The 24 Cabinet Cards of Esther Hoyt and Other Reasons to Hide under the Desk

1.

An F2 Tornado touched down in the summer of 1990, exactly 10 miles south and west of my family’s small house. The civil defense sirens loud, whirring shriek was only interrupted by the instructions coming in over the living room radio:

Go to the basement or the lowest level of the building you are in. If there is no basement, go to an interior room with no windows, for example a closet away from exterior walls…

South and West of town, they said. Moving North and East. I was only nine but even I could do that math.

I followed my family into the basement. I moved a desk chair and then squeezed my body into the small cavity underneath my father’s old writing desk. I could pull my knees up to my chest and still had just enough room to place a pillow behind my back.

My parents sat on the basement couch on the other side of the room. My brother crawled in and out of a handful of hiding places, resting, at times, under the coffee table in front of them. My sister, barely 2-years old at the time, was both blissfully unaware and incapable of staying in one place for any amount of time. All five of us kept a watchful eye on the staircase that led up and out of the basement toward the windy, sideways-rain world above.

The funnel was 100-yards wide, the radio said. At least 3 other funnels on the ground, but none of them as big as the one crawling toward us.

Immediately, the radio kept saying.

I laid down on the carpeted floor with my head and shoulders under the desk, waist and legs extended out into the open room.

Dad turned the radio down and read to us from the Little House on the Prairie. When he read, he was uninterruptible. ask questions only at the end of the chapter. Those were the rules. We were nowhere near the end of a chapter, on the 6th or 7th book in the series now. Laura Ingalls Wilder and Almonzo were riding in a carriage somewhere in South Dakota, maybe.

What a name. Almonzo.

In the pauses between sentences, I listened for the sound of a growing wind outside. I pulled the blanket up to my neck and waited.

2.

In 2016 the University of Tulsa acquired 24 cabinet cards from the collection of a woman named Esther Hoyt. Only one of the photographs was featured in a press release about the acquisition. A local news station ran with the story and gave it the headline: “TU acquires first known photo of a tornado.”

A scan of the cabinet card was included in the article. The roof line of a row of buildings extended along the bottom of the card. A long white twisting line rose from one of the buildings like the smoke plume of an extinguished candle. A large black cloud loomed in the background. The text on the bottom of the card read “Tornado. Oklahoma City. May 12. 96”.

46-year-old Thomas Croft aimed his view camera at an F2 Tornado that struck just outside of downtown Oklahoma City. The storm destroyed one barn, killing several chickens, and tore the kitchen of a farmhouse apart. Croft escaped with his camera intact.

The University of Tulsa’s press release, it turns out, was a lie.

3.

His father, Gathering Feathers, was a keeper of the winter count. In the Kiowa tradition, the count is kept on an animal hyde. A thick black line marks the return of ice and snow and then another one marks the Sun Dance. Roughly where the spine of the animal used to be, there was a neat and careful stack of rectangles, each one accompanied by a small image to represent a singular event for a season.

Kiowa Girls Run Away Summer

Woman Hanged Summer

Stars Fall Winter for the season in which the Leonid meteor shower left strange white scratches on the thick, black November night sky.

Relocated to Oklahoma, the son of Gathering Feathers, who was given the name Silver Horn, continued the historical record in this way. Without access to animal hides, he used lined paper, sometimes annotating his illustrations with the proper American cursive he must have been taught by a white woman in a reservation school. In the winter of 1862, Silver Horn illustrated by the author and his book on how to make “The Horses Ate Ashes Winter of 1862” with a drawing of a horse, pressing its face into a grayish colored soot pile, unable to find grass to eat in the deep snow.

Cut Off Their Heads Summer

Smallpox Summer

Smallpox Winter

The “Horse Eating Summer of 1879” was an illustration of a dead horse. A small X drawn where the horse’s eye should be. A man stood in front of the horse with his hand in his mouth. By 1879 the bison had been hunted to the point of near extinction by white settlers. They were so scarce that the Kiowa were forced to kill and eat their own horses in order to survive.

This was the same year the US Government created a memorial for General Custer on the site of a successful armed resistance to forced relocation of the plains nations.

The same year American poet Walt Whitman went on a speaking tour, recounting the events of president Lincoln’s assassination in vivid detail as though he had been there.

