Dangle

It was late September and the sky looked like it was on fire. Black
clouds like hickory smoke swam across the red-orange canvas, left to
right, clockwise. The hurricane was moving East.

Rain collected in the eves of the roof and scurried through the
shingles like little streams. The water poured over the side of the
roof, cascading like a faucet. Puddles gathered at the base of the
Jacobsen farmhouse. Hanging from the edge of the rafter was a daddy
long legs spider, fighting the wind and rain. Clutching to that spider
was another daddy long legs, providing for a strange arachnid dance
marathon. The two were not moving except for the gusting winds that
attempted to detach them, but they held on strong. It was almost as if
they were not moving to save their energy for hanging on.

Ryan Jacobsen knew better. He knew that they were not moving because
they were already dead. He had been watching them for the past hour.
When someone stares at something that long, they start to connect with
that thing. Ryan had been watching the spiders for so long that he
could see their vacant, lifeless eyes. It was only the wind that
produced the illusion of life. It was only the wind.

"Ryan! Dinner!"

Ryan didn't answer at first, though his stomach was growling. He pulled
on the woolen sleeves of his sweater, wrapping the ends around his
hands and pulled the neck of the sweater over his face, hanging it on
the bridge of his nose. It made him feel more secure to be completely
covered in wool but he always kept his eyes exposed. It unnerved him
when he couldn't see what was going on.

Ryan pressed his woolen nose against the glass of the window. He wanted
to wait and see if the spiders would still be holding each other after
the wind finally grew tired of playing with them. The whole event was
soundless except for the soft static sound of the rain on the
roof.

That silence nearly drowned out the soft knock at the door of Ryan's
room.

"Ryan, honey...come on and eat. The news says we're going to have to
evacuate soon and there won't be a lot of food at the shelter."

Ryan's mother was always at her calmest in stressful situations. The
National Weather Service had forecast Hurricane Deborah to come
straight through Suffolk, Virginia around nine that evening. It was now
six. Most of the rest of Suffolk had already made their way through the
evacuation route and found themselves in high schools and towns to the
southwest.

"Ryan, honey..."

"Coming."

Ryan left his post at the window, hoping that when he returned, the
spiders would still be there. Ryan turned the doorknob and opened the
door to his mother.

"What were you doing in there, Ryan? You've been cooped up in that room
for hours."

"I was watching the sky."

"Well, come on and eat. We're leaving soon. Your papa says the waters
are getting pretty high. You know, I told him we'd have to leave. Just
wish we'd have gone with the Lockharts. I'd feel a whole lot
better."

The Jacobsens' neighbors, the Lockharts, had made their way to Emporia
to stay with some relatives. They had invited the Jacobsens to come
with them, but Mr. Jacobsen. Ryan's father, had wanted to ride the
storm out. But now, the Suffolk police were ordering an
evacuation.

Deborah was an unusually strong hurricane, with sustained winds of over
120 miles per hour. She had already destroyed the North Carolina coast.
It wasn't the wind they were so worried about, however. It was the
flooding. Suffolk was a farming community in the Tidewater area of
Virginia with lots of flat land that made it easy for water to collect.
Combine that with numerous irrigation ditches, the network of
tributaries and estuaries, and the Great Dismal Swamp and Suffolk was
looking at a serious chance to be completely underwater. Elizabeth
City, North Carolina, was already underwater, with only the steeples of
churches visible. Ryan's mother had warned her husband that they should
leave with the Lockharts. She knew that this hurricane would be bad
because she had once wanted to be a meteorologist. She thrived on life
when hurricanes came. It was the only time she ever felt like she had
control.

The Jacobsens lived on a farm on White Marsh Road in Suffolk, just down
the road from the George Washington Ditch. The ditch was dug during the
Revolutionary War as a means of crossing a marsh area. During heavy
rains, the ditch would become a raging river. That ditch was an
indicator for what kind of flooding could be expected. Ryan's father
would go out during driving rains and measure the rate of the rising
waters to estimate how long it would be before they had to evacuate.
This method had been carried out by generations of the Jacobsens. Five
generations, dating back to the Civil War, laid claim to the land that
they occupied.

