The Development (22 page)

Not for the first time in these pages, "So?" one might reasonably inquire: on the scale of natural catastrophes, a trifle compared to Hurricane Katrina or the 2004 Southeast Asian tsunami, with it's death toll of some 230,000. Indeed, although Heron Bay Estates was effectively wrecked, the human casualties of that spinoff tornado were remarkably low: only two deaths (one fewer than the earlier-mentioned toll of Giorgio's unhurried movement up the peninsula) plus numerous bone fractures and assorted lacerations, sprains, and contusions from flying debris, several of which injuries required emergency room treatment.

Indeed, that so many dwelling places and other structures could be destroyed with so comparatively few people seriously hurt, not to mention killed, would seem as fluky a circumstance as the twister itself—the more so since, unlike hurricane warnings, tornado watches hereabouts don't prompt evacuation. Granted, it was the forenoon of a late-October weekday: Those half-dozen youngsters were in school, their working parents and other office-going adults at their jobs in Stratford or elsewhere, and others yet doing various errands beyond our gates. Many of the snowbirds had migrated already to their winter quarters in more southern climes; numerous of those for whom Heron Bay was a weekend/vacation retreat were at their primary residences in the Washington-to-Philadelphia corridor, and some of our year-round resident retirees were off traveling. Even so, not a few HBEers were at home in their Egret's Crest or Shad Run condos, their Oyster Cove villas or Blue Crab Bight coach homes, their detached houses in Rockfish Reach or Spartina Pointe—at work in home offices, fiddling with their computers, or doing routine chores—while some others were enjoying bridge games at the Club, workouts at the fitness center, etc. And our staff, of course, were about their regular employment at the entrance gates, the golf course and grounds maintenance depots, the Community Association office, and the Heron Bay and Blue Crab Marina clubhouses. Bit of a miracle, really, that so many survived such devastation so little scathed—collapsed buildings ablaze from leaking propane lines or flooded by ruptured water pipes (in some cases, both at once)—and that only a couple were killed.

"A couple" in both senses: M/M George and Carol Walsh, of what used to be 1110 Shoreside Drive in what used to be the Rock-fish Reach neighborhood of what once was Heron Bay Estates, in what manages to go on being Avon County, upper Eastern Shore of Maryland, USA 21600. Crushed and buried, they were, in the rubble of that not-unhandsome residence: two red-brick-sided, white-trimmed, black-shuttered-and-doored, slate-roofed stories, of which only the far end of one chimneyed exterior wall remained standing after the tornado had roared through the community into Heron Bay proper, where it waterspouted and then quickly dissipated in the adjoining Matahannock River. Their bodies (his more or less atop hers) not excavated therefrom until quite a few days later, when stunned survivors managed to tally the injured, review the roster of those known or thought to have been in residence, note the unaccounted-for, and attempt to contact next of kin while salvaging what they could of their own possessions, assessing their losses, and scrambling to make at-least-temporary new living arrangements for themselves. A traumatic business, especially for the elderly among us and most particularly for those without a second home or nearby relatives to take them in. No makeshift Federal Emergency Management Agency trailers for us Heron Bay Estaters, thanks!

"So?" you not unreasonably persist: Why should you care, other than abstractly, as one tsks at the morning newspaper's daily report of disasters large and small around the globe? And while you're at it, who's this "I," you might ask, the presumptive teller of this so-called tale, who speaks of "we" Delmarvans and "our" HBE? Am I perhaps, for example, Dean Peter Simpson of Stratford College, a Rockfish Reacher like the Walshes and, with my Ms., one of the hosts of that neighborhood's annual progressive-dinner parties, as were George and Carol? Or maybe I'm another George: that self-styled Failed-Old-Fart Fictionist George Newett, also from the College once upon a time and, with
my
Ms., erstwhile resident of what used to be HBE's Blue Crab Bight? George Newett, sure, why not, who ... let's see ... let's say ... once upon a dozen-years-ago time permitted himself, to his own surprise and likely hers as well, a one-shot adulterous liaison with ... guess who: Carol Walsh! In her early fifties she was back then, his fellow Heron Bay Estates Community Association member and, shall we say, ardent community servicer? Never mind the details. Or wait: Maybe I'm that Miz of his, the poet Amanda Todd, who (you know how it is with us poets) upon her husband's shamefacedly confessing his uncharacteristic lapse, sought poetic justice, shall we say, by bedding George Walsh in turn—or would have so done, except that that astonished and out-of-practice chap couldn't get it up even to the point of consenting to let her try getting it up for him?