The same year Edison debuted an incandescent light bulb in Menlo Park.

The same year Agnes Mary Clerk created a Woodburytype photograph of the planet Jupiter for the first time, almost 300 years after it was discovered.

But the Custer Rewritten as Hero Summer and the Lying Poet Summer and the Glowing Electric Bulb summer and the Jupiter Photograph summer did not belong to Silver Horn or to the Kiowa. What belonged to them was the taste of horse meat lingering on the tongue, sweeter than bison or beef, and so it was called The Horse Eating Summer of 1879.

For “The Great Cyclone Summer of 1905” Silver Horn gave us Mánkayía, the tornado spirit. Mánkayía took the shape of a horse with a long snake’s tail. He reared up into the sky with his front hooves stretched out. His long tail stretched and twisted down toward the ground in the long, thin shape of a funnel cloud. Mánkayía’s long tail loomed over the decapitated body of a federal agent. The agent’s blue vest was decorated with a star on the chest. Behind the body, a house had been reduced to rubble.
“Red Horse Winter of 1905” was Mánkayía again, alone this time. His eyes were wide and full of anger, as though he was looking for someone he could not find.

4.

I barely survived my art history class in college. I was working the graveyard shift cleaning buses at a depot near the freeway at the time. We had a 15-foot-tall car wash brush on wheels, and we’d connect it to a hose, make sure the 5 gallon bucket had detergent, and then pull the whole spinning mechanism along the length of the bus. Ten bucks an hour, but you didn’t have to maintain any sense of decorum or professionalism whatsoever because you’d never interact with a customer or the public at all, so that was nice.

My boss was a 300 pound man who sometimes went barefoot and liked to sit cross-legged in his office chair. He tried to be friendly and ask about school, but as long as we weren’t crashing the buses or spilling detergent or forgetting to close the bus toilet’s drain valve, he didn’t care. Pete was a SeaBee who saw some shit in Dong Xoai and wouldn’t talk about it. If someone left beer on the bus, Pete might lock himself in his office with it and tell us to figure it out without him. He’d come out red-eyed a few hours later and one of us would drive him home.

I’d get back to the dorms around 5AM and get breakfast, then nap for a few hours. I’d wake up and take uppers to make it through the day, but they’d wear off around 2PM, at which point I’d be in a classroom with an open text book of Art Through the Ages in front of me. The professor would turn off the lights and go through a slideshow of medieval triptychs and roman murals, but in that dark, warm room I was at war just to stay awake.

Now that I think of it, I have no memory of what he looked like. The professor, I mean. He was just a dark shape in the back of the room. A disembodied voice coming from a shadow.

Dr. Shadow loved that story about Picasso standing in front of his painting of the Guernica slaughter with a Gestapo officer. The officer asked “Did you do this?”, to which Picasso replied, “You did.” Dr. Shadow told that story all the time, but I still can’t remember the moral. There is a way in which cubism and the simultaneous representation of the bodies from multiple angles inherently mangles and twists them with a violence that tells the truth about Guernica better than a photograph. Maybe Dr. Shadow had said something like that. Maybe not those words exactly.

One afternoon during the photography, unit Dr. Shadow darkened the room and put up an image on the slide projector.

“This one is… difficult,” said Dr. Shadow.

I wrote “Nick Ut ’72 Napalm Girl” in my notes.

I didn’t want to look up at the screen but did anyway. Dr Shadow described it as though reading off a page. “A 9-year-old Vietnamese child named Phan Thị Kim Phúc runs toward a photographer near Trảng Bàng. She is fleeing with four other children down the middle of a road, screaming and naked. In the background, we see the smoke from a US forces Napalm bombing and although it is not immediately clear from the photo itself, we now know that the incendiary bombs were dropped on allied troops and civilians. Kim Phúc’s clothes were on fire.” He paused. “Which is why she tore them off.”

The classroom was deadly silent. We were all sustained in the horror and fear of that little girl. I found myself wanting to force the next slide, but the image didn’t budge.

Dr. Shadow’s voice came from the back of the room. Smaller than it had been a moment ago. “It’s a terrible thing.” He waited. He inhaled deeply through his nose. He held all of us in that room like a conductor whose arms are still raised for the fermata, to witness it.