Ryan was learning the method from his father. Last June, when Hurricane
Catherine came and left minor flooding, Ryan and his father went out to
the ditch to measure the waters.

"Now you see here boy, you gotta have a rope and a rock. On the rope,
there are markers, each five feet apart. What you gotta do is throw the
rock into the water and just count how many markers are covered. After
you do that, you wait an hour and come back to do it again, then
another hour and do it again. Then you just figure out the difference
between the three measurements and divide by three hours to figure out
how much the waters rise each hour. Do you understand? Boy? What are
you doing?"

Ryan was standing on the bank of the ditch, staring out over the raging
waters. The rain was dripping over his hood and streaking down his
face. He had pulled the neck of his rain coat over the bridge of his
nose and his hands were wrapped up in the sleeves. The waters were
tickling his boots, rising nearly to his ankles.

"Boy! Get away from the edge of that water!"

Ryan's father rushed over to his son and grabbed him by his arm,
pulling him back away from the water.

"Boy, you gotta be careful! You're liable to get yourself killed out
there! Those waters would sweep you right away! What were you
thinking?"

Ryan wanted to tell him, but he just couldn't think of the right words.
Besides, he was sure that the old man wouldn't care anyway. Ryan looked
up at his father, raincoat covering his nose.

Ryan's father stood and looked at his son. The rain was soaking through
his coat and his leather boots were caked with mud and grass. He looked
deep into Ryan's eyes and tried to figure out where he went wrong. Each
generation of Jacobsen was proud to be a farming man, but Ryan just
didn't seem to show the same enthusiasm. He would sleep until noon on
Saturdays while his father would wake up at five in the morning and be
out in the fields working all the way until six at night. He reached
his hand out and placed it on Ryan's shoulder. He pulled the raincoat
down from Ryan's nose with his other hand. Ryan looked down at his
feet.

"Come on boy...the waters are rising pretty fast. Let's get inside and
get your mother. We'll head out to the school shelter."

That year, the hurricane had flooded parts of the Tidewater area. The
damage was less than the experts had projected, but the Jacobsens had
to spend most of the year restoring the soil. The soil was critical to
grow peanuts, the staple crop of most of the Suffolk farm
community.

That was the same year that Ryan's parents had asked him one night that
he would rather live with if they ever separated. They had been
fighting on and off all that November, mostly about the farm and money.
But Ryan knew the main reason they were fighting. He had looked at them
enough at the dinner table to see right into their vacant, lifeless
relationship. The problem was rooted in roots.

Papa was born and raised in Suffolk. He left only once, to attend
school in North Carolina for agribusiness. That was where he met Sharon
Myers -- Ryan's mother. They hit it off right away, despite their
contrast in backgrounds. In most situations, South did not get along
with North.

Sharon was born in upstate New York, just east of the Adirondack
Mountains. She left home after high school and never went back. She
attended school at Boston University for business. When she met Papa,
she was enamored with his Southern gentleman persona. Never before had
she witnessed a man care so much for a woman. At home, the only
relationships between man and woman she had ever seen were her dad's
fist to her mom's face. She left to leave, to get away and avoid that
cycle. Maybe that was why she fell so fast for Papa, because he was
different and accessible. He talked her into running away with him
after college to help him with his farm in Suffolk. She said yes.

The honeymoon ended shortly after Ryan was born. The culture contrast
was beginning to compound. Differences, it seems, become annoyances
after a certain span of time. The tensions began to surface in even the
smallest of situations. Dinner to Mother was supper to Papa; evening
was dusk; green beans were snaps; pop was soda. However little the
differences, the outcome were always large. No matter what the reason,
the fights were really over the unfinished Civil War in Suffolk. The
South would not let go and the North would not stop rubbing it
in.

