by Jonathan Sanchez
It felt good leaving the house that morning. Summer had finally broken. The heavy, humid haze had finally packed up and left, like a besieging army saying To hell with it, loading up the ships and heading home to the wives and fiancées.
And my bike was running great. I had put a new cassette on it a week earlier, and the drivetrain had taken a few rides to accept the alien organ, but now the chain was running smooth, no longer catching on the new gears.
I rode around the park and down the avenue to the Crosstown Expressway, pulling ahead of the cars waiting to cross. The pedestrian sign going the other way switched from a white man walking to a red hand flashing. It flashed thirteen times and then we headed over, a cowboy bringing the herd across a river.
A half-mile from my office I passed the old fire watchtower. A skeletal metal structure with a covered platform, about four stories tall, it stood back off the street, just tall enough to see over the short city, not tall enough to really stand out.
That tower behind the Cannon Street fire station, that was the one Thad Condon and I climbed the week after our high school graduation.
Our parents were out of town, and we’d been drinking Bacardi 151 with
Dr. Pepper. We went up there at four in the morning to watch the sunrise.
The climbing was difficult and a little dangerous. I had to stop and catch my breath after about thirty rungs, but we made it up without incident.
“Man,” Thad said, taking in the view. “I feel great. Fucking great.”
I had my legs dangling over the edge and my forehead against the railing.
“Yeah,” I said. “All that exercise brought back the buzz.”
“No,” he said. “I’m not drunk anymore. I just feel great. Really, truly, great.” He took a deep breath. “I feel inspired. I feel ready.”
“Yeah.” I was rolling my forehead left and right on the metal rail, from one temple to the other. At that moment my world was a jazz trio made up of Thad’s voice, the chirping morning, and the noiseless rum bass line in my head.
I pulled my head off the rail, tilted it back and wailed out over the city:
“AMAAANDAAA!”
Thad laughed.
“FRANCINE!” he shouted. “FRAAAAAAANCIIIIIIIIIIINE!”
Our parents were up in Western North Carolina, on retreat with fellow Presbyterians. Our girlfriends, who were best friends as well, were gone on a six-week character- and fire-building trek in British Columbia.
Thad turned towards the northwest, towards where my wife and I now live.
“FRAAAAAAAAN-CIIIIIIIIINE!”
“It would take four hours for them to hear us,” I said. “If they could hear us.”
I remember being glad that I could still remember the speed of sound and could still do the math in my head. I was worried about going off to college, where I figured everyone drank way more than six beers a week. I didn’t want to lose my abilities.
I also remember being jealous that Thad’s girlfriend had a better name to shout from a fire tower.
My girlfriend Amanda and I had been sleeping together since Spring Break. Thad’s girlfriend would lose her virginity to him when she got back from B.C. I don’t mean “would” in some sort of future perfect or hindsight sense. I mean we knew then, up on the tower, that she would, as surely as we knew that shrimp-baiting season started in September and Easter candy went on sale after St. Patrick’s Day.
Each of her three older sisters had lost her virginity in the July after graduation. All four sisters were built the same way, their bodies all developed on the same relative schedule. It was as much a good sensible practice as it was a tradition. The scheduling helped to relieve some of the emotion and the hand-wringing. It was cultural.
Thad sat down next to me and took another galvanizing breath. His well-being was palpable, his respiration as healthy as a flourishing house plant.
“I swear Abe, everything is just so beautiful right now. I just wish it could stay like this forever, I really do. If I could pick any day to be my Groundhog Day, this would be it.”
We talked about what would be mine. I said either the day I got a 104 on a Pre-Calc test, when I’d missed class for a week and had to figure everything out myself, or a day skiing in Colorado a couple years back, when there’d been a powder dump.
Thad loved to ski, even more than I did, and he was headed to college in Vermont. Plus he had a summer job saving sea turtles and a girlfriend guaranteed to make him a man in six weeks. Of everyone I knew, he should have been the one most wanting time’s chariot to move along.
But the notion of enjoying the anticipation of joy more than the joy itself, it’s odd, yes, but, even more, it is so human, so universal, that to my mind it is beyond criticism.
Now, ten years later, I work at a non-profit. I married my mid-twenties bar-scene sweetheart, a girl from North Carolina named Rachel. Amanda is now better known as ‘my high school girlfriend.’ I ride a ten-speed bike, which, after passing the fire tower that Monday morning, I rode to my office and locked to a parking meter.