I thought of Pete behind the locked office door drinking lukewarm Budweiser, gripping the can with his hand, looking at his knuckles and imagining something ineffable. There was a long exhale again. The words, if there were any, did not seem to come, and the longer we sat with the photo, the less we understood it.

Maybe war isn’t something you can try and understand.

Maybe a photograph can’t bring you as close as a painting.

We sat in silence together until mercifully, the mechanical shift and click of the slide projector’s tray lifted the image and pulled Kim Phúc away from the light, sending the whole room, albeit for the smallest fraction of a second, into a total and complete darkness.

5.

I only learned about Esther Hoyt’s 24 cabinet cards because my parents called to tell me that no, they were not in the path of the storm swinging through Eastern Nebraska, but there were a few Tornados that touched ground, they thought, somewhere in western Iowa, and it’s just that time of year and everybody needs to be safe, but anyway, speaking of storms, they had seen something about a storm front in California and was I in the way of it?

I was.

“It looks bad on the news.”

“It’s just a lot of rain. I think they called it an atmospheric river last week. Now it’s a bomb cyclone,” I said.

When I said “a lot of rain”, I gestured with my left hand toward the window fruitlessly. They couldn’t see what I was seeing. The entirety of the sky was overwhelmed with the cold gray of a downpour. The gutters and downspouts were clogged with leaves and muck. The rain spilled over the edges of the gutters. The water pooled in the grass so deep that the green tips of it were completely submerged in some places.

“What’s a bomb cyclone?”

I waited for a second, because I realized I had no idea. “It’s just raining,” I said. “A lot,” I said. And then “I mean, the backyard is a goddamn swamp, Dad.”

After we hung up, I put on my tall Doc Marten boots, which were as close a thing as I had to something that worked at all like a rain boot, went outside and killed the power to the outbuilding. The water was within a few inches of the bottom of the door frame, still clear and clean. I went into the building and tried to imagine it with 6 inches of water. I picked up a few things off the floor and piled them up on shelves and workspaces. Went back inside and searched on my phone for places to buy sandbags in Sacramento but couldn’t find anything and wouldn’t have known what to do with them anyway.

And then because I can’t leave well enough alone, I sat in the living room in front of the wide glass patio door and watched it come down in buckets and googled “bomb cyclone” and “cyclone” and “cyclone vs. tornado” and “tornado photography” and “history of tornado photography” until the I found article about the Hoyt collection and it looked like exactly the sort of hole I could shove my head into while the downpour kept on relentless outside.

6.

A British photography journal published in 1875 included clear instructions from a photographer named Alexander Caddy on how to doctor photographs. In the journal, Caddy took almost two pages of small type to describe his process in almost painful minutiae, going so far as to include the specific recommendation of both a Woolfe’s “BB” pencil made out of cedar as well as a particular size of a leather chamois dabber for making improvements to the print on the carbon plate.

Caddy did not use the word manipulate. There was not even the hint or possibility that this could be dishonest in any way. It was, in his mind, just as much a part of the process as where to point the camera.

By the time I made it to college, bootlegged copies of Adobe Photoshop made the work much easier. A cracked bootleg copy wasn’t hard to come by. My roommate Ben and I collaborated on photoshopping a picture of my back to make it look like I had a tattoo of Burt Reynolds from Smokey and the Bandit.

We had to take the photo first. I stood in the doorway of my room and held my shirt up to reveal a bare, very untattooed shoulder. Ben slapped my skin a few times to make it turn pink. “Trust me,” he said. “This adds to the realism.”

“Does it, though?”

Ben laughed hard and slapped me again. “You have to trust the process.”
We took the photo on a digital camera and loaded it into his computer. Ben had been making album art and fliers and t-shirts for all of our friends’ shitty punk rock bands, so assembling the whole thing wasn’t too tough for him. I sat on the edge of his bed and watched. He found a photo of Burt smiling and wearing that signature cowboy hat. Made it black and white, cranked the contrast, set the layer type to darken, shifted the color curves, erased the edges of the brim of the hat where the image would have disappeared under my shirt, and suddenly I had an extremely convincing (and painless) tattoo of Burt Reynolds on my shoulder. The whole process couldn’t have taken us longer than 15 minutes total, shoulder slaps and all.

