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Resistance, resignation to nature's mastery of us
© St. Petersburg Times SALUDA, N.C. -- It started sleeting on the mountain Saturday night, even while the Drovers Old Time Medicine Show was playing bluegrass music to a standing-room-only crowd at the Purple Onion Cafe and Coffeehouse. That particular business establishment, located on the two-block Main Street, was formerly operated by two sisters of my acquaintance. It still is owned by one of them, the other having made the policy decision to marry and move to Florida, for which I remain grateful. Somebody that evening said, did you know we were in for a big storm, and somebody else said yes they had heard so. But honestly, Saluda is not a place that you worry much about what you have to worry about until you need to. So on Saturday night the band sweated and drank sweet tea and the bass player, who I found out was in real life an elementary school principal, slapped hard at the strings, and we all stomped our feet a little. Sunday morning we woke up, and it was raining needles outside. There was a constant hiss of ice hitting ice. In no time the ground was white like snow except it was not fluffy and friendly. Everybody said it was good that it was sleet instead of freezing rain, because there was less of a chance it would freeze right on the dogwoods and the pine trees and pull down their branches in groaning, cracking surrender, like in the big storm right after Thanksgiving. Not being a place with our own individual Local Forecast On The 8's on the Weather Channel, we had to rely on reports from Greenville, S.C., and Charlotte, N.C., and the national news programs. Everything on the map to the north of us was white for snow; we were the pink-colored area labeled "mix" on top of all the green stuff to the south. Even in tiny Saluda the storm upended many lives, and we knew that for each one of us there were millions of others. One of our local artists and his fiancee set out Sunday morning for an exhibition in Baltimore. He had worked so hard for weeks. They only got as far as Roanoke, Va. It occurred to us sometime during all this that we, ourselves, were supposed to be flying back to Florida on Monday, which required heading down the highway to Asheville, N.C., and then short-hopping over to Charlotte. Given that both airports were iced over and closed, we considered our prospects uncertain. Furthermore, all of the modern things we had come to take for granted -- the Internet, the toll-free number -- were too swamped to be of use. A central conceit of modern life, the belief that if you want to know something you can find it out, no longer worked. We ended up talking to a secretary in the airport director's office in Asheville who said that no, every flight up until yours has been canceled, but yours is still scheduled. It still seemed like a dubious enterprise, but the other sister drove us down the road in the van with no heat, and we went into the little terminal and they still said, On Time. So we went to the gate, which turned out not to be heated so well either, and huddled and waited. I swear to you that there were icicles all along the front of the wing of the prop-jet that was supposed to take us to Charlotte, but you have to figure they know what they are doing. Then they started boarding, and we were still standing there at the desk when somebody said, no, take 'em off the plane. Maybe when people can see a problem with their own eyes, they accept it better. Everybody was patient. We even heard someone say: "I feel sorry for the airlines." Later, back at the ticket counter, it occurred to us that the offer of flying out of Asheville later in the day and then waiting standby in Charlotte or Atlanta all the rest of Monday and maybe into Tuesday meant one, if not two, nights sleeping on an airport floor. So instead we called back the other sister and she sent her husband, who in good humor fetched us from Asheville and drove us back up the Saluda Grade. The next morning we woke up in our upper-story bedroom, and out the windows you could see all the tree branches frozen in perfect ice cases after all, and white rooftops. A dense fog lay across the mountains. The radio said later it would melt some, and then the sun came out bright and it sure did. It is just a matter of luck as to where one gets to wait out the thaw. Our perception that we control what happens to us is, at times, almost entirely an illusion.
 © 2006 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
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