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By Root 430 0

but again, on its own not enough to cause any real damage. But the two of them together . . . Leftover Ivan become entrained in this frontal system, and the result was like taking afire and throwing kerosene into it."1 Ivan's rotation and massive quantities of Caribbean moisture were the kerosene; the frontal system the fire. The combination was enough to turn the new system—Ivan Redux—into a weather bomb, which as we have seen is a slightly hysterical though still technically rigorous term, defined as a system that is already at less than 1,000 millibars when it drops 24 further millibars in twenty four hours. On September 21, this storm exceeded those criteria by more than half, and turned the system back into the equivalent of a Category 1 hurricane that roared across the northern Nova Scotian mainland, the islands of Cape Breton and Newfoundland, uprooting trees, flooding roads, leaving more than 18,000 people without power for several days, and killing six mariners. The massive cruise ship Queen Mary, which had been scheduled to dock in the northern port of Sydney that day, departed hastily for open ocean and more southerly latitudes; the ferry to Newfoundland was knocked out of service; roads were covered with debris, and all schools were closed.

On the afternoon of September 21 the sea in front of our house was crashing on the rocks. The swells had been building all day, and by four o'clock immense rollers were breaking on the bedrock with a great roar. A small spruce tree outside my office window was smacking against the eaves with an unnerving scraping sound. A larger spruce was swaying alarmingly against the power lines coming in from the highway almost a mile away, and we prepared once more for a power outage. The weathervane was pointing northeast; we measured gusts at 30 miles, then 60, then 63. The house, strongly built though it is, creaked and the shutters banged. A skylight moaned in the wind, a ghost-wind squeezing through some minuscule hole.

I didn't know that was Ivan, then. For me, Ivan was a killer whose narrative was a series of printed bulletins, now safely contained in a filefolder. He was just a story. He wasn't supposed to hit my house.

It could have been worse, of course; in very many places, it was.

When we bought our house down on the shore, here at the end of the peninsula, it had attached to it a venerable wind turbine on a forty-foot tower. The fellow who built the house was what they call a "belt and suspenders" kind of guy; he heated his house with wood but had a gasoline generator and electric heaters as backup; used the wind turbine to feed a bank of car batteries to keep his lights going, but kept several kerosene lanterns just in case. Later, he even hooked up to the grid for good measure. At some point before we bought the place, a lightning strike had fried the batteries; the windmill had been disconnected from the house and clanked disconsolately in the wind. Even when there was no wind at ground level, every now and then it would abruptly start up and rattle around for a minute or two before spinning down. We had it removed soon after we bought the property. The buyer came with a crane and trucked it away, and we installed the fish we called Wanda as a weathervane on the windmill's tower.

Now we're thinking of buying a new wind generator. They are smaller than they were a few years ago, lighter, more reliable, easier to use, and are responsive to gentle winds as well as to greater ones. Our house is too far from Lower West Pubnico to benefit from that wind farm's power generation, and in any case, Pubnico is pumping its power directly into the grid, and we don't really trust the stability and security of the grid anymore.

This lack of trust is expressed through a basket of concerns about increasingly erratic weather, the security of long-term fuel supplies, and the uncertainties that greenhouse gases represent for the global climate. These are in effect worries not just about our own place in the scheme of things but also for the scheme of things itself—that is, for the planet's