We Are the Hurricane
I live in a place that reaches out—almost hopefully—into the Atlantic Ocean before curling back on itself, a spiral that sets us apart from ocean and land alike. It’s a foothold of sand that’s always moving, and we go to sleep and awaken to the sound of waves.
Yet we are also protected: we rarely experience the blights of the rest of the continent—earthquakes, forest fires, tornadoes aren’t part of our lives out here at Land’s End. Every year we brace instead for blizzards, for nor’easters, for hurricanes. We know how to deal with these storms. We keep candles and lanterns to hand for the inevitable loss of power. Those of us with fireplaces or generators invite others to sit out the storm in the relative comfort of their warmth. We know how to do this. We know how to face the lashing winds and furious waves: we prepare for the storm, we watch it coming, we gather together to wait it out, hugging each other close. We’re good at it.
What we’re not good at is realizing in this time of plague that the storm isn’t somewhere out there. That we don’t need to protect ourselves from wind and waves, but from each other. That, this time around, we are the hurricane.
Us. The very people we choose to sit with in darkness while storms batter our doors. The very people who offer each other refuge. The very people we care about. We are now the danger to each other.
It’s a sobering realization. How do you touch those you love when you’re not allowed to touch? When a touch can bring sickness and death? We see each other when we’re out doing necessary things, and we still have that first impulse to hug, to kiss, to support. We can only wave half-heartedly from the required distance, misery in the gesture itself, emptiness in our isolation.
That is the irony, of course. Tourists visit in the summer and tell us we’re lucky to live here (we know); but when the weather turns, they wonder at how we cope with the isolation, the perceived loneliness, the lack of entertainment. Winters here are in some ways not so very different from current emergency measures: most shops and restaurants shut down, fewer options, fewer people. Yet within that isolation a community exists that is close specifically because of the remoteness, the seclusion, the inaccessibility of our home. We have come to depend on each other in so many ways that are suddenly denied us.
Because we are the hurricane.
It’s hard to see how this won’t change us irrevocably. Every crisis brings out both the best and the worst in humanity, and we are no exception. We are finding ways of reaching out without touching. We are learning to care for each other in unaccustomed and awkward ways. The spiral of land and sea that is our home will survive, and—we hope—most of us with it. It’s hard to see, now, what lessons we’ll take from this plague, but they will become clearer as time passes.
And in the meantime? We’ll continue to go to sleep falling into the voices of the waves. They are timeless. This bit of land scraped out by the Laurentide glacier knows more about survival than even the most stubborn of viruses, and the sand and ocean change only in their own rhythm.
We’re the ones who are ephemeral. Perhaps it takes a plague to remind us of that.