Letter from Wartime

“Questo è il fiore del partigiano,/o bella ciao, bella ciao, bella ciao ciao ciao,/questo è il fiore del partigiano/morto per la libertà.”
                                         —Italian Partisan Song, “Bella Ciao”

“Heard about Houston? Hear about Detroit?/Heard about Pittsburgh, PA?/You oughta know not to stand by the window/Somebody see you up there.”
                                         —Talking Heads, “Life During Wartime”

In the hours before Hurricane Sandy slammed into the northeastern United States, my apartment in Bethlehem (Pennsylvania), which was 100 miles and a few hours from the Atlantic, was permeated by the unmistakable smell of the shore. Stolid son of the Alleghenies that I am, I’d never experienced the full onslaught of a hurricane before. This almost miasmic odor I associated with vacation—a fragrance inextricably connected to the Jersey boardwalk and Massachusetts beaches, of salt-water taffy and lobster rolls—suddenly permeating my living room, whose window looked out on a hulking, rusting former steel mill, felt borderline apocalyptic. As is the nature in things apocalyptic, it’s the incongruity that is alarming. As it was for some frightened 17th-century peasant reading a pamphlet foretelling doom because of the appearance of a mysterious comet in the heavens or the birth of a two-headed calf. The unexpected, the unusual, the unforeseen act as harbinger.

A landlocked home smelling like the beach is perhaps not as dramatic as those former examples, of course, and yet as with a sun-shower or the appearance of frost in May, there is a certain surrealism in things being turned upside down. That disruption in the nature of things makes it feel like worse disorder is coming. As it did, certainly, those hours before climate-change-conjured Sandy knocked out transponders, their explosions lighting up the horizon an oozing green all through the night, the winds howling past my building on its hill overlooking the river, where ultimately the power was out for more than a week, and roads made unpassable by the felled centuries-old oaks and maples which dotted the Lehigh Valley. It’s the eerie stillness in the air before the storm