I emailed it to my mother. The email’s subject line read “have I ever told you that my favorite movie is Smokey and the Bandit?”

After we lived together, I moved away from Nebraska and then Ben did too. We worked together at a startup in California for awhile, and then he moved back to the midwest. Kansas City, I think. We had a big fight over the phone one day and then stopped talking.

He died a few months later. Suicide. Not because of the fight, I tell myself.

God, the fight was over something dumb, too.

What name is given to this season?

Eating Regret Winter.

I can’t think of photoshopping stuff without thinking of Ben, but I’m sure I wasn’t that important to him. I had just been some goofy college roommate who borrowed his movies. Bladerunner. The Last Starfighter. Logan’s Run. Apocalypse Now. Empire Records. His collection was all over the place.

I paused the movie when Alex was in the record store, asking about something he had ordered, and I ran down the hall. “Ben! The soundtrack to 2001 is right there in the record store in Clockwork Orange!”

“Goddamn right it is,” he said.

I went through his entire film collection in the year we lived together. Photoshopping Burt Reynolds Summer. Borrowed Kubrick Winter. Not Smokey and the Bandit, though. He didn’t have it. I’ve never seen it.

7.

In the Red Horse Winter of 1905, when a Native American sees a tornado on the prairie, but there are no white Europeans around to take a photograph, does the wind that winds through the tallgrass still make a sound?

8.

One night when I was working in the bus depot, Pete took it too far and threw several full beer cans at my head. I didn’t yell at him or even blame him. I just walked off the job and didn’t come back. I tried other things for money. There was a stint at Starbucks and two summers at an ice cream shop (a job that was so good I feel obligated to say “best job I ever had” every time I mention it). I was flat broke through all of it.

I was able to lie about a blood transfusion in 1987 and donate plasma once a week. “Donate” makes it sound like altruism. They’d pay cash for you to lie there and watch a movie with a few needles sticking into your arm and the whir of a machine in your ear.

I’d take a book, but it was too hard to read in that position and only being able to use one arm. So you’d resort to staring at the television sets they had mounted to the ceiling. You had to do something to distract yourself from how bizarre and dystopian the whole thing was. 30 of us in a basement, lying in rows on old hospital beds, trading our blood for cash.

Still, it beat getting beer cans thrown at your head.

The film Twister was on cable by then, and I think I saw it 7 or 8 times that summer, lying back for a however-long-it-takes-to-collect-your-plasma chunk of time. I watched Bill Paxton try to collect scientific data on tornadoes by sending a Dodge Ram, its truck bed full of experimental atmosphere probes, into the heart of an F5. I watched him use a leather belt to strap himself to a water main pipe while the storm consumed the farm house around him. When the dust settled, he loosened the belt, stood up, argued a bit over who would run the lab, and then kissed the female lead.

I was in grad school in California ten years later, when a student asked me suddenly, “Dr. Huscher? You’re from Oklahoma, right?”

I’m not a doctor, but I liked that my students made this mistake sometimes. I didn’t correct him. “I did my undergrad at Nebraska,” I told him. “North of Oklahoma.”

He placed his phone on my desk and then turned it so I could see better. The screen was open to a news article. A massive Tornado had just hit Oklahoma. “Have you seen this?”

I scrolled down past the black bold of the headline. “20 dead in horrific Storm.” His iPhone screen was fully occupied by the photo of what could only be described as rubble. The bottom half of the photograph was a mess of confusion and destruction. Bricks (some chunks of them still mortared together), 2x4s, the cardboard box for a casio digital piano, a blue and white checkered piece of fabric, a still-intact doorway missing its door, the orange and black top of a Shop-Vac, torn and punctured pieces of painted white drywall, a red and blue wind jacket still on the hangar, a brown pipe twisted into the beginning of a cursive letter. The top half of the photo was an empty and blameless pale blue sky, interrupted only by an American flag that had been found in the rubble, then mounted by a relief worker on top of the heap. A small breeze opened the flag toward the camera.

“You ever seen one of these?”

“Uh-huh.”

