Derecho

A raven’s song echoes against a wall where the bark of a tree is a rough marble-face, a place

to put his tongue so it says what needs to be heard. Nothing is sustained inside his mouth but stories, stories

that deepen everything looking for light inside the raven’s mouth, steeped in the dense waters of morning.

Sadness runs like a white horse deep into the gravity human eyes have never touched

until it scratches the place where a soul is weak, where a flaw is most visible, where

light fills his bones until light and darkness collapse into each other.

The mind turns into a hem, a black hole where escape is a prayer

that is never answered. Prayer is now the dark

side of light, a night so impenetrable, heavy

with a silence that tears the neighborhood, his skin, his entire body.

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in the picks & plows, millstones, the indelicate hands working a country back into loose soil. Above me, the once-scattered stars

clump together for warmth. Only so much remains for my daughter to wish upon, for my son to name after mythical beasts, for my father

to cradle between steepled fingers reciting my mother’s name over & over into specter. & our branches tire from holding so much

nothing. Rope swing snapped, not anything like a noose. Wild grass browning around an empty silo. Not at all like the torch-lit bodies

the papers promise will wash away with the next good rain. I too take shelter in this Catholic silence, in the overworked machinery rusted

in place, reddening the field, in these patchwork hands whiter than next season’s hard frost. Here, a burn barrel for our unmended shingles,

the collapsed shed out back, the part of the animal we didn’t bother to eat. Here, son, is your myth, your beast, where we watch a fawn crawl back into bullet.

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BLACK CLOUDS ON the mountains, black clouds rising so high sparkling purple crystals touch the stratosphere on the fringes. The woods go dark, the ravines nearby sinking like grooves where ink drained o a topographical map. Crows vanish in the sky, and when the power goes out, our house goes dark, too. Weather channels gave no warning. Neighbors did not call. An ominous monster looms over Appalachia, slithering through the woods, blowing trees just to see how far they will bend before they break. Many break. A boom like a cannon and half an oak topples in our yard, shivering and snapping as it lands. I close the door, and darkness engulfs me and my family. We light no candles, turn on no flashlights, hiding from whatever is moving through the forest. When it passes, it leaves most of central Appalachia in the nineteenth century. For some people around here, not much changes.

Then the heat arrives. One of the worst heatwaves in years, I have never known heat like this, day after day of triple digits with no A/C to stand in front of with my shirt up around my shoulders, feeling the cold wind after venturing out in the broiling heat to jog through forests on paths through the 125-acre plot I call home—a forest now decimated. There was a blight this year, a blight that weakened the trees, and the ones that have toppled behind the shed have chalky blocks of burgundy wood in the rotted core, wood that crumbles in my hands, a forest that has aged. Rotting: when time is sped up, when the fibers of life age prematurely. The storm’s rage exposed the gaps in time, and now the forest is calibrating, slowing down, stopping.

This monster changes the rhythms of life, rhythms that fade until I lose track of them. It no longer matters which side of the house wall I am on. Heat drains out of the hills and into seas of molten air, valleys and yards and gravel roads filling and becoming impassable. Now I am an interloper in summer who has lost his way. No clocks, no screens, no communication, even the phone lines are broken.

Insects inhabit heat, this much I know. The hotter it gets, the slower I move, and the faster the spiders move. Sometimes I can hear the big ones running in the woods from a distance. When the heat thickens and slows me to a crawl and I sit at the base of a tree to rest, I hear the tiny ones skittering across the brittle leaves. There are more than you think. The cicadas, the soundtrack of heatwaves, hiss like a dentist drill mining my skull, until finally the logic that had strung together what few thoughts I could muster comes unwound in the unending afternoons when I wander alone, sleep-deprived from nights lying next to my open window and wondering how it could still be 88 degrees and muggy at 11 p.m., come unwound like a spool of fishing line. There is a big one on the other end and I think he’s going to get away.

