The wind tore through NC last Saturday.
64 funnel clouds blew the sky down, uprooted trees, flattened buildings, and sucked the internet up and carried it away. Without email or cable for days… I lived in a news vacuum save for that antiquated old standby: the newspaper.
When the storm hit, the dogs and I huddled in the back bedroom (except for Huckleberry who, for some reason, felt determined to remain in my home office, under my desk, curled up on his cushion). The gusts blasted against the house, followed by sporadic, angry bursts of rain and hailstones. I’m not sure how long it all lasted. My sense of time, like the internet, was snatched away by the funnel clouds.
Later, when the world grew quiet, my phone began to ring and buzz with text messages. Are you okay? Is everything all right? Any damage? Calls from family members and friends… from here in NC… from PA and NY and VA…
That evening, out in the front yard with the dogs, I saw white shapes glowing in the twilight. Bleached dinosaur bones were scattered across the lawn. I heard a creak and a sigh from above and looked up. The power tower on the edge of the yard was twisted, its skeletal arms broken and hanging; the power lines sagging. The upper half of a shattered ceramic insulator dangled from its side.
My cell phone rang. It was Gaston calling from Washington D.C.
“The power tower is damaged,” I told him, “There are bits of ceramic insulators all over the lawn.”
“Did you call the power company?”
“No. We have no internet. I don’t know the number.”
“Look in the phone book.”
Phone book? Do we still have a phone book? Who has phone books?
The power company arrived the next day to take photos. More teams showed up on Monday to assess the damage and on Tuesday, the prehistoric bucket trucks arrived to bring the Future back.
They’ve spent the past three days replacing the tower with a brand new one: a single pole that is anchored ten or twenty feet into the ground. Unlike the old one that had a footprint as wide as the Eiffel Tower’s, the new one blends in better with the landscaping.
Yesterday evening they began disassembling the 40-year old (50-year old?) tower, breaking it apart from the top down and hauling it away. I could hear the groan of tired metal and the whirr of the buzz saw as I made dinner. And when the convoy of giant bucket trucks quit for the day and rumbled away down the street, three quarters of the old tower was gone, leaving behind a scattering of dinosaur bones on the ground.
I collected a few to keep as souvenirs. I made a small pile of the relics, fossils of another age. Unlike most of the composite polymer ones made today, these are porcelain. Sad they aren’t all still made of porcelain. I’m glad these dinosaur bones are made of the real deal.
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