It was a normal day. I read the paper while I drank my coffee. The middle sister on For Better or For Worse was cheating on her latest mid-twenties bar-scene sweetheart. Date enough cheaters and you become one, I guess.
A woman named Rita works next to me. She likes baseball and Andrew Lloyd Webber. I like baseball too, but the way she likes it makes me not want to talk about it with her. Rita gave me the silent treatment all day because I’d opted not to watch her dogs that weekend. Apparently, one of them had been acting “weird” after his kennel experience. I didn’t ask if it was Kevin or Steve. I’m sure it was Kevin.
There was a staff meeting. We went over the calendar and discussed strategies for our annual grant request.
Lunch was accordion-shaped pasta and soy-crumble balls, heated up in the microwave. The afternoon slipped away. At five-thirty I walked outside into a day so nice I could have cried for having missed it.
I guess I should have found some satisfaction in the ten-minute commute on the bike, ten more minutes of outdoor time than people in cars would enjoy, but I was not satisfied and so I stopped in to see Thad.
I locked my bike up and went across the street to buy a couple forty-ounce Michelobs. All the people in the store were black. They were drinking twenty-two-ouncers and leaning against chest-high tables, smoking cigarettes and talking shit. People had been doing the same thing at or near that place since 1808. It’s not a bar, just a convenience store, something like a fast food restaurant for beer and cigarettes. You can have it To Go or For Here. There are lots of them uptown. They close at nine. It’s cultural.
I put the forties in my backpack and went around the fire station. The firemen were cleaning one of the trucks. They waved. They were always washing those trucks.
I climbed the ladder to the fire tower with ease. It’s funny how much fitter I am now at twenty-eight than I was at eighteen. It wouldn’t have been like that back in 1808. But today, kids bound for college, they don’t know shit and they can’t do shit. I sure didn’t and couldn’t. I thought Amanda would be impressed that I’d joined the freshman ultimate frisbee team and made the cut for an improv comedy group. But Thanksgiving break she said she was dating a law student and dropped me like a bag of hammers.
When I came up on the platform, Thad was standing on his head.
“Hey man,” he said.
“Nice day.”
“Fucking-A right it is.”
He came down out of the pose. I liked the way he was about the weather. Even though there are a lot of nice days in Charleston, he wasn’t a snob just because he caught every one. I’m the same way about dolphins. I’ve probably seen a hundred dolphins, but they never fail to thrill me, and when I see one with someone from the inland, I never act like it’s no big deal.
We dangled our feet over the side. I complained to him about office politics and other work stuff so my wife wouldn’t have to hear it. He absorbed it with ease. You get pretty calm when you do three hours of yoga a day and can predict the weather.
“How’s Rachel?” he said.
“She’s good. Real good. She just got a big order from Barney’s.” My wife had a line of pocketbooks she ran out of our home. “I was just talking to her on the phone before I left work. They’ve upgraded that tropical storm.”
“What’s this one called again — Lee-Ann?”
“Not yet – it’s Joanna.”
“Right.”
The list of potential storm names comes out each spring, and they go alphabetically. On average there are only about ten named storms, so a Hurricane Teresa, for instance, is a long shot.
Thad and I looked off to the southeast. It was clear — the storm was still five hundred miles east of the Bahamas. The sky near the horizon was pale blue, fading into white.
We drank our beer and listened to the city and the birds. You could hear the interstate too of course. It seems there’s not many places left where you can’t hear it.
It was nice to sit and shut up for a while. I stayed for a half-hour and then rode the mile home, the alcohol sinking my spirits in my gut, like a dead, gentle leaf, falling steadily into the arms of my wife.
In the early history of the church you find platform sitters, monks, who, like the flagellants or those wrapped in chains, took their asceticism to circus-freak levels. Good marketing for a growing religion. One could argue the traditional continues today with the tree-sitters of the environmental movement.
Thad of course was not up there for Jesus or for Mother Nature, nor to preserve the fire tower, which wasn’t threatened. He was just up there. It was cultural.
The old mansions on Legare Street, Secession, Fort Sumter, sweetgrass baskets, oyster roasts, institutionalized racism, heavy drinking, these things weren’t exclusively local culture any more. They’d been commodified. By that I mean anyone could buy or rent them when they came to visit. Just as well I suppose.
