Sandy off Reheboth Beach (AP photo)
I can report that the county in southern Maryland where I live came off fairly well when Hurricane Sandy passed through. Most of us lost power and some trees came down but that was the extent of it. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for much of the East Coast.
I associate the name “Sandy” with one of the most traumatic reading experiences of my childhood. My father read to us Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court when I was in middle school and my brothers and I enjoyed the novel’s comic satire. We were unprepared, however, for the unexpected turn that the novel takes at the end. “Boss” Hank uses his technological superiority to obliterate the Camelot knights that are attacking him but ultimately creates a death trap for himself. In the framing narrative, he has been somehow transported back to the present, and in the final paragraphs we watch him calling out for his beloved Sandy, the love of his life, as he dies:
Ah, watch by me, Sandy—stay by me every moment—don’t let me go out of my mind again; death is nothing, let it come, but not with those dreams, not with the torture of those hideous dreams—I cannot endure that again…. Sandy?…”
I remember all of us crying as my father ended the book.
In my original plans for today’s post, I had planned to post the following passage from The Tempest in a nod to Halloween, which is today. Prospero, I would note, is an illusionist that children would appreciate. I only wish that Sandy were an illusion conjured up by a benevolent magician. Instead, we are the passengers aboard the ship, caught up (as Ariel describes it) in “a fever of the mad”:
Not a soul
But felt a fever of the mad and play’d
Some tricks of desperation. All but mariners
Plunged in the foaming brine and quit the vessel,
Then all afire with me: the king’s son, Ferdinand,
With hair up-staring,–then like reeds, not hair,–
Was the first man that leap’d; cried, ‘Hell is empty
And all the devils are here.’
The devils have been here indeed.
