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Reverse 911

September 04, 2010 - View Single Entry

Bright early fall air is blowing through my apartment. The curtains on the west side are billowing, the shade on the east is swaying. When it started to rain last night I closed everything up -- serious rain comes in through all open windows and skylights, no matter what direction it's coming from. Yesterday's heavy air was still in residence when I woke up this morning. Now it's gone gone gone.

Hurricane Earl didn't live up to its advance billing. Partly this is because it was steadily fading the closer it got. Mostly it's because the advance billing was, to put it mildly, overblown. "Earl brought wind, rain and not much else" says the update headline on the M.V. Times website. I'd add "an adrenaline rush for island officials and quite a few residents." Automated calls to more than 20,000 phones -- yesterday I learned that these are called "Reverse 911 calls." You call 911 to report an emergency to authorities that can help deal with it. With Reverse 911, the authorities call you to report that there might be an emergency in the future.

What's the difference between Reverse 911 and crying "Wolf"? Interesting question. The boy who cried "Wolf!" was a kid. The people playing Reverse 911 are not kids. They are adults in positions of responsibility and authority. The boy who cried "Wolf!" was, I suspect, bored. Nothing ever happened in his village. The adults never got excited about anything without compelling reason, and compelling reasons were hard to come by. One of the few was the threat of Wolf. Hence the boy cried "Wolf!" Not "Chicken!" or "Mama!"

In other times and places adults -- men, in nearly every instance -- have got considerable mileage out of crying "Witch!" or "Commie!" but the boy who cried "Wolf!" wasn't sophisticated or well-connected enough to be taken seriously so he was hung out to dry -- which is to say he became a parable to teach children that it is very bad policy to scare the adults without very good cause.

These Reverse 911 people think they have very good cause and (unlike the boy) they get to decide what a good cause is. They think they are conveying crucial information. Crucial information like businesses should close at 2 p.m. and stay closed for 24 hours -- before anyone knew what shape Earl would be in when it started affecting our weather. They were taking refuge in "profiling," in other words. Earl had "Hurricane" in his name, just like Katrina had "Hurricane" in her name -- therefore we might have Apocalypse Incoming.

A neighbor and I were talking about the hysterical reaction of some people. "Maybe they remember Hurricane Bob," she said.

Aha. "Maybe they don't," I said.

I remember Hurricane Bob. He arrived in the middle of August 1991. We hadn't had a really big blow on Martha's Vineyard in decades. Big trees went down, and in some parts of the island the landscape was totally transformed. I was living down a dirt road near the West Tisbury–Chilmark line. Several very big trees fell across that road. A woman living on that road was a nurse at M.V. Hospital, and it was on her account that volunteers -- firefighters, EMTs, and others -- showed up with chain saws and cleared the road. The rest of us, non-essential though we were, had access to State Road much sooner than we would have if one of our neighbors hadn't been a nurse.

Electricity, however, was another matter. Our electricity wasn't restored till nine days after the storm blew through. Yeah, it was an inconvenience,  but you know what? We managed. We got drinking water from a hose at the West Tisbury fire station. We took showers at friends' houses. I washed my hair in the sink at work.

A few years later, Hurricane Edouard blew through on Labor Day weekend. I was working at Webb's campground that summer, 1996. If you're living in a tent, or even an RV, heavy rainfall has a significance that it doesn't have for people in more secure dwellings. My co-workers and I informed campers that shelter was available at the Oak Bluffs School, and quite a few of them took advantage of it.

The short version is that because I've weathered a few storms here, I have confidence that emergency services will be provided and that whatever happens -- barring the worst of worst-case scenarios -- we will make do, help each other out, and get by. With Earl on the way, in other words, there was no need to panic. No need for the excesses of this Reverse 911.

Preparation is good. We're pretty well prepared; most of us know the drill. This Reverse 911 is not so good. It reminds me of the big demonstrations of my younger days, when savvy organizers knew that there were some people who could not under any circumstances be trusted with bullhorns. Put a bullhorn in their hands and they immediately lost the ability to SHUT UP. Pretty soon they'd infect everyone in the immediate vicinity with their nervousness and their misinformation.

Same with Reverse 911. The nervous got more nervous. And those of us who were pretty sure that we could survive whatever Earl threw at us heard "Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!" and went about our business.