So what’s left are the smaller, quirkier things: the badly-leaning houses, the little boys selling palmetto roses, the old black men on bicycles with milk crates strapped to them. Families out on Sol Legare peninsula going clamming together. The key clubs and juke joints, the Indochinese people who sell shrimp out of white Igloo coolers. And the happy hour bodegas like the one where I bought the beer, everybody in there drinking and talking smack, their kids downtown selling palmetto roses or, in December, mistletoe.
And the Condon boy who’s sat on a fire tower for ten years. It helped that he was from a name family. There’s a Buddhist-like conceit among the rich in not-doing. Sitting up there meant Thad was one son of Charleston who would not succumb to the Yankee work ethic and its air-conditioned offices. He was a source of pride. He made people think our town wasn’t becoming just like any other. If we didn’t think he was so odd then that set us apart.
Not that no one local found it odd. Francine, back in ’95, she found it pretty odd and most inconvenient. She’d come home after half a summer of character building to find out Thad had been sitting up there for six weeks. She broke his heart, told him he was an idiot. Some say Thad went a little nuts that day, the first and last time Francine ever climbed the tower.
When I got home that night, Rachel had the weather channel on. The hurricane was beautiful. The eye was clean and tiny and perfectly round. On the radar the storm looked like a great white galaxy, a nomadic nation of white, crawling to the left.
“I stopped and talked to Thad.”
“Oh, good.” She’d clipped the hurricane preparedness list from the paper. “Do we have any syrup of ipecac?”
“You know, it won’t get here till after next weekend.”
“Yeah well it’s more fun to start preparing now.”
I knew what she meant. Joanna was a Category Five storm, which meant it had nowhere to go but down. Likely it would peter to a Cat Two and then miss us altogether, go up and hit North Carolina like usual. Better to enjoy it while we could.
“Is Thad thinking of coming down?”
“I didn’t ask.”
Five years earlier, Thad had evacuated for a storm named Gary. The storm did not hit us as feared, and going from his hermit perch to sitting in needless hours of stop-and-go traffic really threw Thad off balance for a long time. He didn’t say anything definitive but I was pretty sure he’d sworn off ever fleeing again.
Not that he never came down. He came down every few months, for provisions and for special occasions like the birth of his niece. It took the pressure off the whole scene. If he never left, there would surely be a Thad-watch, betting pools and the like.
A week passed. It was exciting. The storm showed no signs of weakening. Plus, like manifest destiny, it held to a hard, western course, not the usual up-the-coast brush.
On that Monday the governor called a mandatory evacuation. I don’t think my co-workers and I had ever enjoyed each other’s company so much as we did wrapping our computers in plastic and hauling them upstairs, where Planned Parenthood was letting us use their boardroom table. I was chipper and helpful, working with the notion I might not be back for days, weeks if there were a major power outage. The interstate was a parking lot all Monday evening and into the night. Rachel and I decided to wait one more day and let it clear out.
Packing Rach’s car the next morning was a joy. Her parents’ lake cabin was waiting for us, and there was an odd, pleasurable feel in the air, like darkness creeping into the afternoon before Christmas. The storm was due to hit that night. We went downtown to Kasper’s for a leisurely breakfast. It was like being on vacation. It was better than a vacation. Vacations were optional. This was mandatory.
There were some crusty old coots at Kasper’s, drinking bad coffee out of styrofoam cups. They were the sorts of guys who, twenty years ago, would have run
happy hour bodega bars of their own out of parking lots down by the Market. By now of course all of that had been slicked-up, with Bubba Gump Shrimp and the piano bar where the waitresses wore debutante outfits. But the tourist district was empty for the moment, and the old coots reigned again. They still had their big white coolers and enough ice and beer to last a week.
They tried to be condescending to us about fleeing but we were too giddy.
“Just make sure you save some of the good looting for when we get back,” I said. “There’s a dress in the window of Sak’s the wife’s had her eye on.”
Rachel hugged me.
“This is the rainbow we’ve been waiting for,” she said. “We’re gonna loot us a minivan!”
Before heading out of town we made one last stop. I went up the tower alone.
Thad was reading. Tolstoy. Haven’t read him yet myself.
“Hey bud,” he said.
