it is now shortly after 4:50 AM and I am wide awake. I tried going back to sleep for another hour, just one more slim, wonderful hour . . . but no luck. The light of dawn has invaded my space and I am fighting to get up and be motivated.
I can hear it outside as it claws past the house I am in. It has not ceased all night, and at times it makes the structure creak as it hammers blow after blow against the walls. The wind is relentless in its attack!
I am now dressed, wearing what I had on yesterday. I am unwilling to fight my way to the car, pull out my duffle and find new clothes just so the wind can surge over me and suck what energy and heat I have amassed away again. God, I hate the wind.
peeking out through the blinds over the windows, there is a narrow band of yellow on the horizon between Newfoundland and Labrador. Somewhere to the west, decent weather is waging a war against the mass of cold, grey, angry clouds invading this region. Yet, as I watch, I see the band of light falter, then fade, as the ditant rain pushes back the light.
As a child living in Santa Cruz, California, I can remember the night a thick, damp, fog bank rolled ashore and havoc ensued. It was full of things that would, in later years, bolster the mind of Alfred Hitchcock to create another of his masterpiece films. The seabirds, lost in the fog, guided by the lights of the new Holiday Inn in town, started crashing through windows in their struggle to find safety, ending in anything but that! So many seagulls and other birds came ashore that night that the flow of cars on the interstate was halted by the mass of birds walking on the road, unwilling to take flight into the cold, grey, foreboding mass. Here, now, outside my room, I watch as two seagulls are blown sideways walking across this village road and wonder if today is the start of yet something else as crazy.
I must pack up! I must get the car started, warmed up, headed north on on the road again, toward the terminal . . . toward a different day. There I can find breakfast. There I can find the company of others like me, stuck in the midst of travels, working on a timeline, that suddenly we no longer control. How truly small we humans are when Mother Nature rears her head and howls. Yet, maybe today, just possibly, she will let us go . . . I can but only hope . . . and drive with my fingers crossed.
Labrador bound . . . once again!
What the Walrus said . . . 