He wanted to ask me more, but I couldn’t hold the room. There was a political science class beginning to sneak through the door to occupy the seats emptied by my fiction writers. I was distracted, and there were 24 more photos.

“Can you send me that?” I asked.

I took a 40-minute bus ride home and followed the link once we hit the freeway and the heavy diesel engine started to open up. Everything on my phone was just aftermath. The only images of the active tornado, taken from a safe distance, were buried at the end of the news article’s photo collection (numbers 23, 24, and 25).

Early in the afternoon, a dark storm cloud began to rain on the wheat fields near Moore, Oklahoma. In less than two hours those clouds turned into a tornado wider than the island of Manhattan. The recorded wind speed was 270 miles per hour. It injured over 200 people and killed another 24.

The bus slowed to a crawl and then stopped completely on a slightly banked curve where I-80 Business meets the exit for I-5 south. The air conditioning seemed suddenly inadequate. We were less than 2 miles from our destination. I could probably walk it from here if the driver would let me. I moved to an empty seat on the left side of the bus, which was in the shade. I couldn’t see how high above the ground the overpass was from my new seat.

I kept reading.

A storm chaser named Tim Samaras was attempting to deploy atmospheric pressure probes and infrasound tornado sensors into the rapidly developing storm. Samaras, his son, and another team member were all killed. There was a quote from Samaras’ widow, but I closed my phone and pushed it deep into the pocket of my shoulder bag. I looked out the window and imagined what we’d do, stuck in a bus on an overpass 50 feet above terra firma.

Go to the basement or the lowest level of the building you are in. If there is no basement, go to an interior room with no windows…

My god, it’d catch us all up like a kite, wouldn’t it? Shatter the glass and spread a billion shards through a darkened sky like a cloud of pollen. Swallow up the sounds of our screaming. Lift us through the empty window frames and do what tornadoes do to people. Crush us or pull us apart or throw us or bury us alive three counties over. I don’t like that my mind does this. I can imagine how the storm will twist the steel frame of the bus and leave it strewn across an empty street like a tangled shoelace.

Someone comes later and tries to understand what happened. Someone points a camera at our bodies or the barely recognizable shell of the bus or the collapsed overpass.

Click.

The sky was empty.

9.

There are at least three tornado pictures older than the Croft photograph.

Clinton Johnson’s photograph on July 15,1895, F.N. Johnson’s on August 28, 1884, and A. A. Adams’ on April 26, 1884.

The actual first photo, the one by Adams, is the least impressive. The funnel cloud itself had to be dramatically enhanced on the negative during the printing process. Photoshopped within an inch of its life. Or whatever they would have called photoshopping back then. It looks more like a painting than a photograph — nothing about it seems natural. Even in this state, the tornado is so thin it might as well be a plume of dark smoke extending from a chimney into a relatively calm, albeit overcast prairie sky.

I can’t help but think of Ben for a moment, using the blur tool to soften the edges of Burt’s mustache and sharp chin. Shifting the hue of the “tattoo ink” toward a blueish gray.

I found a newspaper article describing the tornado in the Johnson photograph. The storm “smashed the house of Mr. Nelson to kindling, carrying Mrs. Nelson and her baby thirty feet, but injuring neither.” The same storm also threw a man 300 feet through the air and “fatally hurt” a 12-year-old girl.

The Robinson photograph is the most impressive of all of them and captures the most destructive tornado as well.

A massive black storm cloud takes up the top half of the photo. A large tornado extends down in the center, with two smaller funnel clouds extending down toward the ground as well. A blur of flying dirt and debris marks where the main funnel is carving its way through the prairie. “Significantly doctored,” the article says.

Such a strange word to use. I considered looking into the etymology, but thought twice about it. I get so distracted sometimes. I don’t like that about myself. I wonder what Ben would make of it. The word doctored, I mean.

I can imagine him holding a Woolfe’s “BB” pencil made out of cedar and a leather chamois dabber. Ben and everything around him is in black and white, because it’s 18-whatever. Ben skillfully darkens the central funnel cloud and widens it. He looks up at me from the carbon plate with a big grin.

“Trust Me. This adds to the realism.”

