Hermine Pinson

Hurricane Isabel at the peak of its intensity. NASA/Aqua-MODIS, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Rain followed in the wake of Isabel making calls in North Carolina and blowing 165 mph kisses across Virginia, leaving the battered ground here in Williamsburg swollen and weeping with water. Trees lay where they’d splintered and fallen across roads, on cars and rooftops, front and backyards, leaning crazily in the woods.

Heat palmed the land and the people in sweat, mildew and rotting food. The end of a week of candlelight, bottled water, and no tv cracked open like thunder thinned to a strident note, so high-pitched and insistent that it drew me out of my funk and onto the porch.

Where was it coming from? I walked out to stand in galoshes in the middle of the soaked lawn, listening with my eyes, following with my ears the sound that had swallowed the night.

I stole into my own yard. The nearer I got to it, the more I was convinced that the sound was coming from the bush in the eastern most corner of the yard.

A shaggy boxwood, nearly eleven feet tall, had outgrown its formerly manicured hedge. Green tongues of ivies peered through its branches. I trod the soggy ground around the boxwood, listening to the toneless song emanating from the cricket at its center. It seemed to take no breath except to sing, sing and sing the one note.

In the aftermath of rough weather, one wing brushed the serrated borders of the other. The cricket, deaf to its own music, sang for its mate to come out, so they could create new life, for as long as they were able.

All was silent around the sound, which was as heavy as heat’s fleshy hands that strangled the night.

I had a little light, and with it I poked through the branches, until I clapped my hand over the daft singer, then flung it high and long. Silence hummed reproach at my presumption.

But in the wilderness of the street, I overcame my fears and wedded my own cackle to the cricket resuming its stridulation, until our chorus was a judgment on the land’s heat, mad weather, and water.

Hermine Pinson is Frances L. and Edwin L. Cummings Professor of English & Africana Studies, at William and Mary, and an editorial board member and contributing writer to the Ecollective.

Hurricane Isabel 2003: a true story