EVERY AFTERNOON I STAND in the gravel road, our 1.5-mile long driveway, and stare at the western skies, praying for a thunderstorm to cool it down, to quiet the cicadas for a moment so I can regather my thoughts, but rain never comes. Ever since the looming darkness plowed through from that direction, nothing comes from the west anymore

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except heat. My mother asks me what I was doing out there in the driveway when I come inside, and I tell her I was praying for rain. She does not say anything. She once told me she believed Satan sometimes sweeps across the country, usually north to south, wreaking havoc and causing school shootings and unrest and natural disasters. I wonder if maybe when he came through this time he left the door opened to hell. I am not sure I should say this to her, she might think I am belittling her intuition, and one ought never belittle a mother’s intuition. Besides, just thinking these words makes me want to take a nap under an oak tree by my water garden, where my pet ducks give me accusing looks because I have not given them fresh water in days.

I take my axe, because my axe still works when the TV doesn’t and I can no longer concentrate on my research of Montesquieu’s Spirit of Laws, and I wander into the woods to cut down pines. I hate pines. Forty foot weeds whose snot fossilizes on car windshields, sticky bark like bran flakes with too much honey clinging to my shirt, conspiring together to hide trespassers during hunting season when all the other leaves have fallen, trespassers that I sometimes chase. Fear is not something that comes naturally to me, and as I swing my ax in the heat, shirtless and grimacing with every shuddering blow, I think about my brother, my opposite, the man who once said to me Alex, I’m not sure if there’s anything you’re scared of. I used to take it as a compliment, but these days I wonder.

It is too hot to cut down the big pines, so I have found smaller ones far from home, somewhere near the border with my neighbor, the miscreant who let a hunter onto his property, a hunter who nearly shot my little sister with a high-powered rifle—and then justified himself when we called. I forget his argument; it did not matter. I hack the pines down near power lines after eyeballing distances and trajectories, but my lazy trigonometry betrays me when the tallest pine tangles in the power lines. Is there electricity in these lines or is the outage further down? I have to get the tree disentangled before someone sees, before power companies blame me, before my brother laughs at me. The lower ones are for phone lines, right? I won’t get electrocuted if the tree is touching those. And I have rubber-soled shoes, so I will be insulated. Standing on the angled trunk, cicadas laughing at me, I jump up and down on the tree because this makes sense on the fifth day of 103 degrees. The power lines shiver and twitch as I jump like an excited capuchin monkey, the pinecones hooked over the wires, jump until the tree snaps free and the black lines of information that the storm has rendered useless undulate like sound waves, light waves, heat waves. I have been ridiculous and some part of me knows it, but it is too hot to care.

Besides, I fear nothing.

I WALK HOME, horseflies droning around me. Then I notice I have stopped moving, standing in the sun as horseflies and deerflies circle. A corpse of myself, like the blighted trees. I start walking again, though I have nowhere to be. I start walking again

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because this is what the living do, or so I have heard. I start walking again because humanity has walked for thousands of years to get me to this point, and I must continue to walk to get humanity to wherever they are going.

When I walk through the doors of the local grocery store, the deli stockers are pitched into the coolers like vomiting sailors, throwing out pizza and crab legs, anything not native to the land, before it stinks the place up. Too late for that, but at least they are trying. Kroger’s backup generators are running, but I guess fuel has run out or they are only strong enough to keep the lights burning. No one expected the power to be out for this long, so all of the perishables are perishing. And wandering among the country folk are unnatural, misshapen shut-ins who have emerged from their wilderness hideaways in search of canned food and clean water. I stare at them because here in the Virginia mountains people stare like it’s a pastime. I stare at them because I know this is the only time in my life that I will ever see these endangered specimens of Appalachia in public. And they stare right back. And I think of spiders.