I think about photoshopping while I’m writing this now. I don’t know what a Woolfe pencil is, but I do know how conveniently I can start to sharpen the lines sometimes by just adding something like The Wizard of Oz to Ben’s movie collection or the Kent State photograph before and after the AP removed the fencepost to Dr. Shadow’s slides or some other fabricated coincidence. But I like the inconvenience and messiness of it. The way it never unfolds cleanly.

The storm in the Robinson photograph was “400 yards wide at the center and had winds up to 260 miles per hour.” It killed eight people and destroyed over a dozen barns and houses, killing almost 50 livestock animals.

The writer Laura Ingalls Wilder was riding in a carriage 10 miles north of where Robinson stood to take his photo, and she described the scene in her book, These Golden Years.

Almost overhead now, the tumbling, swirling clouds changed from black to a terrifying greenish- purple. They seemed to draw themselves together, then a groping finger slowly came out of them and stretched down, trying to reach the earth. It reached, and pulled itself up, and reached again.

I pressed the power button on the phone and the screen went black. It was still coming down in buckets outside.

I became suddenly aware again of the sound of rain on the roof and crashing against the windows and the deck. It was still coming down. What is a bomb cyclone even? I leaned against the window and could see just the edge of the outbuilding with the water level beginning to kiss the lip of the doorframe.

My phone vibrated in my pocket and it was the kids’ preschool asking if we could set up a water pump, because Laura’s husband has one of them but can’t make it. Three photos of the playground. A shimmering white surface of water where the ground used to be.

Another dad said he was on his way. Has another pump of his own that he can bring. “We’ll just let them run them overnight,” he wrote.

Someone responded with a row of heart emojis.

I put the phone back in my pocket and try to ignore the notifications. It was getting darker outside. The boys were watching Teen Titans Go!, so I told them to turn it down and reminded them both of an impending bed time.

As they stumble back toward their bedrooms and pajamas and toothbrushes, I remember my dad reading us those Laura Ingalls Wilder books. Makeshift lullabies. I tried books at bedtime for awhile, but didn’t have the patience to answer all their questions. So what do I do? I tell them how much time is left before I take the remote and sit in their rooms waiting for them to fall asleep, googling tornado photography in the dark.

10.

The school I walk my kids to every morning doesn’t have hallways because why would you? Why would you in Sacramento, California specifically? Every classroom door opens to a shared, open courtyard. The kids trampled the fescue and bluegrass into oblivion long ago, but there are still a few flowering bushes. Small trees surrounded by benches. You’re literally outside for anything outside of the classroom itself. Open campus. A few covered walkways, sure, but the school was not built for a storm, because you don’t have to build it for that. A few years back they brought us in for orientation and I sat there the whole time, looking at that huge wall of windows that faced the unkept garden to the north of the classroom and thought to myself, if there is no basement, go to an interior room with no windows, until I remembered that I wasn’t in Kansas anymore, Toto.

The storm is the outlier.

The flood and the wind is the outlier.

The bomb cyclone is the outlier.

Even the tornado photograph in Esther Hoyt’s collection is the outlier.

Of the other remaining 23 cabinet cards, 22 of them are of Native Americans. One or two at a time. Fifty of them standing in a field. Twelve of them outside a reservation school. A Kiowa mother and her children. Survivors of the Horse Eating Summer and of the Red Horse Winter.

There is one more outlier. It is the only one in the entire collection that was not taken by Croft. It is the only photograph of Hoyt herself. The back of the card says it was taken in Tomah, Wisconsin at an Indian institutional school.

Hoyt stood near the back of a large classroom, staring directly down the barrel of the camera. Her pale, stern features made her stand out in a room of 49 Native American students. The desks were in rigid, straight lines. The white-painted wood panel walls were empty. A large chalkboard had a portrait of George Washington and an American flag, under which the phrase “One country” appeared in a calculated and neat cursive. The same one I was taught. The same one my 11-year-old learned in third grade, though his fourth and fifth grade teachers never once brought it up.

There is no reason to believe that Silver Horn is in this classroom. No reason to believe that this is where the keeper of the winter count learned the cursive English that he used to scrawl out a translation in neat letters, “The Great Cyclone Summer” next to Mánkayía.

11.

