Something Thoughtful

 Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.  

                                           A MOMENT OF FEAR

            Please bear with me as I tell you a story that seemed real terror to me at the time, but that later proved trivial when compared with what other people had to suffer.

            It was when the first blast of the tropical Cyclone Gabrielle hit Auckland. Rain we were used to – isn’t there that old joke “If you don’t like Auckland weather, wait half an hour”? Aucklanders are used to rain, and lots of it. But the rain rarely lasts long. The narrow isthmus on which Auckland is built means that weather rushes across it skittishly. Rain. Sunshine. Rain. Sunshine. Rain. Sunshine, in equal measure. But this cyclone was something else. The sky was uniformly black, and stayed that way. The rain came down vertically, not pushed by the wind even though the wind was blowing, in heavy, bullet-like drops. At first it drummed down like any ordinary downpour of the sort that eases off after a few minutes. But this downpour did not ease off. It continued for hours.

            I was alone at home in our North Shore suburb. My wife had driven off to the other side of the city, baby-sitting for one of our adult children who was out at work. At first I was certain that the rain would stop. Nothing so heavy could go on for long. But it did go on, relentlessly. I was agitated. I couldn’t concentrate on what I was trying to write. I kept pacing around my study, looking out the window then going downstairs to the front door and looking at how things were getting on. I had never seen weather like this.

            Under the deluge, water was rushing down our street. At first I could see the white line in the middle of the road, but soon it became invisible under the torrent. The road was turning into a river. Further down our road, a drain was blocked with sticks and rubbish. A large and wide pool developed, slowing down the very few cars that were still daring to go this route. By now the torrent was overflowing, rushing over the kerb and over the berm and into the properties on our, lower, side of the street. Our house is built on a relatively gentle slope, but water was flowing steadily over our grass, around our house and into the back yard. Mulch we had put in our front garden was being swept away.  I rushed to our back windows, and saw half of the back yard turning first into a pool and then into a shallow lake, fed in part by another torrent that was flowing through the back yards of our neighbours.

            The deluge kept on for hours. The drumming on the roof never stopped. And this was the time I felt fear. When would it stop? How many more hours would it go on for? For the first time in years, a leak began dripping in our sun-room. I heard a scraping sound and watched our wheelie-bin being pushed down our drive by the force of the water. How would my wife be able to get home safely in this flood? Would our house be permanently damaged somehow? The only time I could remember being as frightened by nature this way was years ago, when we were walking part of the way down the Fox Glacier and we heard the growling and scraping of ice and rocks crashing down on a part of the glacier behind us.

            Slowly – far too slowly – the rain eased off, but the road was still a river. I rang my wife and told her to delay her journey until the water had subsided in our street. When she eventually made it home, she told me that a trip which usually took about 35 minutes had taken her the best part of two hours, negotiating flooded highways with the water nearly up to the hub-caps, miles of stationary cars in a massive traffic jam, and idiots going at top speed through the outer lane, making waves in their wake.

            The following morning, the sky was still dark, but the rain had gone and there were even a few, very brief, glimpses of the sun. We checked the damage. Our front garden had been partially denuded. The bean-vine was largely destroyed. The back-yard pool was slowly draining away. Water had got into what we still call a “garage” – even though we haven’t used it as such for years – and a few items had to be dried. As for our house, it was completely un-damaged, standing as it does on firm foundations. The worst was that some water had got under the house, leaving a very mild pong which disappeared after a day or two.

            Within a couple of days everything was back to normal. A second blast of the cyclone, a week or so later, brought down the branch of one tree, but we were able to easily cut it up. This time the rain wasn’t as relentless and water didn’t overflow the kerb. As for a third warning about a downpour, it turned out to be no more than an average storm, no damage caused.

            So is this a tale of terror and fear? Of course not, though it felt that way at the time. The reality is that ferocious storms, like the one that passed over Auckland, are suffered regularly by inhabitants of islands further north in the Pacific. The other reality is that, while there was no major damage in our suburb, in other parts of Auckland homes were flooded and made uninhabitable, families had to seek temporary shelter, there were slips on cliffs and hills undermining the foundations of nearby buildings and loss of power. Many homes were red-stickered and many streets rendered impassable. And then there was the even greater disaster going on in the North, in Coromandel , in Hawkes Bay and in much of the east coast - bridges destroyed, roads drowned, many communities cut off from the rest of the country, crops destroyed, farms turned into plains of silt, a huge number of homes destroyed, people killed, people missing…

            How small, how tiny, my brief hours of worry were in comparison – a slight itch measured again a national tragedy. How wrong it is to see things only through your own eyes.