We sat on the beach that day. It was sunny and the waves were monsters. All of the sudden, a man dressed in a black cloak and a three-cornered hat galloped by on his horse. "The hurricane cometh! Gather ye children! The hurricane cometh! Get ye hence!" After the horseman passed, the lifeguard raise his arms as if to gather us from both sides. We left our umbrellas, blankets, and sand castles and gathered round.
"Alas, 'tis true. Yarrrrr, there's a great storm a-brewin'," said the lifeguard. "Nary a soul shall survive! Pack up yer steeds and carriages 'fore Irene come! She will show no mercy, not to no one! Yarrrr!" The lifeguard paused, perhaps thinking of a former companion lost to such a storm. "Mandatory evacuation for all non-residents by Friday at 5. No dilly-dallyin', no procrasinatin', no general tomfoolery! This here's serious!" He looked us all in the eye, somehow simultaneously. His long, ragged, sun-bleached blonde hair flapped in the wind like a flag of surrender. "Now git, I say!"
We scattered. Umbrellas, blankets packed up with haste! Sand castles demolished with enthusiasm! Nothing left behind!
Back at the beach house, we turned on the television. The Important Newscaster forecasted our doom: "Irene is coming at a furrrrrrious rate! It is a Category 26 Billion! It will kill us all! Repent now before it's too late!"
We changed the channel, but it was no different: "You'll need 5,000 gallons of water. 36 days' supply of food. If you are in a coastal state, or bordering a state that borders a coastal state, or ANYWHERE EAST OF THE MISSISSIPP--you must dig yourself a shelter and eat prunes until October. That is the only way to stay alive!"
We were far from home, 8 hours in good traffic. First, we needed to evacuate Ocean City, then we needed to go home and evacuate our home. The dreaded double evacuation--we'll be packing for days!
We left Friday morning. Along the way, roadside preachers sang our doom. "The hurrrrrrrricane cometh! It's too late!" Cars pulled over along the way, the drivers too panic-stricken to go on. They lay in the ditches, in the medians, moaning and grumbling. "If only I would've saved more water…" said one of them. The air felt heavy with rain and desperation. It truly was Hurricarmageddon.
We arrived home. It was hot, muggy. The rains had not arrived. It was eerily quiet. The stores were all out of prunes and plywood-the 2 essentials. I started to dig a shelter, but it was no use: survival wasn't worth this much work! We filled up our biggest cup with water. "This will need to last a month," I calculated, "so everybody gets 17 drops a day. 5 for breakfast, 5 for lunch, 5 for dinner, and 2 for a special treat after you've done your chores." We all hesitantly agreed and waited for the apocalypse.
The rains came on Saturday. It poured furiously most of the day. I chopped up our living room couch to fashion a canoe before I realized there was very little wood in the couch. I did the same thing to the loveseat before deciding that modern-day furniture does not have nearly enough wood for a canoe. Frantic for a boat, I dragged the dining room table out to the yard for a raft and sat on it, waiting for the floods to come. By 5 PM, the table was very wet, but not afloat. By 9, it was still very wet, and still very not afloat. We decided to go inside and wait out the storm upstairs. Hendrik had first watch. That was a poor plan, as he didn't even wake up Melanie for her turn and we slept through the night.
When I woke up, I looked at my digital clock. 7 AM. How are we still alive?!?! How is this clock still working?! I looked outside, it was still raining, but no wind. The table outside was still very wet. I scolded Hendrik for not waking up Melanie and we went downstairs to watch TV and fret. Melanie had first Fret Watch, since Hendrik didn't wake her up. Church was cancelled, due to our impending doom. TV, thankfully, had not been cancelled. Perhaps they were all located in storm-free country, if that even exists.
The winds came right on schedule at 10 AM. They huffed and they puffed, and they blew some branches down. Small ones, medium ones, big ones. Our early afternoon viewing of "Tangled" was interrupted several times by flickers of power. This hurricarmageddon was very inconvenient! I went outside to yell at it, but it didn't listen, it only got stronger.
The rains stopped around 3 PM. There was no flooding in our area. Just a very wet table. It was just as well, since it had been my turn to clean the table for the past 2 months, and I led the league in Avoiding Duty. I deemed it sufficiently clean and dragged it back inside.
We all gathered in the living room and celebrated the successful weathering of the storm. There was no need for all of those precautions. What ridiculous weathercasters and newspeople! Their fear-mongering was all for ratings! It was all a conspiracy by the prune and plywood sales reps! We laughed and laughed at how superior we were. We thumped our chests and roared. We were very prideful then.
But then, tragedy struck. At precisely 3:34 PM, the power went out. For good. This time, there was no foolin' around. This was fine, we could manage a small outage. We barely use electricity anyway. We dusted off our books and relearned how to read.