After Ryan grew to an age where he began to understand the nature of
the fights, the cannons stopped firing. The war appeared to be over,
but was simply entering another, more political stage. At dinner,
nothing more than "Pass the snaps" was ever uttered. No words, no hugs,
no affection. The house was always very cold and Ryan only had but so
many sweaters.

The table was set for three. Papa was already sitting patiently,
graceful in form. His hands were clasped together over his plate and
his head was cocked, ready to bow and pray. Ryan took his place across
from the kitchen window, which opened onto a veranda. The house was
old, but sturdy enough to have survived dozens of hurricanes and
tropical storms over its hundred and twenty years. Ryan reached across
the table for the snaps.

"Boy! What are you doin'? We haven't said 'Grace' yet!" Ryan's father
had a disapproving look in his eyes.

Mother, who always seemed to be on Ryan's side, spoke up. "Let him eat.
He's only sixteen. He's growing yet. Besides, we need to hurry. The
storm's going to be a fierce one." She stared out the window to the
tumultuous skies, churning and twirling. Her eyes sat unmoving,
unblinking. She knew there was little time to waste with the frivolous
Southern tradition of saying grace. The hurricane was getting
closer.

Papa pondered this for a moment before he spoke up. "Well, if we don't
thank the good Lord for His graces, He may not deliver us from the
storm at all. We're saying grace and that's that."

Through some mathematical system of equations, in the Jacobsen
household that always equaled that. It didn't matter how much evidence
you had to prove that wrong. That was that because Papa said so. When
it came to matters of the Lord, there was no discussion. Ever since
Papa prayed one year for his crop to be plentiful -- and it was -- he
had pointed out every single instance that qualified as a miracle. If
the rains came when the drought was about to ruin the crop, it was a
miracle. If UVA upset Florida State in college football, it was a
miracle. If Ryan's bus got him home just hours before a pile-up
occurred on highway 58...

They bowed their heads and waited. There was an uneasy silence for a
few seconds and Ryan almost looked up to see if his Papa had forgotten
what to do. Then he began.

"Thank you, Lord, for this bounty You have delivered. Thank You for a
healthy family and I pray that You deliver them safely through this
storm. Amen."

Ryan raised his head and opened his eyes. Outside, across the peanut
fields, the brown of the soil seemed to glow against the dark gray
horizon. The rain was falling harder now and was blowing sideways,
tattooing the window, streaking panorama. At the edge of the veranda,
Ryan thought he saw something dangling.

After dinner, Mother cleared the table while Papa started to load the
truck. Ryan was back on post at his bedroom window. The window was
Ryan's portal to thought. It was the only place he could escape for
uninterrupted thought. With but two hours remaining before the
hurricane started bearing down on their little house on White Marsh
Road, Ryan was starting to get a little scared. His heartbeat was quick
and his skin felt cool and clammy. Ryan put on an extra sweater.
Outside, a single oak tree was swaying in the wind. Ryan could remember
the times he dangled from the branches of that tree, wishing that the
wind would carry him away. In good weather, he would sit at the base of
the trunk and ponder the future.

The future was a pretty important part of Ryan's thought process. He
couldn't do anything before he planned it out ahead of time. Everything
had a sequence, whether it was getting ready for school in the morning
or getting ready for bed. Things got so regimented that he started
trying to plan way ahead, trying to predict what he was going to face
each week. For every situation, he had mapped out every possible
outcome for every possible decision. When that became too much to
handle, he began finding other ways to predict.

When he was fourteen, he started calling the "Psychic Pals Hotline," a
commercial he saw on TV a few times. The commercial promised that the
psychics could tell you anything about everything. Ryan wanted to know
everything. It was a perfect match.

Late at night, Ryan would sneak downstairs and call the hotline and ask
the psychics when they thought he would die. A week before Deborah,
Ryan had his most enlightened session.

"Psychic Pals. This is Cheryl." The voice seemed unenthused.

"Hi...my name is Ryan..."

"You again? Did you get your parents' permission to call here? Don't
you know it's late, yet? Ah....I guess it doesn't really matter. You'll
figure it out when your parents get ahold of you with their phone bill.
What can I do for ya?"

