THE USUAL NOTE FROM LB: From the summer of 2002 to the spring of 2010, Gwen the Beautiful and I were the proud and often exhausted owners of a beautiful Ozarks property we called Cloud Creek Ranch.
In many ways, the ranch was paradise. But it was a paradise with a price that started going up before we even knew it existed. Here’s another Monday musing about our adventure and the lessons we learned.
Oh, and if y’all detect any irony, please believe me when I say it comes straight from the universe and not your kindly Uncle Larry B.
by Larry Brody
A couple of weeks ago, restless and in search of adventure, I flew off to The City of Brotherly Love, AKA Philadelphia, to speak to film students at Drexel University.
Brilliant, they were. Eager. Excited.
And exciting as well. My job had been to inspire them. I don’t know how well I did in that department, but they sure inspired me.
I came home ready to take on the world.
And immediately met my match in the form of Tropical Storm Ike and his march northeast from Galveston.
The storm and I reached Little Rock ten minutes apart, and from there it was a race up to Cloud Creek. Ike traveled, I’m told at 40 mph. My truck went about 60 on the winding two-lane roads leading to our part of Paradise.
Most of my driving was through a torrential downpour. Half an hour after I settled in with Gwen the Beautiful and a bag of M&Ms, Ike announced his arrival with even more rain and a howling wind that meant, “Bring in the dogs!”
Until about 5 a.m., our electricity went off and on and off and on, again and again. Then the rain turned to drizzle, the wind stopped, and the electricity stopped completely as well.
As soon as it was light enough, Gwen, Emmy the Bold, Decker the Giant-Hearted, Belle the Wary, Dixie the Ditz, and I went outside to see what was what. Huck and Rosie were healthy and hungry, and all the chickens were alive and cackling. The hen house, however, hadn’t fared so well. It’d been crushed, by a toppled, forty-foot tree.
What saved the chickens was that they hadn’t been inside on the nesting boxes but instead were huddled in a smaller enclosure in their yard. This was because of the black snakes that invaded a while ago. That little adventure completely changed the chickens’ lifestyle. “We’re safer out here, thank you,” their behavior said.
And they were right. If not for the rat snake and its cotton-mouthed companion all the chickens would’ve died.
The Universe may not be big on justice, but when it comes to irony, it knows how to rule.
I did some preliminary clean-up around the ranch while Gwen called the power company and came back outside to tell me it would be about 48 hours before life would be back to normal. We could camp out on Cloudcreek Mountain or go to the nearest functioning motel.
It was no contest. We chose the motel.
Yep, I know. Humans lived without electricity for thousands of years. It shouldn’t be a big deal. But here’s the thing. In the rural U.S., the most serious part of not having electric power isn’t the loss of TV and internet, or even of refrigeration and air-conditioning (although the temperature was in the high 80s). The most serious part is the loss of water.
In the rural U.S., municipal water only gets to a small fraction of the population. The rest of us have wells, with electric pumps that go down, down, down into the ground and bring up water as needed from underground streams. In our case, the down, down, down part is over 900 feet.
No electricity means no water to drink after the holding tank empties, and, most importantly of all for those of us only recently relocated from the city, no water for—okay, okay, I admit to being ashamed!—the toilet.
Unflushability was the order of the day. And for a sensitive artist such as moi, and an Oklahoma native like Gwen, who’d vowed when she was six years old never to live with an outhouse again, unflushability was unacceptable.
I mean, “Yikes!”
So off we went to Mountain Home, Arkansas, almost an hour away, to join other refugees with similar and greater problems. Men and women whose roofs had been battered, windows shattered, and front porches tossed to the rear.
Like them, Gwen and I got the “Tropical Storm Discount,” and with them we shared breakfast, lunch, dinner, some fascinating stories, and an unexpected sense of camaraderie.
And why not? Fall prey to hard times, and you’ve got a tragedy. Survive what gets thrown at you, and tragedy turns into adventure.
All in all, Gwen and I had a fine little adventure of our own. Philadelphia’s a great city. But, both despite and because of ole Ike, we found inspiration and the embrace of true Brotherly Love right here in Paradise.
