Trouble in the middle of the night

On the train to work, looking down over the rocky shore out to sea. We travel through these four little tunnels here which bring us higher and higher up the hill until we’re way high looking down. Today the sky is layered grays of clouds (who knew how many ways there were for clouds to be grey?) and mirrored in the rough and darker greys and whites of the sea. On these grey days, even the grasses on the hills take on a grey tint, blending with the sky and sea in an effortless pallet while the greens change not at all, and the sky and the sea change constantly. How does green do that?

Last night at 2 am, the village fire alarm went off, quickly followed by Naomi’s terrified cries. I, already awake because of the shrill alarm, raced in and held Naomi until she fell asleep again, feeling her quick heartbeat and my quick heartbeat slow down and get more and calm and sleepy. Coming back to bed, though, the adrenaline was not a help to my getting back to sleep, and I watched the dark ceiling (with only the faintest hint of the ghastly chandelier visible) and thought about how I couldn’t handle living in a town with a volunteer fire whistle. Here, that whistle means that there has been something awful. There’s been a crash on the road, or a fire in a house, or a medical emergency, and the alarms are being rung to gather the volunteers who will put out the fire or perform the CPR or cut accident victims from their cars. The alarm rings maybe twice a week, and this was the second time it’s woken me in the night (the first was for a school burning down—arson—in the next town).

When the whistle goes off, I brood. Someone’s life might be changing, some family may have just had a tragedy (and, of course, sometimes it’s just a false alarm and it’s only a handful of volunteer firefighters who are inconvenienced, who have left their dinners or their jobs to race to be of help to nothing much). At 2 am, I brood extra, and last night I thought about what a bad system that whistle was. Wouldn’t beepers be a better idea? What was I doing living in a little town like this anyway? Why would anyone want to do that? I missed the city, where you never thought about people’s personal tragedies, where all of that life and death happens behind closed doors, safely out of sight. And of course, even at 2 am I wasn’t quite sleepy enough not to recognize the fallacy of that.

It was another 2 am, in Washington DC, the day after we returned from our NZ visit in April, that we began to talk about moving to New Zealand. We were jetlagged and miserable, and had returned to a city more crowded and dirty than we remembered. Then, at 2 am, the sirens began to howl, and they howled a long, long time. And there were helicopters, flying low over our house, the search lights flashing into our bedroom window. And more sirens, and more helicopters, and Michael and I were awake for the 2 hours of the search, wondering what terrible mayhem had happened, wondering if a bomb had dropped or a plane had crashed or some other enormous global action had taken place. I figured if something like that had happened, one of my friends who was awake while I slept in DC would be calling me to check up.

We woke the next morning to find that there was a quick and violent crime spree, several cars hijacked, several people killed, in a series of attacks. The final hijacked car had been left in our neighborhood while one of the suspects fled, on foot, to the zoo. As far as I can tell, they never caught those guys.

At 2am here, I never wondered about a global incident. I never thought about a dirty bomb. I never wondered if my own life was in danger. Mostly, I felt sadness for whoever else was in pain and couldn’t sleep because of it. (Ah, now passing the Porirua bay with black swans and oyster catchers and several kinds of terns and gulls—and is that a loon with a white belly and neck and a black back? No internet on this train to look it up. Past the town the hills climb out of the bay, flecked golden with the late-summer flowering bushes—yarrow? I don’t even know why that word comes to mind.) I’ve been wondering, as I walked along the beach with Perry this morning, as I got the kids ready for school, what it is about a city and the scale of it that makes private tragedies fall away so that I could believe—even at 2am—that I never heard a siren in DC. It’s made me wonder about what it means to have such a big percentage of the world live in big cities—impersonal and removed from one another. I know that people know about this impersonality, know that people have been writing and thinking about this issue for a long time. But I haven’t fully experienced the difference until now, haven’t fully thought about what that difference means. I think about small schools, and how much better small schools are than big ones for kids—big ones are impersonal and it’s easier for kids to be beastly to one another, for kids to get lost and to wander off a healthy path without any adults ever really noticing. I’m beginning to understand how living in a big city—which I’ve done nearly all my life—changes what I’m able to do, how I think, and who I am in the world.

There will be no story in any newspaper about what happened at 2am in Paekakariki. It’s likely, though, that Naomi will come home from school and tell me about a fire in our town or the next, or about somebody who knows somebody who was rescued from an accident. This turns out to be the way news works in a little village where everyone wakes up when someone is in trouble in the middle of the night.

PS the pictures today are of my office in town--first the office, then the view out the window.