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Essays on herbs, gardening, cooking, food, family life can now be found at: EnEFood.blogspot.com
Plans in Ashes
How odd that amazing, ingenious, powerful Man with all his technical wizardry should still be daunted by nature. We strive,
we build, we design, ever to survive what the world (or God) may throw our way. We invent, we communicate (more rarely talking),
and laugh at storm's glorious beauty in the safety of our walls, or drive with delightful speed on made and natural highways
criss-crossing the land and sea and air. We work and play, travel and vacation, and complain at an hours delay, an awkward
schedule, a missed meal due to fees and computers and human faults and imperfections. We charge ahead, planning, scheduling,
doing, fussing over every detail, every dollar spent for precious earning, long-anticipated pleasures and sights and delights,
certain that all will be in place, waiting, ready, reserved. Yet still nature hides a treasure trove of weapons, deadly or
passive, sudden or unsteadily warned and grown, and like a plaything, tosses Man off course with the most casual slap, with
shaken rock and rolling wave, powerful swirling winds and downpours of H2O in all its forms, and with the easier splash of
the leftover flotsam and jetsom of its mighty hidden power. Still frail Man.
We sit back and laugh (as much as local allergies allow) . We shouldn't. We wouldn't entirely laugh (though we have
experienced enough of traveling travails to sit back and enjoy as we can even while we wait tense and concerned with the rest),
but this time we aren't there in crammed hotels, endless lines, and closes airports wondering when we might come home, how
much longer we can afford to stay away, what alternative routes we can find that are not already taken by the rest, already
stranded before us. From here it easy to speculate what course we would take, what pleasure we might find in enforced vacation's
extension (budget and health permitting) and think not too heavily on those times we've been less than healthy on the way,
wearied by days on the road, ready to return to family and familiar foods. Train or bus or rental car (or naval ship: Britain
has the way of it! clever girl!) or cruise ship or ferry. But it is spring and how many are already in action, booked, moving,
filled, with little space to spare. Moving on demand, all spares in mothballs, months from activation, and guilty rich raising
prices with demand, no easy backup plan for sudden opportunity.
We raise our eyebrows at another delay, the quick storm-like plan in place ow thwarted by the hindrance of nature's whims.
Business on demand requires steady predictability, the sheep for sheering in due order with plenty of flex meaning a rush,
a double ordered, a special charter, not a global shift in a day as favored (and publicly supported) air is replaced by every
other mode that has survived the leaner times unsupplemented, demand beyond reckoning, demand off the scale of wild expectations
and economic hopes. The seas become more daunting with every day the sky rains ash. Rerouted flights are not enough and
ships are rare and far away, not easily diverted from their scheduled course unhindered by the skies. Speculation flows freely
and we watch in fascination as representatives of ourselves, we Man, invent new ways to cope.
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