What caused the power outage? Not a hurricane. It came from the wrong direction, from the other side of Appalachia, beyond West Virginia, where none of us go unless we have no plan to return. And there was no rain. Hurricanes have rain. It was not a tornado, though winds surpassed 80 mph. When the power company comes through after many days, searching for their toppled poles in the rattlesnake-infested brush and marveling at how many of their lines snapped, they call it a derecho. We ask them what a derecho is, what a derecho means, but they don’t know. It’s what experts are calling it, they tell us, as if a name makes it comprehensible. Name it and maybe we won’t fear it. Name it and maybe it won’t come back. Never come back, derecho.

THE DERECHO OF 2012. One of the most destructive natural disasters Appalachia has ever seen, but you’ve never heard of it, because this is the land of forgotten wonders, of overlooked demographics, where the only natural disasters to hit are the ones that no one understands, the ones that happen because a hurricane wandered so far o course meteorologists lost it, the ones that must be named because they cannot be explained, the ones that have purple-fringed clouds touching the heavens like the foam of a colossal wave about to crash. Here, meteorological phenomena emerge and vanish in an instant because here there are secrets, unnatural natural disasters that leave families huddling in church basements and drivers dodging downed lines and trees.

By the sixth day, logic is in disarray and memories have become hopelessly muddled in the overheated monotony. But I remember that white oak. White oaks are so hard that when my father cuts them for firewood, his chainsaw blade becomes dull and smokes by the time he is halfway through, but the derecho has brutally bent this one in half, the fibers tangled together like a rope twisted too far and then released, like a green sapling a child has wrenched beyond recognition in a fit of impatience. Broken

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majesty, it stands like a tortured dissident, a tree the storm took o ense to when it refused to bend, to play along with the game. The trees around it, trees that were far more brittle, stand untouched. The place is haunted by the memory, as if it has seen something it should never have seen, and I leave, though I will revisit it many times in the future. It is always very quiet there.

At least the bugs are having a good time. They sing in the treetops, giant hornets zip past my ears munching the heads of cicadas that are still hissing, grasshoppers sail on the oceans of heat, and, several days into the heatwave, the bugs begin partying in the rotten trees. Carpenter ants and termites congregate as a boring bug makes tiny scratching noises, like twisting corks being loosened in wine bottles, like a million tiny washboards harmonizing in the forest as they harvest the pulp of the trees that have been toppled in the maniacal rampage of the derecho. The forest is letting the insect hoard remove its fallen, the forest is celebrating life, the forest is celebrating death, the forest is persisting. And I am here not because I am on my way somewhere else; unlike most of the world, I do not walk through forests to get to a destination: I walk because this is where I belong. This is my destination, and I will always return no matter how far I wander. I am not an outdoorsman. I am the outdoors.

I can tell the time of day by the smell of the undergrowth I can identify any animal of Appalachia by the noise it makes on the leaves I can see variations in the trees when the wind blows and know if there is an animal in the limbs and divine what kind I can watch nervy birds and know where the predator is and what species it is I can listen to blue jays and cardinals and wrens and know when they are lonely or when they are playful or when they are cussing each other out I can tell what the squirrels are saying when they chuckle and spit at each other above my head I can distinguish the silence of a contented forest from the silence of an uneasy forest from the silence of a sleeping forest from the silence of an angry forest from the silence of a watching forest because I have just appeared with an axe on my shoulder I can watch a vulture and know if he is circling because he has found something delightfully dead or because he is enjoying the late morning updrafts I can walk past deer who know me and be so close I might reach out and touch their noses—even when they have fawns that buck and run parallel to me when I jog I can tell the di erence between a rabbit’s ears perked because he senses danger and a rabbit’s ears perked because he senses family and know whether family is coming to socialize or settle an old score. I don’t know how I know all of this, but I do.

WHEN I WENT to college after nearly two decades in the Appalachian wilderness, I took my girlfriend to Massanutten mountain one night to see the moon, and when we walked back I sensed tension in the forest. I listened as my girlfriend talked, but when a branch snapped strangely I shushed her because something was wrong. The forest

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