A hard summer

They tell us the Wisconsin winter was “easy” this year, which is a funny thing to hear after a week of two blizzards followed by subzero temperatures. Now they say summer’s making up for it, in rain. We’ve learned quickly that rain means thunderstorms, and if rain is a “maybe” then storms are a “yes.” 

I had almost finished my novel rewrite when the worst storm came. Tornadoes were a possibility, extreme winds were a promise. The tornadoes spared us but the winds did not. When the sirens went off, we went into our basement like good little midwesterners. Our cats were confused, but they joined us, confusedly. The basement has all the couches from our old apartment, so they probably thought we went back in time. Every so often I would remember something, and send Seth to check upstairs—are the doors locked? our new plants! bring them in—is that window closed? is that other window closed?—and he would return, brave and unharmed. The lights flickered a couple times, and each time, it made Seth laugh. I went upstairs briefly to watch the storms through the windows. It was like watching a movie with low resolution, where everything is dark but you understand violence is happening. Every second, lightning flashed through the sky but failed to illuminate anything except the canvas behind the moving darkness. Then the power went out. 

It stayed out for two days. 

It may not have been the worst storm to blow through Madison, but it was the worst outage event our electric company has ever experienced. Five hundred separate outages from downed wires and poles had to be addressed one by one. Our little street was not their top priority. That was fine. We were lucky. We have family with a house whose power came on more quickly and gave us a place to stay temporarily. Mostly, I was stressed about the book. I had a rigorous writing schedule to meet my deadline, which was just days away, but the storms threw that out of whack. (I still made the deadline, but had to cancel some plans to get there. I had imagined being done by the weekend and had scheduled a full day of activities involving dragonfly identification, a bonfire, and a bike ride around Lake Monona.) But I also understood that, really, things were fine, we were safe; we had to throw out a little food but we had a place to stay. 

different night, a view of a localized storm from the lake near our house

The funny thing is the novel I was finishing, The Unmapping (the one getting published next June), is about a geological disaster that drastically impacts a city’s grid and is a sort of cautionary tale about the need to be prepared (it’s a lot of other things too). Yet I felt fully unprepared. I had exactly two portable phone chargers, both of which were dead, and one battery-powered lantern in need of new batteries. I was glad to see an email alert from the city announcing temporary shelters available for people who need charging, internet, water, and food, but I wondered about the people who hadn’t signed up for every single city alert as I had, and even if they did, what if their phones and computers died before they could receive this message, sixteen hours after the blackouts began? It shook me, this level of cascading failures that could add up after one simple storm that barely made the news. How much of our lives depends on a few necessary things, like electricity. When you lose that, what else do you lose? 

Since sending off the novel manuscript, I’ve had some time to tackle our yard situation. This is relevant, I promise. Our initial dream was to simply replace all the grass with clovers, but we missed the boat on that this year, scattering the clover seeds too late. So now the dream is to dig up the grass and replace it with native flowering plants. So far I’ve dug eleven holes and filled six of them with baby bushes. Fives holes remain unfilled. When it rains, the water pools inside them. 

It’s been storming a lot, so I’ve been thinking a lot about where water goes when it rains. There’s one particular spot on the driveway that likes to stay wet. A tiny river forms on the side of the streets where rain floats past our house carrying leaves and sticks. Certain patches of my running path stay wet for days even when they’re right in the sun. And exactly one hole in our garden stays filled with water. 

The way water moves largely has to do with the way the land is sloped and graded. But then there is the soil. Some holes in our garden are dug in rich, brown dirt. The one hole that has become a pool has a different composition. It’s closer to the area that’s more silty and filled with rocks. I wish I knew more about soil and how to turn a yard into a prairie, but at the very least I know the general difference between silt and loam. Silt is made of inorganic things, like broken down rocks. Loam has more organic materials, dead things that were once alive: leafs, sticks, roots, and bug poop. I don’t know how or why exactly but silty soil does not like to soak up water, while loamy soil does. Our garden is a science experiment but I don’t want to go in blind, so I’m glad I kept these holes unfilled so I could examine how they deal with water. 

The general point is that a land can handle the rain if it has the right soil and enough plants digging into it. It’s almost too obvious a metaphor. To handle a storm, you need roots, you need life, and you need to live in a place where many living things have lived before. We were able to handle two days without power just fine because we live near family who can take us in. We have a support structure. That’s all it is. 

The evening of The Big Storm, I was walking around the park as the wind picked up, when something strange began to happen. Cotton seeds were floating in the air. It looked like snow, but it was seventy degrees. I’d seen a couple seeds here and there in the preceding days, but suddenly it was everywhere, drifting thickly down. I’d try to catch a cotton seed but the simple act of my hand pushing forward created enough turbulence to push it away. 

cottonwood snow

post-storm downed cottonwood tree

It made me feel like a kid, walking through the park, trying to catch the snow, failing, trying, failing, and trying again. The wind picked up and made it even more challenging, blizzarding sideways. I pushed forward and held out my hands until a seed flew into it, a small peck of hardness surrounded by a loose tuft of hair. I held onto it long enough for sweat from my hands to glue the cotton to my palm. Then I blew it away. 

Since then, there have been storms about every other day. None so bad as The Big Storm, but they’ve become a constant evening presence. We now have a spare power bank for our laptops, lots of lanterns, and fully charged portable phone batteries. We’re still kind of dumb about the rain forecasts—we biked downtown and got demolished by a deluge last Tuesday—but we’re getting used to it. 

And when there’s a break in the rain, I’m in the garden. Every time I pull a weed, even the small ones at the edge of the driveway, I worry about the structure of the soil. But I have new plants ready to replace them. They came from the arboretum in flimsy plastic containers and sat on our back deck for two weeks before I got around to transplanting them. In that time, their roots grew wildly out of the bottom of the containers, so much that I had to trim down the roots to free them from their plastic prisons. I hope this is a good sign. I hope it will all hold together. This is a strange summer after a strange winter and things will only get stranger as the planet heats up. I’m ready for a hard summer. I’m waiting for the snow. 

-Denise

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PS: I’m going to be doing a live Q&A about the process of publishing The Unmapping with the publisher Mari on her Youtube channel next Saturday, June 15, at 3:00 PM ET. You can tune in here.

PPS: I keep forgetting to post the interviews I’ve done this year. So here are three(!) interviews I carried out with three very interesting and talented authors about their new books. 

1. A Geologist, Philosopher, Politician, and Chef Walk into a Bar… and They’re Sisters:  Conversation with Caoilinn Hughes about “The Alternatives” for the Chicago Review of Books

2. Confronting the Climate Crisis through Fiction: A Conversation with Mary Annaïse Heglar about “Troubled Waters” for The Rumpus

3. On having faith in creative abundance: Interview with Mark Cecil on “Bunyan and Henry” for The Creative Independent

PPPS: Hi from Mondo