Darkest Before The Dawn
Many years ago I was told by a dear aunt that she was not celebrating 40 years of marriage, despite what it said on the big pink cake – she was only celebrating 20 of them. This was because for the other 20 years she had been married she’d wanted to throttle my uncle and make off with the life insurance. Being a newlywed at the time I had expressed some surprise at this sentiment and she gave me some very sage advice:
She told me that anyone who loved their husband for every moment of their time together was either mad or drugged. That normal people pissed each other off. A lot. And that that was okay. Sometimes you hate them, sometimes you love them. As long as it worked out about 50/50 (or the sex was seriously good) then you could count yourself lucky. She wasn’t far off the mark there. I spend some nights lying awake, scared that he might die first. I spend others awake planning how to dispose of the body.
You might have gathered that it has not all been wine and roses around here lately. And you’d be right. In times of great stress, in the absence of a common uniting enemy, Big Hairy Man and I shout at each other in order to solve the problems of our world. Oddly enough, it has never occured to us in the last ten years that this has not solved anything but only makes us more cross with each other. You’d think that two reasonably intelligent people would find alternative ways to cope with the trials of modern life, three children and small business management. You’d be wrong…
Until this Thursday when the schizophrenic weather gave us a karmic kick up the arse. It rains a lot here in New Zealand. You might have noticed. But this time, the heavens outdid themselves and dumped three months worth of rain on us in a mere 36 hours. That’s over 400mm of water. And you know what? That little flood we had before turned out to be a blessing in disguise because if we hadn’t had that inch of water in the carpet we wouldn’t have had the frenzied over-zealous ditch-deepening done and without that the entire house would have been washed out this week.
This time it was much worse. It started raining the day before and got heavier and heavier. Then the flooding began. The State Highway was closed, there were frantic phone calls from the daycare centre and schools to come and collect our children before they were unreachable as the roads flooded. I was stuck an hour and a half south of town, babysitting my nephew and niece. Big Hairy Man was uncontactable (I found his mobile phone when I called him and found my handbag vibrating) as he’d taken our youngest to get her arm x-rayed for a suspected fracture (I know, I know, it never rains but it pours. It turns out her arm is fine but I didn’t know that at the time) and I spent a frantic half hour sobbing in a gift shop trying to contact anyone I knew to get them to collect my other two children and get them home safely. The roads north (to home) were closed as were the ones south of town so my brother and his wife could not get home again either. I eventually got hold of my sister who drove to the rescue and then got stranded herself as the waters got too high for her car. She had to be rescued along with her car-full of kids by my brother-in-law and Him Indoors in their four-wheel-drives.
By then many of the roads were closed off, rivers having burst their banks, ditches and streams overflowed in many places washing debris and branches onto the road, blocking off routes from one area to another. Further south, train-tracks and sections of road were being washed away entirely. Having rescued my sister and loaded the kids up in the four wheel drives, they all drove off in convoy up through the back roads and through the forest, up to the turn-off where, at 3pm, my sister and her husband waved good-bye to my partner and kids who drove off down a windy, steep dirt road which would eventually get them back home. And that was the last we heard of my family… the phones were out, the mobile phone coverage was down and the whole area was cut off.
People, that was the longest night of my life. I knew that he was a good driver and would have pulled over if the road had been too bad. I knew that there were a few houses and farms along that road where they could have sheltered. I knew other cars would have taken the same route and probably seen and called for help if anything had gone wrong. I knew they had probably reached home and were safe, dry and not really upside down in the car at the bottom of a cliff under a landslide of mud. I knew all this but I still spent the night desperately trying to call home and rocking back and forth in a corner.
The phone finally rang at 7 the next morning, he’d been trying to call me all night too. He’d been worried about me driving back to my brother’s house from town – a 20 minute drive which took 70 minutes of white-knuckled steering-wheel-strangling terror over winding flooded roads in the heaviest rain I’ve ever seen.
I eventually got home the next day, having driven through green valleys that had huge lakes which weren’t there two days before. I hugged my family. Hairy Man and I haven’t argued since. I’m not saying we won’t because I know we will, it’s just there’s nothing like staring into the abyss to make you appreciate what you’ve got.