Good tries yourself there, Comrade Reader—to which you might add the possibility that I'm
Ellen Walsh,
George and Carol's errant, Sapphic daughter! Ellen Walsh, sure: Early wire-service reports of that freak Delmarva tornado reach my office at the
Plain Dealer,
followed by more specific accounts of a certain gated community's near-total destruction. I repeatedly phone both "home" and the HBE Community Association office, in vain: All phones in the area are out. No point in calling Uncle Cal and Aunt Liz in Virginia or Uncle Ray and Aunt Mattie in Delaware yet, who're no doubt making the same anxious, fruitless inquiries; soon enough they'll be phoning me, to hear what I've learned of Mom and Dad's situation. It occurs to me to try the offices of the
Avon County News
in Stratford, or maybe just hop the next flight to Baltimore/Washington International, rent a car, and get my butt over the Bay Bridge to HBE, since no matter what my parents' fate, I ought surely to be there to aid and comfort them, pick up the pieces, whatever. But—paralyzed, maybe, by some combination of anxiety, denial, anticipatory grief, self-pity, and who knows what else—to my own dismay I find myself staying put for a day, and then another and another. I turn off my phone-answering machine and decline even to answer the caller-ID'd attempts of aunts, uncles, and others to reach me, with whatever tidings, though for all I know some of the
un
identified calls could be from my folks themselves, reassuring me that they're safe somewhere but needing my help. I go through the motions of my work, my "life," steering clear of the few officemates and "friends" who know where I grew up (i.e., in Stratford, back before HBE was built) and who might be wondering ...

Nay, more, now that I think of it: I find myself staying put in the little apartment that I share with a ten-gallon tropical-fish tank and a past-its-prime computer and
losing
my fucked-up self in what I've long wished, to no avail, had been my true vocation, the writing not of interoffice memos but of serious-type fiction stories. Like maybe one about an only-child daughter who, coming to realize that she's a lez, leaves small-town Maryland after high school, goes to university somewhere Midwest, and returns thereafter only for dutiful visits to her parents—unlike the tale's author, who never left "home" but often wishes she had, instead of winding up as a sexless spinster in an entry-level Egret's Crest condo partly financed by her folks and miraculously spared by Giorgio's tornado. A tornado that never actually occurred, it occurs to her to imagine, except in her heartbroken, wish-granting imagination—wherein, while she's at it, she fancies that she's only
fancying
that she "stayed behind" in Avon County! Or, on the contrary, that she long ago left it and never moved back ...

Thus do I find myself by losing myself: While the directors of Tidewater Communities, Inc., at their next board meeting, observe a moment's silence in honor of their late colleague and his Mrs., and then debate the pros and cons of rebuilding Heron Bay Estates—weighing the projected (and environmentally ruinous) ongoing population surge in the Chesapeake Bay region against the recent nationwide slump in new and existing home sales and the predicted hyperactive hurricane seasons, with their attendant steep hikes in H.O. and flood-insurance premiums—"I" invent a pleasant, "eco-sensitive" gated community called Heron Bay Estates, replete with a natural preserve, recreational facilities, good neighbors and Peeping Toms, toga parties and progressive dinners, neighborhood- and community-association meetings, house renovations and teardowns, adulteries and suicides—the works. Sometimes I almost get to thinking that the place is real, or used to be; even that
I
am, or once was. Other times, that I dreamed both of us up, or anyhow that
somebody
did.

In whichever case (as happens), B followed A, and C B, et seq., each perhaps the effect, at least in part, of it's predecessors, until ...

W
HERE IN THE WORLD
to begin, and how? Maybe with something like
In the beginning, Something-or-Other created Creation
—including what became our local galaxy and solar system ...

On whose third-from-the-sun planet, a primordial land mass divided over the eons into a clutch of continents ...

Along the eastern coast of one of which (named "North America" by a certain subset of an animal genus that evolved together with the geography), the of-and-on glaciations and other geological morphings developed that particular planet's largest estuarine system—called "Chesapeake Bay" by the "English" colonizers who displaced it's aboriginal human settlers after appropriating many of their place names along with their place ...