Storm Prep

September 01, 2010 - View Single Entry

The hurricane's coming! The hurricane's coming! Hurricane Earl is progressing up the U.S. east coast, and the anticipatory panic has already been going on for several days, although -- or maybe because -- the weather service can't predict where it'll make landfall or how strong it'll be when it gets there.

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout . . .

In the days of my youth John Prine sang "Blow up your TV, throw away your paper / Go to the country, build you a home / Plant a little garden, eat a lot of peaches / Try an' find Jesus on your own." He's still singing it. Loosely interpreted, it makes pretty good sense. The TV and the paper part, however, can be strictly constructed.

I can't literally blow up my TV because I don't have one, and I also can't stop the spillover babbling from people who are glued to their TVs or their weather-related RSS feeds. Short version is that, yeah, I did learn that a hurricane was coming. A couple weeks ago we had a three-day blow and didn't see the sun for most of a week. So I consulted my underwear drawer and calculated that if we didn't see the sun from Friday to Monday, I would most certainly run out of clean underwear. Preparedness is good, so this morning I did laundry.

The humidity is heavy, the breeze minimal, but the sun is out and the laundry was dry by mid-afternoon -- all but my Presidential Visit August 1993 T-shirt, which for some reason stayed damp even when my denim cutoffs were all bone dry. This round had more short-sleeve Ts and fewer sleeveless than the last. Still no long pants, however.

Now I can sing along with Cindy Kallet: "I am ready for the storm."

Speaking of whom, Kallet and Grey Larsen are performing at Katharine Cornell on Saturday. Can't wait.

August License Plate Report

August 31, 2010 - View Single Entry

The traffic has dropped off noticeably in the last few days. Whew. We seem to have survived another summer!!! Fewer cars mean fewer opportunities to add more color to the license-plate map, but hey, we could luck out, right?

Spotted in August: Arizona and Nebraska. Not bad.

There are eight white holes in my map: Alaska, Montana, North and South Dakota, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Kentucky, and West Virginia. And four months to fill them in.

Fairly Belated

August 30, 2010 - View Single Entry

I never did get around to reporting on my day at the fair. My fair was entirely about bread and dogs. Strange but true, a fair [sic] amount of my writing time this past week was devoted to writing (1) a letter to the editor about this year's requirement that recipes be submitted with baked goods, and (2) comments on the American Kennel Club's proposed changes in the regulations for Rally, which is what Travvy and I compete in.

My day at the fair was Sunday, dog day. Along with the rest of the Rally group, I helped Karen Ogden set up her space: a demo area with agility equipment and (later) an abridged Rally course, and a smaller space where we could hang out with the dogs when nothing was going on. Once again, the racing potbellied pigs were headquartered nearby. Travvy was even more fascinated by them than last year. At least five minutes before they came out of their trailer he'd start staring in that direction and straining against his collar.

All in all, though, he was considerably more relaxed than last year. I was more relaxed. This time last year, our first Rally trials were still in the future. Now we've both got more experience, Trav in highly distracting environments and me in handling a dog who is easily distracted.

Once again we won the Alaskan malamute class, being the only team in it. The kid who was supposed to bring out the ribbons brought out his hamburger instead. Travvy didn't eat it -- or the cotton candy and ice cream cones that passed at nose level at other points during the day. Good Travvy.

The judge was a Siberian husky person and she liked Travvy. I said I thought Trav might be carrying a little too much weight, after a hot summer of little serious exercise. She didn't think so. Trav was very happy about that and probably wished he hadn't been so polite about the kid's hamburger.

Last year Trav snarled when a judge's assistant swooped out of nowhere and without a by-your-leave tried to examine his teeth. Immediately after the fair we did some teeth-exam practice, and I've made a point of frequently touching and rubbing Travvy all over, especially the areas where he doesn't especially like to be touched, like under his tail. That made a difference. He "stood for exam" and didn't react at all when the judge felt along his back and touched his sides. Progress is good.

When things were quiet and Travvy was settled in his soft crate with an old marrow bone slathered with peanut butter, I left him under the watchful eye of my buddies and went into the hall to see how my bread had done. I'm used to finding my breads in the winners' case, so it was very weird to find it nowhere, not in the winners' case and not in the also-ran cupboards. Finally, on my second attempt, I found it to the top shelf of one of the cupboards. It looked great, but it didn't win anything. I was amazed. First time in 25 years that I didn't get a ribbon for yeast bread.