I woke up early and poured what was left of the previous day’s pot of coffee into a mug. I microwaved it and found something interesting to listen to. Maybe something I could ignore. I put my earbuds in, pulled off my socks, and walked barefoot through the standing water to the outbuilding. It had stopped raining at some point during the night, but we weren’t out of the woods yet.

The water was cold, but clean. I stepped into the outbuilding and began replacing things. I plugged things back in. Still no power. I forgot I threw the breakers the night before. Ran my fingertips across the floor by the edge of the door. It seemed dry. Or was it?

I made my way to the side of the house. It looked like someone had driven a truck right through the place. I gently lifted the wisteria, cradling the long branch in my arm like a newborn. In the place where it had been lying, there was a small piece of torn fabric where the climbing plant had been tied to the square wooden stake. I tried to lift it without twisting or breaking it. I fumbled with the weight of it in my right hand, heavier than I expected, while I tried to locate the heavy garden stake with my left hand. It felt loose in the dirt.

I’d have to look closer.

When I sat the branch down, some small piece of it caught on the white wire connected to my white earbuds. (Airpods came out 8 years ago. I don’t know. Sometimes I’m slow on the uptake.) The white wire went tight and the earbud pulled hard against the bottom of my ear. For just the smallest fraction of a moment, I held the weight of the branch solely by the earbud digging into the cartilage of my ear. Then it slipped out neatly and coiled itself inside the white wire like an ugly, fat-headed snake in the wood chips. I picked it up, straightened it, and put it back in.

I didn’t miss anything. The recording was of a Joan Didion lecture at a forum on migration. They were still charging through 20 minutes of introduction. The University President had to introduce the Program Chair who had to introduce a professor who could talk mostly about the program but also possibly introduce Joan, who would likely just read 20 pages or so out of a novel and be done with it. Not that there was anything wrong with that.

The wooden stake was splintered and cracked at the base. I lifted it out of the dirt and carried the pieces back to the garage. I didn’t have anything that would have worked in its place, so I took a handsaw to the stake and removed the splintered and cracked part, then returned to the wisteria with a familiar, but shorter replacement.

The second or third introducer quoted John Ruskin. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something and tell what it saw in a plain way.”

I wished I had something to write it down with.

Down the street, one of my neighbors was walking through his yard, dragging a large, heavy branch behind him. We have, by anyone’s best guess, another 8 hours or so before the next wave of this storm hits. A deceptive and thin opening in the sky before the clouds assembling above the western horizon arrive later tonight.

There were news vans driving through William Land Park yesterday, just two blocks to the west. The first wave of this storm toppled 20 or so massive, 40-year-old birch trees. Pulled the whole root ball right out of the ground and dropped the tree on its side. The police drew tape across the entrances to the park like it was some kind of crime scene. No wonder the wisteria didn’t make it.

The people who know these things are saying round two was going to have winds at 50 miles an hour, but anything that was going to get knocked over would have already been knocked over.

I lifted one of the branches up toward the stake and realized it wasn’t even attached to the plant at all anymore. The leaves were still green. The flowers were still purple. It was as though no one had bothered to mention to this particular branch that it was dead.

Clouds just a little bit closer now. The tops of the trees were beginning to wave for attention.

Joan was a page or so into her reading of the novel.

Jessie has landed in Vietnam with no passport. Adlai and Inez are trying to piece together the story in a way that would allow Jessie to still be stateside, to have never talked her way onto an airplane. Someone had seen her, but it could have been any young, blond American woman. There was a driver’s license. Had anyone actually seen the driver’s license? OK, but what was on the driver’s license? Did the driver’s license being Jessie’s license actually mean that Jessie herself had been on the plane? One mustn’t jump to conclusions.

The pictures of the upturned birch trees had been all over Instagram. The second once-in-a-century storm in the last 2 years. When it happened, I scrolled for an hour at least. Could have just walked two blocks to the west, but I didn’t. I keep making this mistake — believing that the photograph is somehow more honest than the weight of the broken wisteria branch in the palm of my hand or more honest than the boy trying to find sleep under a desk, imagining the weight it can hold above him, and imagining the weight of his house. Sometimes just reading the novel is the lecture.

The young palo verde tree, green trunk no thicker than the handle of a shovel, will not make it through the night unless I can figure something out.

What name is given to this season?

What name will be given to us?