Which those newcomers then named "Maryland" ...

In what their descendants would call "the USA" ...

And lo, on the "Eastern Shore" of this same river-intricated Bay, near the small college town of "Stratford" in ever-less-rural "Avon County," an enterprising outfit trade-named "Tidewater Communities, Inc." developed in the "1980s" a soon-thriving gated community called by it's developers "Heron Bay Estates" ...

Which project prospered just long enough for it's thousand-and-some inhabitants to begin to feel that their variously laid out and well-shrubberied neighborhoods constituted not only a successful residential development but a genuine community ...

Until, a mere two dozen years after it's inception, that development was all but totally flattened in fewer than two dozen minutes by an F3-plus tornado, rare for these parts, spun off from an ever-less-rare tropical storm—the one called "Giorgio," in the "October" of "2006," during that year's annual hurricane season—and here we refugee-survivors of that freak twister freaking
are,
and that's more than enough already of this strung-out, quote-mark and hyphen-laden blather, the signature stylistic affliction of Failed-Old-Fart Fictionist George I. Newett, emeritus professor of more-or-less-creative writing @ the above-alluded-to Stratford College, who here hands the figurative microphone to his former colleague and fellow displaced Heron Bay Estatesman Peter Simpson, just now clearing his throat to address the first postapocalyptic meeting of the Heron Bay Estates Community Association (HBECA, commonly pronounced "H-Becka"), convened
faute de mieux
in a StratColl chemistry lecture hall thanks to Chairperson Simpson's good offoices as associate dean of said college and open to all former residents of that former development. Your podium, Pete, and welcome to it: Rebegin, sir,
s.v.p.!

"Yes, well," Dean Simpson said to the assembled—then paused to reclear his throat and adjust with experienced hand the microphone clamped to the lectern perched between lab sinks and Bunsen burners on the small auditorium's chemistry-demonstration rostrum: "Here we-all are indeed—or
almost
all of us, anyhow, and thanks be for that!" He shook his balding but still handsome late-fiftyish head and sighed, then with one forefinger pushed up his rimless bifocals at the nose piece, smiled a tight-lipped smile, and continued: "And the question before us, obviously, is
Do we start over?
And if so, how?"

"Excuse me there, Pete," interrupted one of the six official neighborhood representatives seated together in the lecture hall's front row—plump Mark Matthews from Spartina Pointe, Heron Bay's once-most-upscale detached-house venue—"
I
say we oughta start over by starting this here
meeting
over, with a prayer of thanksgiving that even though Heron Bay Estates was wrecked, all but a couple of us survived to rebuild it."

"Amen to that," some fellow gruffed from an upper rear row—beefy-bossy old Chuck Becker, Pete saw it was, from Cattail Court, in his and Debbie's own much-missed Rockfish Reach neighborhood—and there were other murmurs of affirmation here and there in the well-filled hall. But "Objection," a woman's voice protested from elsewhere in the room—the Simpsons' friend and (former) neighbor Lisa Bergman: Dr. Dave the Dentist's wife and hygienist-partner, and HBECA's trim and self-possessed rep from their late lamented subdivision. "If we're going to bring Gee-dash-Dee into this meeting," she went on, "—which I'm personally opposed to doing?—then before we thank Him-slash-Her, at least let's ask Her-slash-Him to explain why He/ She killed George and Carol Walsh and wrecked all our houses, okay?"

"Hear hear!" agreed her swarthy-handsome husband and several others, including Pete's afore-mentioned Debbie, the Stratford poet-professor Amanda Todd, and
her
spouse, Yours Truly, the of-and-on Narrator of this rebegun Rebeginning. Enough present objected to the objection, however—both among the official representatives from what used to be HBE's Shad Run, Egret's Crest, Oyster Cove, Blue Crab Bight, et al., and among the general attendees of this ad hoc open meeting from those several neighborhoods—that Peter was obliged to restore order by tapping on the microphone before proposing that in the interests of all parties, a few moments' silence be observed forthwith, during which those inclined to thank or supplicate the deity of their choice would be free to do so, and the others to reflect as they saw fit upon the loss of their homes and possessions and the survival of their persons. "All in favor please raise your hands. Opposed? Motion carried: Half a minute's silence here declared, in memory of our late good neighbors the Walshes and our much-missed Heron Bay Estates."