My hunch is that they had new judges this year -- maybe last year too, because I didn't enter last year. I also wonder if the plan to publish a cookbook for the fair's 150th anniversary next year had something to do with it. Whoever came up with the muddleheaded plan to require the submission of recipes might have wanted to control who got into the cookbook. Eleanor Neubert, the longtime fair manager, called me in response to my letter -- which I sent to the M.V. Agricultural Society as well as to the newspapers. She didn't realize that recipes were required until she read the premium book while we were talking on the phone. I'm pretty sure she didn't think it was a good idea.

This is the kind of thing you can't find out about by asking questions. You have to just shut up and keep your ears open. Maybe a year or two or three down the road you'll find out what went down.

The Most Important Book I Ever Read

August 29, 2010 - View Single Entry

Another one from To Be Rather Than to Seem.

I'm holding in my hands what may be the most important book I ever read. No, it's not by Shakespeare, Hawthorne, Coleridge, or any of the other literary giants whose work has awed me over the years. It's not by Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Judy Grahn, or any of the feminist writers who expanded my vision. You've probably never heard of it: Lawrence of Arabia, by Alistair MacLean. It's a young adult biography of T. E. Lawrence, number 52 in the World Landmark series of history books for young people.

I had a subscription to the series, a gift from my parents, so the book probably arrived in my family's mailbox when it was hot off the press in 1962. I was in fifth grade, approaching my eleventh birthday. Thanks to a fourth-grade project on Saudi Arabia, I was already interested in the Middle East, but I don't think I'd heard of T. E. Lawrence. I didn't know that Alistair MacLean was famous for writing The Guns of Navarone, the movie of which had come out the previous year.

This was the book that introduced me to a man who has fascinated me ever since. True, the fascination was further encouraged by David Lean's film of the same name: the cinematic Lawrence of Arabia was released before the end of 1962, after my interest in its subject had been well piqued, and I saw it with Grandma on its first U.S. run, in April 1963.

By then I'd found Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom and the abridged version, Revolt in the Desert, on Grandma's bookshelves and read both of them. So I, the budding preteen Arabist, got to explain the events depicted and alluded to in the movie to my friends and family, many of whom had a hard time following the story and understanding the politics. I knew where liberties had been taken with the historical record, and I knew which characters were real (Prince Feisal, Shaikh Auda Abu Tayi, General Allenby) and which not (Sharif Ali ibn al-Kharish, played by Omar Sharif, upon whom I like just about everyone else had a terrible crush). I loved pointing out that Peter O'Toole, at six-foot-two, was playing Lawrence, who in real life was five-foot-four.

When I left home for college and the wider world, this book stayed behind. For decades it lived on gray metal utility shelving in the damp, unfinished basement of my parents' house, along with other books and memorabilia from my early years. When the house was sold, in the summer of 2009, the contents of the basement were junked as too moldy and mildewed to be worth sorting through. Losing all those relics was like a seismic shock in a place I used to live. The initial jolt faded in a few weeks.

Regret for the loss of this particular book didn't fade, however. Its dimly recollected cover image became ever more vivid in my mind: a drawing of Lawrence in Bedouin dress, a dagger in his belt and binoculars around his neck. I looked it up online: inexpensive copies weren't hard to find, but I put off buying one, and put it off some more.

My world has been powerfully affected by books. Books have changed or greatly expanded my understanding of the world, myself, or my work in the world -- often all three. The most important ones have become part of my foundation, part of the path I walk on and simultaneously the signposts and lodestars I need to find that path. The most crucial ones have been with me through countless moves; when they go missing, I eventually replace them. This one, though, I had left behind and not gone looking for. Perhaps it was best left back there. How could a book I'd read in fifth grade possibly live up to the place where my memory had enshrined it?

My passionate interest in the history and politics of the Arab world continued through junior high and high school. My self-directed studies introduced me to subjects that weren't covered in class and perspectives that rarely surfaced in the newspapers, which in those days I read voraciously. For a history project my senior year of high school, I rewrote the parts of the Treaty of Versailles that pertained to the Middle East. Also as a senior, I was a finalist in a school speaking competition. My subject? The secret Sykes-Picot agreement made by the British and the French in 1916. You've never heard of it? Neither had any of my classmates, or most of my teachers.