"Talk to me." Ryan's voice cracked a little.

"Well...you seem like a lonely boy. Am I right?"

"Yeah..."

"I am getting a sense of neglect...Your parents...they don't pay a lot
of attention to you, do they Ryan?"

"No, but..."

"I'm getting sadness. Your heart is heavy. You want to see them happy
and then you can be happy..."

"Cut the crap. I know all of this already. Why can't you people just
tell me the future like you advertise?"

"My, my...temperamental, aren't we? All right, you little shit. I'll
let you in on a little secret if you promise to stop calling our
hotline. Deal?"

"It's a deal." Ryan liked secrets.

"Well, first of all, we're phonies. No one can tell the future. You
wanna know why?"

"Yes."

"Because there is no future, that's why. There is only the present.
What we can't let go of is the past and what we want to happen is the
future. I'm sure that in your life, you've had things happen that you
didn't want to happen. If everything could be predicted, then there
would be a future. Unfortunately, it can't. Savor the moments you're
gifted. Enjoy life. Go outside. And stop running up your parents' phone
bill."

Ryan hung up the phone slowly. "Go outside." He remembered and wondered
if that was the answer to it all. The spiders were gone, swept away by
the gusts of wind from the hurricane and there was nothing left. Ryan
suddenly understood...

"Ryan, honey! We have to get going! The storm is close and we need to
get out of dodge."

Ryan's mother was fastening the strap on her black raincoat. The light
from the kitchen shined off of the plastic. Ryan's father was lacing up
his muddy boots. He was going out to check the water levels again
before they left to figure out what route they would take.

"Ryan! Ryan?" She turned to papa. "Did you see where Ryan went?"

"Naw. Haven't seen him since dinner."

"Well, I'll look around here. You go on out and check the water. But
hurry. We have to get going."

"Yeah, yeah. I'll be back in a few minutes."

Papa pulled the hood of his jacket over his head and opened the door.
It swung open, banging against the wall. The wind was howling and
beating against the house. The rain was slapping papa in the face. He
pulled the door behind him and struggled to close it.

"Damn that wind is strong. Better get this done and over with."

He looked over the peanut fields. The sky was dancing and the trees
were bowing. The dirt from the fields was being kicked up by the rain,
bringing a brown haze. He stepped down the stairs and began walking to
the ditch. The ground was soft and saturated beneath his boots, sinking
with every step. Inside, he had a sinking feeling. What if they didn't
get out in time? What if the storm took everything they had?

Papa was nearing the ditch when through the driving rain he saw a
silhouette in the distance, standing on the bank. Papa hurried his
pace, his heart quickening. The rain was falling harder now. The
silhouette was taking form as he got closer. Papa could see a green
woolen sweater on the figure, pulled up halfway over the head.

"Ryan! Ryan!"

The winds howled, drowning out Papa as he quickened his pace to a run.
The waters from the ditch were starting to creep up around the knees of
the figure, then to the waist. Suddenly, the figure disappeared under
the waters. Papa reached for his rock and rope and heaved them into the
rapids. He pulled on the rope and felt a tug back. There was something
on the end, dangling. He dug into the mud, boots sliding at the heels.
Everything started to rush in at once. His life, his son, his wife all
passed through his mind. What would happen if he lost Ryan? Then the
rope gave. Papa pulled it in slowly, hand over hand and looked at the
end. The rock was gone.

Papa walked back to the house with the rope in his hands. There was
nothing left, nothing to say. He opened the door.

"What took you so long? You're crying... Are the waters bad?"

Papa looked long and sad at his wife. When someone stares that long at
something, they begin to connect with that thing. Her hair was soft and
flowing and her eyes shone in the light. He saw her as he once had.
There was something left. He dropped the rope and walked over to her.
He collapsed in her arms as if to save his energy for hanging on. Papa,
through the sobs, spoke.

"The Lord works in mysterious ways."