Here I am, alone in a small house on the Isle Madame, which is actually a network of one big island and several smaller ones, extended out a bit from Cape Breton in the Gulf of Canso. It’s raining outside, and Hurricane Fiona is about to hit. I don’t know whether the house will still be standing tomorrow.
It’s 160 years old, and that bodes well for it, but the barn out back is in rough shape, and there’s a fir tree in front that I should have cut down a long time ago. As it is, I climbed a ladder this afternoon and cut off several of its most threatening limbs. I don’t have a chainsaw here, and I don’t think the electrical tool would have liked the wet wood and the rain anyway.
My wife and our grown son and daughter are staying at a friend’s house, high and dry—we hope—35 miles inland. I’m here to make sure that if something does happen, and something could be done to mitigate the damage, somebody will be on site to do it. Of course, it is all quite vague. You don’t know what you’ll need to do until the need arises. And it’s not as if I have plenty of tools here to deal with a crisis.
There’s no generator, for one thing, and so there won’t be any running water from our well. I’ve filled a large plastic tub with water from the shower, to dump into the toilet, or to give to the cats. The power will almost certainly go out tonight, and it may be several days before it’s repaired. I will probably throw the breaker switch tonight to disconnect everything before the storm hits because there’s no sense having live electricity coursing in a house that may be burst open.
I’m worried, but I’m also at peace. I’ve said my prayers, and all now is in the hands of God. I’ve noticed other people, yesterday and today, pottering about their yards, battening down the hatches. Other men have been doing a lot of tree cutting too, in anticipation.
It’s a strange kind of calm, what I am feeling now. I know that my wife and my children love me, so that’s all right; and I do trust that they know I love them. But a man wants something other than that. Perhaps we all want it. We need to be needed.
In the ordinary course of human life before our technological revolutions, you didn’t have to wonder whether you were needed. The need was obvious and usually urgent. The children have to be tended. The animals need water and food, and they need to be kept reasonably clean, too. There are always crops to see to, food to stalk or gather, fruits and vegetables to preserve for the winter. Clothes must be darned or mended or patched or cut down to fit a smaller child. The hearth must be swept clean of ashes. Logs must be chopped and stacked and kept dry for the fire.
Nothing should simply go to waste. Everyone has work to do, and most of the time that work is done best when the boys are over here and the girls are over there. They become interdependent, and that makes for more than efficiency and solidity. It makes for gratitude and the satisfaction that you have met the challenges of life as best you could.
I recall once reading in a newspaper from the 1880s that an unusually warm winter might pose a hardship for the local hospitals, with loss of human life. That was because there wasn’t enough ice from the lakes. And, of course, lake ice isn’t simply beamed from outdoors into a hospital cooler. It must be cut out of the lake by men and boys with ice saws, and stacked in blocks, and stored that way, banked with sawdust, in ice-houses, to last through the rest of the year.
I imagine being a sturdy little boy on the lake, not able to handle the saw but big enough to carry blocks from the lake to the horse cart, all while the men are sawing away and chatting, and it being a bitter, bracing, sweaty, dead earnest, and yet merry time. Such memories penetrate to the marrow of the soul.
No, there could be no unnecessary people then, and neither men nor women would be so foolish or so ungrateful to suppose that life would be better, or would even be possible, without the other sex. Every day, the boy had to do what boys did, and every day, the girl had to do what girls did, and that was no cramp on them but a way to flourish.
It is a boon to man that we no longer must rely upon ice saws and ice tongs and horse carts and ice houses. And surely it is a boon to man that most people are no longer bound to the vicissitudes of daily necessities for procuring good food, warm clothing, and a roof over our head. What is not a boon to man is the sense that he is no longer needed. That is deadly.