"Gree…green…egg…eggs…an…and…h…ham" read Melanie. She was a very advanced reader for her age. I picked up a Richard Scarry book to look at the pictures. Hendrik practiced his animal sounds. It was all very 1913.
When it got too dark to look at the pictures, I went over to turn on the lamp. It didn't work! Well, the lightbulb may have burnt out, I'll try another light. No luck! I went through the entire house, and not one light worked. What a coincidence that the same day that the electricity goes out the lights all burn out! Mel found a flashlight and turned it on. Phew! At least that didn't burn out.
Our gas stove also worked. We cooked water and pasta. The water tasted funny, but the pasta was delicious. When it got completely dark, we went to bed. It was 7:30 according to my phone. When we wake up tomorrow, everything will be back to normal.
Just as I suspected, everything was back to normal. The house was completely lit up the next morning, and it didn't matter that our light bulbs were all burnt out. The TV still wouldn't turn on and there was no hot water, but other than that, it was back to normal. The fridge was warm and the meat in the freezer was bad, but everything else was the same. The dishwasher wouldn't turn on and I had to heat water on the stove to do the dishes, but besides that, things hadn't changed. I dropped Hendrik off at day care and went to work, as Mel had left an hour before. We knew that when we came home everything would work.
When we returned, the house was dark and nothing worked. Without light, there was nothing to do. All our frozen dinners were ruined, so there was nothing to eat. The microwave wouldn't even pop the corn, and the oven wouldn't heat the fish sticks.
We started to go crazy. Hendrik ran around in circles like a mad-man. Mel lay under the table, scratching at the tile and singing lullabies. I climbed on the roof and howled at the moon. This was the end. We had lost our minds. Irene had taken away our light, our food, our entertainment, and our sanity.
Our family was in disarray. Hendrik left to live with the wolves. Melanie became a recluse, living in a fort of empty chick-flick DVD cases. I couldn't string together a coherent sentence. We had become animals.
On the roof, I heard the growl of what must have been a great beast. It came from multiple directions. We were animals now, I thought, and we would have to defend our herd like wildebeests in the bush. I assumed these great beasts were coming for us, but the constant growls did not grow nearer. I crawled back inside and approached Melanie's fort.
"Who goes there?!" demanded she.
"Husband. Want. Talk," said I. It took a while, due to my diminishing linguistic abilities, but we planned our attack on these growling beasts across the road from us. Melanie had retained the ability to walk on her hind legs, while I was forced to use all fours. We crossed the dark street, into the neighboring human's automobile shelter. The growling was louder now, we were close. My heightened sense of smell picked up the stench of fuel. This beast possibly was feeding on lawn-mowers and other gas-driven equipment. He must have horrendous teeth, sharp as a Cutco knife! We stalked around the shelter and saw the beast. It had a metallic shell and wasn't as big as I imagined. It moaned and growled somethin' terrible and constant. That's when we noticed the human's shelter had light.
Melanie pointed to the window. "Look, Ken-wah!" She called me Ken-wah now, I wasn't sure why, but it felt right. "Light!"
"Light?" I stepped out of the shadows and into the rectangle of light on the grass. I saw inside the human shelter. There was indeed a light and I looked directly at it.
Mel tackled me. "Don't look directly into it! It will destroy your brain!" We put trash lids on our head to protect us from the brain-eating light. However, we couldn't resist watching how the humans inside the glass lived. Inside, there was a flat box with moving pictures. The male sat on a couch watching it with his mouth agape. The female sat under the light and read a collection of papers with writing on them. I got too close to the glass and the trash can hit it. The female saw us creeping outside and called to the male, who picked up a shotgun and headed to the door. We scattered, Melanie on her hind legs, me on all fours. Melanie was much faster than me and hid behind a tree. I was in the rectangle of light when the male human fired his gun at me. It struck me in the leg and I thought I was a goner. Melanie came back for me, pulling me back into the bush, licking my wound and comforting me.
We went back into our own shelter for the rest of the night. Melanie retreated to her fort, and I slept on the roof. The metallic beasts growled through the night, and it was truly a junglescape.
The next morning, I was back in human form. The daylight gave me strength and intelligence. Humans weren't meant to live in the dark. I told a cold shower, dressed, and went to work.
When we returned that evening, the electricity was back! We turned on all the lights, we cranked the A/C down to 50 degrees, we plugged in the space heaters. We turned on the TV and stereo, putting it to maximum volume. We ran the washer and dryer with no clothes, the dishwasher with no dishes. The generators around the neighborhood were all turned off. Our next-door neighbor's flood light that they never turn off and shines directly into our room was back on. After 2 solid days of no electricity, we were back in paradise. We slept soundly that night, with all the lights on. It was a relief to be back in modern society.
