You Don't Need A Weatherman

On the eighth straight day of torrential downpours on Long Island I keep waking during the night (three am, four am, five am), haunted by the relentless pounding of water on the asphalt shingles of our house's deeply sloped saltbox roof. (This roof lies three feet above my pillow; when I sit up in bed my head enters the crevice where roof meets wall.) It feels a tad biblical; I'm finding six months of rain delivered in one grand gesture physically disconcerting; it releases the kind of nameless, claustrophobic anxiety familiar to all who reluctantly frequent the hour of the wolf.

The huge locust tree in the yard that has been listing leeward for years, now sways at a thirty degree angle over our back deck, poised to crunch mighty oak branches in its wake and deliver to us an unshaded southern exposure, when its shallow upturned roots finally give up the super- saturated landfill it has clung to far longer than we ever expected. I hate change, and the ruin of our dappled light and the naked visual access to our neighbor's too-close garage will not be optimistic portents, although there is always the chance that the felling of this tree will offer a glimpse of the Milky Way.

The Hamptons are known more for fields than woods; we are the only people in the neighborhood that haven't cleared the space between us and the tidal inlet behind the house. We like the mystery that our tree and vine filled property, with only a path to the water, proposes, the implication that there is vast invisible nature just outside our door, that you can't tell where nature ends and civilization begins. But as more houses, more lights, more guest wings and gazebos abut us, this hubris wears thin—we've just a narrow lot filled with scrub oak and poison ivy, and our property values would vastly improve should we join the others and bulldoze a lawn and an open water view.

Our property extends beneath the undulating salt water of Ligonee Creek, we watch it ebb and flow each day. But lately the even gurgle and hum of swimming pool motors wafting in from three directions has become a constant presence. The building inspector shook his head when I inquired as to the prudence of burying a vinyl clad bowl of water on a tidal plain: "Believe me, some day the earth will rise up and lift those pools right out of the ground!" he laughed. Thus far, the pools have persevered, their metallic motor buzz returning again with the birdsong as each storm has passed. And, there are hot August days I envy my neighbor's children the cool relief, the carefree, dispersing splash, of a bellowing cannonball dive.

But like I said, we hate change and, after 23 years here, don't even know how to begin re-envisioning our .9 acres. It is all I can do to rake the leaves again and again and cut the reeds that relentlessly overtake our four-foot wide path – I have spent hundreds of hours, every summer, spring and fall, struggling to maintain my position in a never-ending battle with invasive flora.

Now the pile of landfill that holds up the cement slab beneath our house is surrounded by water, moat-like, and we had to run barefoot and knee deep into the over-flowed inlet to rescue our drowned backyard bench. This has happened before—in hurricane Gloria in '85, when we were evacuated to the Pierson high school gym, and hurricane Bob in '91 when our family of four sat huddled in the center of the house, videotaping the tree branches slapping the windows.

But this year it's different. This is the year a Tsunami wave snatched away 200,000 souls; this is the year hurricane waters drowned an entire, magnificent city, scattering half a million people; this is the month an earthquake buried tens of thousands. This is the year my husband and I lost our jobs.

I am not afraid for my house. I do not feel the least bit endangered. But even small anxieties these days, like darkness and storms, have a way of completely filling one's chest, like air entering a balloon, they just spread, like saturating rain, into every available gully, crevice, and pothole. I suppose there is nothing remarkable these days about nameless anxiety, snuggled below the eves at four am, awakened again and again by heavy rain that doesn't seem as if it will ever let up.

This essay first appeared in The East Hampton Star
GUESTWORDS column, October 27, 2005