I started college as an Arabic major, and though I finished with a degree in history from a different school, what I learned from my years of study shaped my worldview. At first glance, there would seem to be few points of convergence between my life and that of a young war hero who spent the rest of his not-very-long life seeking obscurity in the Royal Air Force and speeding through the English countryside on ever-more-powerful motorcycles. But in Lawrence's dilemma, of being caught between worlds and unable to ignore the contradictions that were pulling him apart, I'm still finding echoes of my own. If we were stranded together on a desert island or in a lifeboat, I think we could have quite a talk, once each of us got over our fear that the other one couldn't possibly get it.

Finally I scored a copy of the book on eBay. The copy I read as a kid had a proper dust jacket. This one doesn't. It's a library edition, cast off by the Northside Junior High Library in Greenwood, South Carolina. For weeks I didn't dare open it. Recently I mustered my courage and started reading. Know what? It's still one helluva story, and a pretty good book.

Susanna at 59 does not read with the eyes of Susanna at not quite 11. That Susanna was known to her fifth-grade classmates as Walking Encyclopedia; without knowing it she was an editor in the making, but she wasn't an editor yet, so almost certainly she didn't notice that the word spacing is a little loose, or that "coöperate" is spelled with a diaeresis over the "o" -- a rare styling in American English these days. Now I notice that the book is almost straight narrative from one end to the other. It relies mostly on telling, not showing, though MacLean draws in some good anecdotes that weren't strictly necessary. His first chapter does an admirable job of presenting a complex backstory and essential intelligence: the nature of the land; a working definition of what constitutes "Arabia," or the heart of the Arab world, as we're more likely to call it today; the lives of the Bedouin (so styled), a sketch of the Ottoman Empire in the final phase of its long death throes (the stock phrase "the Sick Man of Europe" is not used), and enough about the British Empire and the war in Europe to make Britain's interests in the region clear. To pull this off in 17 pages -- several of which are illustrated and so don't carry anywhere close to the book's average of 250 words a page -- is downright impressive.

The next chapter goes into Lawrence's child- and young manhood. In the middle MacLean interrupts the biography with one of his rare forays into analysis and speculation: "Looking back over T. E. Lawrence's early days, one is struck by the strange fact that nearly all his interests, activities and hobbies were exactly the ones he would have chosen had he been consciously aiming toward his ultimate destiny."

As a young person I was almost certainly drawn to that idea, and to the notion that each of us -- or at least the more interesting of us -- has an ultimate destiny out there waiting for us, if only we can find the right road to it. Now I suspect that some of us are drawn on, ever onward, following portents and will-o'-the-wisps the way Merlin followed Morgan le Fay, without really knowing where we're going. Lawrence might well have been one of them, but since he was caught up in circumstances for which his preparations -- if preparations they were -- were so perfectly suited, it does look as though Fate had a hand in it, doesn't it?

Fate, it occurs to me as I read, is the ultimate deus ex machina, and a handy plot device if you've got a limited number of words with which to tell a complex story about a complicated person to a target audience of mostly 10- to 12-year-olds. With Fate to fall back on, there's no need to mention that Lawrence and his four brothers were all "illegitimate" by the standards of the day, or to delve into the class and cultural norms that he was flouting from an early age. This Lawrence of Arabia ends when the First World War ends, with a short coda about the role Lawrence played during the peace conference and its immediate aftermath. Here is the last paragraph:

"Colonel T. E. Lawrence was to live for another fourteen years before he met his death in May, 1935, in a high-speed motorcycle crash. But our story of Lawrence of Arabia ends on July 4, 1922. On that day, at the age of 33, he resigned from the Colonial Office, his task completed and his duty done."

It's those fourteen years that so intrigue me. How does a man come to terms with cataclysmic events that came about partly through his doing, even though in many ways they were beyond his control? How does he escape from a stage and a role that were partly of his own making? How do any of us deal with knowledge about ourselves and our world that we desperately wish we had never acquired? If we can't stuff the genie back into the bottle, or Pandora's troubles back into her box, how do we live with what we know?

Fortunately, Alistair MacLean's Lawrence of Arabia didn't end with its last paragraph. That last paragraph is followed by a one-page bibliography. Before long I had read most of those books, and they led me to more. In the wake of the movie, more books were written. I read them too. In my own travels through worlds that sometimes seem mutually incompatible and even incomprehensible -- as Arabic major and antiwar activist, feminist bookseller, year-round Martha's Vineyarder, features editor of a small-town newspaper, coffeehouse volunteer, onetime horsegirl who returned to horseback riding in her late forties, among other things -- Lawrence's own Seven Pillars of Wisdom has always been on my bookshelf. This passage is one reason among many:

"In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith."