Storytellersunplugged

Dragon Claws?

I have a lot of vivid memories of Hurricane Isabel. Isabel was a Category 2 hurricane when it hit my home town of Hertford, NC in September of 2003. There were trees uprooted, roofs sheared off, and roads cut off completely to traffic. I was caught in the middle of it with my family. The widow’s walk tore off the roof of my house and fell in the pool while I stood on the porch and watched. Trees older than my great grandparents would be, if any of them were alive, ripped up and fell. My street was without power for a week; living through that storm, and the power-outage that followed was an eye-opening experience.

Many of you already know that I wrote my memories of that storm, and a lot of other things, into my novel “The Mote in Andrea’s eye.” There are other stories, though. Things like hurricanes leave big marks and the memories they carve are deep and lasting. I was reminded of one just the other day when I saw an odd mark in the asphalt in a parking lot. It looked (and looks still) exactly like a giant footprint made by a rubber wading boot, complete with the distinctive tread and the shape of the foot. It is such a startling likeness that my imagination kicked immediately into overdrive. It also made me remember something else about Hurricane Isabel that I thought I’d share. File this on the shelf with all the other places we get our ideas.

When they finally cleared route 17 back through the Great Dismal Swamp, which runs for about 12 miles directly along the long coastal waterway that stretches all the way to Florida, I returned to work, and life. I had an hour commute one way, and every day I drove through that swamp. All long that road crews had come through with chainsaws and just sawed the fallen trees off even with the road – there were too many for them to carry away, and the best they could manage was to cut a swatch through where the road ran to get traffic moving.

I took it all in, driving a little more slowly than usual. It’s a dangerous, narrow road in the best of times - has a sign at either end proclaiming the number of those who have died on the road to be 26 since some year in the 1980s - hasn’t been updated in a long time, but the message is clear enough. Since then they’ve installed a bypass with four fast lanes and fewer dangling trees, but that’s not important to this little tale.

So – there I was, driving along, when suddenly, I saw something, did a double-take, and I had to stop. I pulled to the side of the road, crossed over and stared at the pavement. The edge of the asphalt was scored. Deeply. It wasn’t like something crushed it, but more like huge claws had dug into it - about six of them, a huge saurian back foot ripping the pavement in passing. I’m not particularly superstitious, but that sight chilled me. I was the only car on the road, most businesses were still without power, and people were home.

I looked into that swamp, and I wondered. I knew the marks were probably the mark of the roots of some old tree that was picked up and bodily dragged across the road by the storm, except that I couldn’t see it that way. I couldn’t see how a tree could make the marks, and I couldn’t think of anything else that could make those marks — so my mind built a dragon. It even put the smashed trees into a different perspective, because on one side of the road, the trees had fallen one direction, but on the side with scored ruts, they were smashed in the opposite direction. That means they fell against the wind of the storm.

I never pass that spot without looking at the gouges in the asphalt, and wondering. I see the giant rubber boot print every day on my way to work. One day the words will come…

This has been David Niall Wilson, standing in for the lovely and talented Justine Musk…

Onward!

DNW