You couldn’t get a cup of coffee in Midtown Memphis for love or money yesterday morning. I guess that’s what you get when you depend entirely upon electricty to brew that most precious of beverages, and when hurricane force winds hit a totally unprepared city at 7 am, there’s no electricity to be found. 300,000 people are without electrical power in Shelby County as I write this, including my house. The only reason you’re hearing from me at all is that my office is on the same power grid as a hospital. I’ll be lucky to have power by this time next week, and it’s going to get hot before then. Like Baghdad hot, only with 90% humidity.
Check out the storm damage slideshow on the Memphis
Commercial Appeal site. That’s not even scratching the surface. Hundred-year-old oaks were tossed around like matchsticks. One guy I talked to watched an ancient tree uproot itself and smash his car into tiny little pieces. One thing people who are flying into Memphis always comment on is all the trees. Seen from above, the city looks like a forest. Or it did. The storm, which the Commercial Appeal is calling a “derecho”, which is apparently a Spanish word for “really big fucking huge windstorm that fucks a lot of shit up but that’s not a tornado”, knocked down thousands upon thousands of trees. And when those trees came down, they landed on cars, streets, houses, people, and above all, power lines. Sparking power lines are laying everywhere. No one in my office has any power. Only downtown, where the power lines are underground, and in small areas around hospitals and police stations have any power. I understand that the Memphis Light Gas and Water building was without power or telephones for most of yesterday morning. Landline phone service is nonexistant, and the cell networks are about as stable as plutonium due to all of the downed towers. Getting through the city is like running some sort of huge maze designed for rats with randomly blocked passages. The shortest distance between two points is most certainly not a straight line any more, and there are exactly two working traffic lights in the entire city, presenting a totally unorthodox challenge to the already-clueless Memphis drivers. The word “chaos” implies way too much order to describe what’s going on out there. In my neighborhood alone, a grocery store was totalled, a hundred-year-old church lost all its windows and some of its roof, two other businesses were roofless and without inventory, the house across the street from my friend and former landlord was totally destroyed, my old apartment (half of a duplex) now has a tree through the roof and broken windows, and a wall collapsed in the local police precinct, destroying a police car. Almost every building in the city has some kind of damage, from collapsed chimnys to missing roofs. It’s a miracle that there have only been four deaths attributed to the storm so far.
I spent much of yesterday afternoon sawing fallen tree limbs off of my house with a hand saw. Chainsaws are worth their weight in gold right now–the one estimate we got to work up the big Bradford Pear tree that used to dominate our back yard but now dominates the the side street next to my house (as well as the dozen or so main power lines it’s leaning on) was $950! Profiteering contractors are out in droves–many with out of state plates. I could buy three or four chainsaws and do it my damned self, if every chain saw in the city weren’t already sold. As it is, I will hack away at the tree with that poor old hand saw until it finally gives up the ghost.
I’m afraid after a coupe of days in this heat, things could get ugly. Like roaming bands of heavily armed looters shooting it out with National Guard troops ugly. I’m really not exaggerating here. Last night, we managed to find a Walgreens with power because it was next door to a TV station. The place was packed, of course. I managed to snake two of the last remaining candles and waited in line for almost a half hour to pay for them. When I got to the cashier, he noticed there was no price tag or bar code on one of the candles, so he started to do a price check. “Don’t do that,” I said. The other candle, a three-wicked aromatherapy deal, was $4.99. “Run that one again. I’ll pay that price,” I said. “But this one’s cheaper. You’ll pay more.” he said. “I don’t care. I’ll pay it. I don’t want to start a riot.” I said. “What do you mean?” he said. “Look, if you slow down this line to run a price check on the last candle in the house, there’s going to be a riot.” The thought had not occurred to him, but he saw that I was right and, as he charged me $4.99 for the candle, I saw him realize that for $6 an hour he was going to be expected to fight for the cash drawer if the shit went down.
Wish us luck, people, we’re going to need it.