“Getting pretty eerie out, isn’t it?” I said.
He looked up from the book.
“Yeah, pretty eerie.”
“We’re headed up to Lake Lure. Rach’s parents’ place.”
“That sounds nice.”
In the corner was a coil of rope I hadn’t noticed before.
“I guess you’re planning on tying yourself down with that.”
“Hopefully I won’t have to.”
“We’re looking at taking a direct hit. I’ve been watching the radar all week. It’s headed right for us.”
Thad closed the book and stood up, looking to the east.
“I’ll bet you a dollar it doesn’t.”
He turned back towards me and smiled.
“Thad,” I said. “I didn’t want to have to bring this up, but if you stay up on this goddamn fire tower tonight, things are going to turn out a lot worse this time, way worse than losing Maggie.”
Unless you knew him well, you would have thought he was unfazed by my comment. He bit his lower lip and turned back away, looking out over the harbor. The wind started to pick up.
“Have fun in North Carolina,” he said, bitter-voiced.
I climbed back down the ladder.
Maggie was a girl from Australia. She’d climbed the tower three years ago. By then Thad had regained his composure from the Hurricane Gary evacuation, but her arrival still managed to throw him for a loop.
“Oh my,” she had said, coming up onto the platform. “I certainly didn’t expect to have company.”
“Are you serious?” he said.
She had no idea who he was, something that hadn’t happened to him in years. They talked for three hours and then she went to the youth hostel for the rest of her stuff, came back up and spent the night. She ended up staying six months. Two tower-sitters made it easier to put up the rain tarps, meant fewer trips down for provisions. They would get up in the morning and drink their coffee, watch the day go by, the natural day and the city day, talking and not talking for hours. She was the one who started him on yoga.
When Hurricane Linda came late that fall, he convinced her to ride it out with him. It was just a brush but the winds were up in the seventies. Maggie tried to act as if it had been a bonding experience, but she was pretty shook up. She went home for Christmas and didn’t return.
As Rachel and I headed out of town, I felt pretty guilty about the cheap shot, but it seemed like my only chance. Sure he’d been up there for a decade, but we’d never had a Cat Five come in that time.
Apparently a lot of people had the same idea to dodge the traffic by leaving late. It took us eighteen hours to drive the three hundred miles. I doubt that anyone, myself included, calculated just how many people and cars there are down on the coast now. At four in the morning we stopped at a gas station just over the border, still a good ways from the lake. The local paper was already out: “Joanna Weakens to Cat 2, Turns Northward. Wilmington Braces for Direct Hit.”
I don’t know how Thad knew. I’d rather not know. I don’t want to hear how he read the clouds or the behavior of the dragonflies.
In my early twenties the storm brushes had been fun. Friends who lived on the beach would evacuate and we’d all cram into someone’s house further inland, stay up late drinking and shooting pool. Hurricane Gary, that was the last full-scale evacuation. Rach and I had just started dating. I didn’t have a car so I had to impose on her for a ride to wherever she was going. We’d been on a few dates but none of them had a life-or-death impetus. There was bad traffic but we didn’t mind, drinking gin and fooling around in the Camry.
But that was a long time ago, when we were younger and more single. For Joanna, we got one night at the lake before we had to come back. A week later, another named storm, Hurricane Kevin, came up and hit Houston. Or Galveston, I forget which. Thad spent the rest of the fall enjoying Anna Karenina and looking at the real world every day, gazing hundreds of miles out into the Atlantic, via the birds and the critters and the clouds.
Lucky contemplative bastard.
Back in high school we were into surfing. There aren’t a lot of good waves here, so surfing is like bait fishing, you just do it if you like to be out in the water and if you like waiting. The surfers bob out there like kelp, talking shit, watching for waves.
In many ways it’s like looking for hurricanes. After years of doing it, you can spot a good one early on, can tell if it has good definition, enough power to do the job. Or you might see a good one but know right off it’s going to land somewhere else.
Although I no longer surf, I still watch the ocean. I keep a satellite image of the Atlantic in the corner of my monitor. Watching, hoping for the big one to start stirring. And although I don’t go to a high place, in my inner monologue lately I’ve heard myself wailing a name, a good one to shout from a high place. Shouting to the east, calling for her to please come:
“LEEEEEEEE-AAAAAAAAANNN!”
