Summer storms

This year, marking the 250th anniversary of the United States, many people planned gatherings to think about our collective past and our possible futures.  For many of us, the Fourth of July holiday marks the beginning of summertime. Family reunions, fireworks, friends, and space to enjoy the world.

Then the storms came. 

Friday night, with an intensity becoming all too frequent in the Midwest, high winds following blistering heat carried ferocious rain, flooding roads and homes, downing trees and power lines. Heat indexes had registered over 100 degrees, and wind speeds were gusting close to 80 miles an hour.  In the space of a few hours about half a million customers found themselves without power.  More than a million people faced life without electricity. By Wednesday, thousands of us were still waiting for the lights to come back on.

In the meantime, the toll of life without electricity began to mount. People lost food, many had to find alternative places to stay, and the ubiquitous flooding damaged homes, cars and streets. Six people lost their lives, three of them children, whose families had been running generators. Three other people were killed when their car crashed into a stalled semi tractor trailer on a flooded road.

For many of us, this Fourth of July was spent recovering from the storm.  Frustration and anger grew because of the increasingly difficult efforts to reach DTE to report outages or get some idea of when power might be restored. Tree limbs and debris had to be removed from driveways and streets. Some of us faced the task of reckoning with the loss of loved ones.

By Sunday, a steady all-day rain set in. Then early that morning I had an unexpected gift. A large waste management truck came rumbling down our street, stopping at the huge pile of branches directly across from my front window.  Neighbors had worked together on the 4th to move massive tree limbs off driveways and out of the roadway, creating about a six-foot-high pile of branches. 

A single man was driving the truck.  He climbed out of the cab, walked around and looked at the pile, and then hopped up to the controls and began expertly guiding the huge pick-up shovel. Several times he jumped down and walked back to the pile, rake in hand, to push everything into an easy spot for the shovel to reach. He worked for about 10 minutes, quietly, in the rain, and all alone.  In the end, there was not a single leaf left. He used his shovel to push down the branches so they wouldn’t blow out as he moved a few house down to repeat the process.

Over this last week I have thought a lot about that man. His dedication to a job that offers few rewards. His endurance to continue in the face of steady rain and wet. And his absolute determination to make sure he was doing the very best he could, for people he didn’t know and who he will probably never meet.

Sometimes, in the midst of storms, we are reminded of how much we depend on each other. How our lives are made possible by people who do the best they can, often in trying times, to make our common lives possible. I am grateful to that man, not only because of his work, but because he reminded me of what community life requires of each of us.