- A couple of weeks ago, restless and in search of adventure,
I flew off to The City of Brotherly Love, aka Philadelphia, to speak to
film students at Drexel University.
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- Brilliant, they were. Eager. Excited.
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- And exciting as well. My job had been to inspire them.
I don't know how well I did in that department, but they sure inspired
me.
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- I came home ready to take on the world.
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- And immediately met my match in the form of Tropical
Storm Ike and his march northeast from Galveston.
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- The storm and I reached Little Rock 10 minutes apart,
and from there it was a race up to Cloud Creek. Ike traveled, I'm told
at 40 mph. My truck went about 60 on the winding two-lane roads leading
to our part of Paradise.
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- Most of my driving was through a torrential downpour.
Half an hour after I settled in with Gwen the Beautiful and a bag of M&Ms,
Ike announced his arrival with even more rain and a howling wind that meant,
"Bring in the dogs!"
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- Until about 5 a.m., our electricity went off and on and
off and on, again and again. Then the rain turned to drizzle, the wind
stopped, and the electricity stopped completely as well.
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- As soon as it was light enough, Gwen, Emmy the Bold,
Decker the Giant-Hearted, Belle the Wary, Dixie the Ditz and I went outside
to see what was what. Huck and Rosie were healthy and hungry, and all the
chickens were alive and cackling. The hen house, however, hadn't fared
so well. It'd been crushed, by a toppled, 40-foot tree.
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- What saved the chickens was that they hadn't been inside
on the nesting boxes but instead were huddled in a smaller enclosure in
their yard. This was because of the black snakes that invaded awhile ago.
That little adventure completely changed the chickens' lifestyle. "We're
safer out here, thank you," their behavior said.
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- And they were right. If not for the rat snake and its
cotton-mouthed companion all the chickens would've died.
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- The universe may not be big on justice, but when it comes
to irony, it rules.
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- I did some preliminary cleanup around the ranch while
Gwen called the power company and came back outside to tell me it would
be about 48 hours before life would be back to normal. We could camp out
on The Mountain, or go to the nearest functioning motel.
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- It was no contest. We chose the motel.
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- Yep, I know. Humans lived without electricity for thousands
of years. It shouldn't be a big deal. But here's the thing. In the rural
U.S., the most serious part of not having electric power isn't the loss
of TV and Internet, or even refrigeration and air-conditioning (although
the temperature was in the high 80s). The most serious part is the loss
of water.
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- In the rural U.S., municipal water only gets to a small
fraction of the population. The rest of us have wells with electric pumps
that go down, down, down into the ground and bring up water as needed from
underground streams. In our case, the down, down, down part is over 900
feet.
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- No electricity means no water to drink after the holding
tank empties and, most importantly of all for those of us only recently
relocated from the city, no water for - OK, OK, I admit to being ashamed!
- the toilet.
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- Unflushability was the order of the day. And for a sensitive
artist such as moi, and an Oklahoma native like Gwen, who'd vowed when
she was 6 years old never to live with an outhouse again, unflushability
was unacceptable.
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- I mean, "Yikes!"
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- So off we went to Mountain Home, almost an hour away,
to join other refugees with similar and greater problems. Men and women
whose roofs had been battered, windows shattered and front porches tossed
to the rear.
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- Like them, Gwen and I got the "Tropical Storm Discount,"
and with them we shared breakfast, lunch, dinner, some fascinating stories,
and an unexpected sense of camaraderie.
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- And why not? Fall prey to hard times and you've got a
tragedy. Survive what gets thrown at you, and tragedy turns into adventure.
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- All in all, Gwen and I had a fine little adventure of
our own. Philadelphia's a great city. But, both despite and because of
ole Ike, we found inspiration and the embrace of true Brotherly Love right
here in Paradise.
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- Copyright C 2008 by Larry Brody. All rights reserved.
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- Author Larry Brody's weekly column, LIVE! FROM PARADISE!
appears on his website, www.larrybrody.com. He has written thousands of
hours of network television, and is the author of "Television Writing
from the Inside Out" and "Turning Points in Television."
Brody is Creative Director of The Cloud Creek Institute for the Arts, the
world's first in-residence media colony. More about his activities can
be seen on www.tvwriter.com and www.cloudcreek.org. He welcomes your comments
and feedback at <mailto:LarryBrody@cloudcreek.org>LarryBrody@cloudcreek.org.
Brody, his wife and their dogs, cats, horses and chickens live in Marion
County, Arkansas. The other residents of the mythical town of Paradise
reside in his imagination.
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