Getting Stoned With Savages - J. Maarten Troost [57]
I knew one thing. The cat could have gone in only one direction—with the wind. I shone my flashlight on the bushes lining the fence. “PIP!” I yelled. Stupid cat. “PIP!” I scanned the trees. No, I thought. There’s no way he would have made it into a tree. I scanned the bushes again. There he was, huddled like a wet rat in the narrow space between a shrub and the wooden fence. I could see him crying out, but I could hear nothing over the thunderous roar of the cyclone. I turned the flashlight into the wind, searching the sky for sheets of tin and other items capable of inflicting a sudden decapitation. I made a dash for it, leaning my weight into the maelstrom. I was smacked by a thousand leaves. The rain stung. A twig hit me in the back of my head. I grabbed the cat and fought my way through the wind back into the house.
“Pip. There you are,” Sylvia cooed, rushing forward and toweling him off.
I stood in the doorway, drenched and panting.
“Um…could I have a towel too?”
IN THE MORNING, once the cyclone had been reduced to a gale, we emerged from the house and surveyed the damage. The gardening shed had been lost, along with the fruit trees. Our front yard and the driveway had disappeared under a foot of mud. Everything else, unsurprisingly, was a mess, a jumble of tree limbs, branches, and leaves. But the house still stood. And Pip had remained among the living. Stupid cat.
We walked into town. The permanent structures had withstood the cyclone, though here and there, a roof had been lost. Anything with a thatch roof had to be written off. Most of the smaller fruit trees had been toppled, and a good many of the larger trees had been knocked over too. The whole town seemed to have been inundated with a blizzard of wet leaves. At the harbor, we counted eight yachts sunk, their masts just cresting above the surface. But all in all, Port Vila had escaped the worst a cyclone could offer.
A Chinese shop was, inexplicably, open for business, and we walked in seeking basic provisions. Before the cyclone, Radio Vanuatu had suggested that people stock up on food and water. We’d followed this advice closely and bought a bag of cookies. Now we were in need of both, so we bought a few bottles of water and, as there was nothing else available beyond a few rusty cans of chicken curry, another bag of cookies. Remembering the state of our yard, I also purchased a machete.
“You know what this feels like?” I observed as we headed home. “It feels like a snow day.”
And now it was time to do the tropical equivalent of shoveling snow. As a child growing up in Canada I was, of course, very familiar with shoveling snow. But a few hours later, as the machete left my hand, hurtling through the air like a tomahawk when all I had meant to do was hack away at a torn branch, I acknowledged that I was not quite in my milieu here. We spent the day hacking at dangling tree limbs and shoveling mud. Since I was out there trimming, I figured, I might as well prune the hedges, which had grown to such a height as to obscure what there was of our view. There was something vaguely enjoyable about the chore, and the results of my efforts were satisfying. The heat and humidity of the previous days had blown away, and there was a steady cool breeze. I felt like we had survived something, and surviving anything always left me feeling very happy. Everyone we had encountered seemed to be of a similar disposition. Cyclones can kill. It was one thing to know this in a theoretical sort of way. It was something else entirely to actually experience a cyclone and realize that you were just a gust or two away from joining Dorothy in Oz. Not everyone was so lucky, alas. Flooding had taken lives elsewhere in Vanuatu. But