four.

I stand up and ready for a walk. The crunch and scatter of leaves meets with the kick of wind. Amidst a flurry and float of gold and red, I reach inside to grab a scarf and a mask, holding the door tightly to prevent a swinging crash from the fierce winds of November.

I’m walking and thinking. The wind as fiercely whipping as the thoughts in my head. I’m even a little dizzy. How does one love thy neighbor? What if they do not even want that love? I realize my chest and ribs are tight with the tension of holding my elbows in, tightly, from the wind and from the thoughts and the looming election taking space in my head.

I hear the third siren of the morning, closer still, than the last one.

I keep walking until I get to the memorial park. There are trees and benches flags and memorials to the fallen dead of past wars. I often read at this park on sunny days. Sometimes people do yoga in the park. People walk their dogs and I often get to pet the animals and, in kinder times, I was able to meet and talk to people. Here, I once approached a lone animal while I was wearing my reading glasses. It turned and sprinted away and I wondered if was a pet escaped its leash. I retrieved my long-distance glasses, put them on, and saw that it was a large coyote.

At the park today only, limited time offer and a once in a lifetime sight: a burly old man, bearded, tensed, and belligerent, has parked his three wheeled mobility scooter at the entrance to the park, right by a steady trafficked road. He’s standing and saluting his flag-bedecked scooter. It would be comical, except it isn’t. The flags are huge and threaten, in the wind, to topple the scooter. One flag is, of course, the American flag. One flag is a rather sumptuous, finely made and frilled, deep blue, Trump 2020 flag. The third flag is wrapped around itself in the wind and I can’t tell what it is. I stop well ahead of him. I have to go right past him, if I want to keep walking this way.

It occurs to me that the Trump flag actually looks good and is well designed. The colors, fonts, design and manufacture stand out, and for a brief second I wonder that the flag — symbol, signal, and standard — is of much finer quality than that which it represents. Wonder what he payed for it, flashes through my mind.

Love your neighbor, I think, again. How? If I am to love this character, do I give him the fight he so ardently wishes? I briefly consider walking up to him and then taking a knee right in front of the flag. If he wants provocation, I’m certain that’ll do.

Suddenly a horn blares and a fellow traveller to this Trumpist old man honks again, in a pickup truck no less, with another Trump flag and the corrupted blue-and-black ‘blue lives matter’ stars and stripes hoisted in the back. This guy — and it’s clearly a guys guy — continues with a thumbs up and honking until out of sight round a bend. The burly old fellow with the scooter continues, in stony silence, to salute his flags. I remain standing, watching. Thinking.

Then, coming the other direction, a young fellow leans out of the window of a work van. He screams something that sounds like ‘effing fascist,’ and flicks a stub of cigarette at the old man. The cigarette gets swirled and taken away by the wind. The old man continues saluting his flags. I’m on the edge of rage and briefly consider shouting something back at the disrespectful punk. Or even confronting them at the stop light. I think the only thing that stopped me was the thought that I’d be mistaken for defending the old man’s flags and belligerence and not for demanding respect.

But the rage leaves as quickly as it arose. Amid a swirl of wind, with lowering cloud obscuring the sun, and in an enveloping sadness, I turn and head back home. Away from the old man and his flags. I hear more honking and the rev of a sports car. The colors leach away and all I really see is gray on grey, as more clouds come in.

If I am to love this old man, and if I want to love the cigarette flicker punk, and the pickup truck patriot, then what I want, most of all and more than anything, is for them not to be angry. To neither foment, nor succumb to, the purely destructive urges of anger, that least of emotions, and the most of mental illness.

As I get home and push closed the door against the winds. Yet again, in the distance the keening siren. I realize the hurricanes of November have arrived, and fell wind will blow for a long time fuelling and fueled by itself against itself. I remember or imagine, on the heath, and long ago, another old man stood and raged back at the storms of the sulfurous and thought-executing fires…

Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! rage! blow!

You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking thunder,

Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

Crack nature’s moulds, an germens spill at once,

That make ingrateful man! (King Lear, Act 3, Scene II. )

Thus, ever, then as now, our tragedies are wrought out of the iron unbending of our selves. And I wonder when I will finally break.

© Petr Swedock 2020