PETER OUNDLE was also interested in politics, it turned out, and when I mentioned the radio program, he’d heard it too, not because anyone told him to but because he liked that sort of thing. He gave me tips about online magazines to check out, because their coverage of the issues was, he said, “really sharp.” In the way I might have looked up bands recommended by an attractive boy—not expecting, really, to like the music, but feeling it was an essential homework of flirtation, what my mother called erotomorphia, an illness she attributed to half of America’s teenage girls—I looked up the journals online. The articles weren’t totally engrossing, but they weren’t intolerable either. He told me to watch a film called Gasland, that he said explained fracking. I could see that the issues Peter cared most about—nature and the environment, fracking, and the global-warming discussion—were bigger than our own individual lives.
On some level, environmental issues felt abstract and remote, but I still thought I could make a passionate speech about the effects of global warming. So I went to Mr. Cartwright and suggested it as the topic for my final speech project of the year. It would mean moving categories, from “Declamation and Recitation” to “Original Argument,” an issue only because I was new to the team: usually it was the eighth graders who did Original Argument. But Mr. Cartwright gave me the thumbs-up, and told me I had two weeks to write the draft because the tournament was, by then, little over a month away.
He said that the best way to write a strong speech was to make it personal. Our house hadn’t been flooded or destroyed by a tornado; no tree branches had fallen on our car. I could speak about my terror of thunder-snow—the first time I’d seen lightning in a snowstorm, I thought it was the apocalypse—but that wasn’t particularly interesting. I could speak about the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, but that was ages ago—historical, really—and I’d never been to New Orleans. I could try to prepare something about the recent horrible earthquake in Japan—it had caused a nuclear accident too, just a year before. But I didn’t have any personal connection to the event, for one thing; and for another, it wasn’t simply a global-warming issue. While you could argue that it was caused by global warming, you couldn’t reduce it to that.
My father reminded me about Rudy the caretaker. “Remember that freak storm a couple of years ago? Hurricane . . . who? Which was it?”
“I don’t remember,” my mother said.
“A girl or a boy?” I loved that storms had genders.
“I can’t tell you. The point is, it was a freak storm, a late hurricane, shouldn’t have been this far north. They’d predicted coastal flooding and everyone boarded up and evacuated along the beach, but then it mostly didn’t turn out as badly as they’d feared.”
“Mostly?”
“High winds and rain, the kind that makes the road flood in twenty minutes, but bursts of it, not consistent.”
“I remember,” my mother said suddenly. “That string of mini-tornadoes, right? What was the name for those things?”
“Damned if I remember.”
“I can look it up just now on my phone,” I said. At that point I was the only one in the family with a smart phone. “What’s it? A name for a mini-tornado?”
“It’s not quite a tornado,” my father said. “It’s like a tornado.”
“What are you doing with your phone at the table?” My mother raised her voice. “We made rules about that thing.”
“It’s not at the table, it’s near the table.”
“And that makes it acceptable?”
“Let her look it up. It bugs me that I can’t remember.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake!”
“A dust devil? Is it?”
“No. Keep going.”
“Rich! We’re at table!”
“You wouldn’t stop her going to get the encyclopedia, would you?”
“But—”
“But she wouldn’t be able to find it there, because she doesn’t already know the word.”
“Derecho?”
“Bingo! That’s it. Thank you, Miss Julia. A string of derechos. What does it say about them?”
“They’re thunderstorm wind events, but are not tornadoes. ‘These storms produce strong straight-line winds and can cause damages similar to a tornado.’ ”
“See? That’s exactly right. I remember having the conversation with Rudy about it, in the Rite Aid parking lot. He explained all that to me. Caused by the hurricane. A string of derechos. Sounds Mexican, Doritos and nachos put together. He was disappointed, as if there would’ve been more cachet in a tornado. A higher class of storm.”
“Dad—”
“The point is, a derecho destroyed his house. A little clapboard Cape in the woods out the Vine Tail Road by the nature reserve. He’d lived there with his mother and as I recall, she’d died not long before, so it was especially devastating. I went out and saw it, with Eric, at the time—flattened, like a giant had stomped on it.”
“Where does he live now?”
“Same place.” My dad got up to clear the table.
“Rich! That’s Julia’s job.”
“Give the kid a break. I’m finishing my story.”
“Did he rebuild the house?”
“No, he brought in a double-wide and set it on a raised concrete foundation. Real backwoods stuff. Basically what he could afford with the insurance. Primitive. He keeps that dog in a pen outside, and I’ve heard that at night she howls like a werewolf.”
“That’s a great story, but it doesn’t help Julia with her speech.”
“Did the derecho blow the house down? Or was it a tree falling?”
“You can ask him. But the storm tore up a line of old pines like they were matchsticks—it’s still there, like a road cut through the forest—and I guess the house was in its path. A twisted pile of firewood with some mud-soaked furniture strewn about. When I went out there, that’s what it was.”
My mother sighed. “Not very cheerful.” She took the vanilla ice cream out of the freezer. “I think we need a Parisian moment. Poire Belle Hélène, anyone? I’ll heat the chocolate sauce, if you’ll change the subject.”
“I think you should interview Rudy,” my dad said. “His story will make a great speech.”
“But was it global warming that caused it?” I asked. My mother put the pears in bowls and scooped the ice cream.
“Of course it was. Who ever heard of a hurricane—or a derecho, for that matter—this far north in November before?”
“I hear you,” my mother said, “but it’s dinnertime, and Rudy can wait. Sweetie, why don’t you tell us about the lacrosse game this afternoon? Who won?”