Sturm
"...and I still don't know" - Rilke

Kodak Brownie Hawkeye / 120mm / FujiFilm iso100

re-spooled to 620 format / slightly rendered

Western North Carolina / Spring 2012

I am standing in a room with my friend Jesse and I look out the back window to a scene of devastation.

I realize am not in a house but a two or three-story building in a small town and I am looking across a wide expanse toward the back of the buildings on the next street.  There is a divide of some sort, like a shallow gully. 

There has been a terrific storm, and I see the destruction.

Bricks are strewn about and the dirt has been washed away exposing the underneath of sidewalks.  I see where a creek once crossed the gully area and emptied into a drain pipe.  Everything is wrecked since there must have been a flash flood. Roots are exposed, bricks and pieces of concrete are exposed yet the buildings are all standing but quite damaged.  

I am surprised because I surely thought I was in a simple residential house but now I realize I am in a building looking out over a scene of storm-havoc.

~

I dream I am in an old basement and there are pipes overhead and several unlit rooms beyond me.  I am getting ready to take a shower and I am naked near an old-fashioned bathtub.  The shower head is hooked over one of the metal pipes overhead.  I slide the shower head over the bathtub and turn on the water.  I let the water run for a while before I stand in the tub.

I am thinking, "this place belongs to Dave."  

I take a very long shower and the water is running all over the floor.  I am very aware of taking a long and self-indulgent shower.  When I finish I look around and the floor is flooded.  I take a large towel and begin to soak up the water.  I keep mopping up from room to room and the water is all over.  I go into the next room and there is even more water but only about an inch deep.  

My towel is soaked and is of no use.  I look down into a heat vent in the floor and think the water may drain down this vent.  I don't clean up all the water before the dream ends.

~

I am in a house getting myself ready for the day, getting cleaned up and showered.  I am shaving.  There is shaving cream on my face and as I look out the window I see a nearby two-story house on fire.  

It is a raging fire with black smoke and flames coming from all the windows.  

I think to call my friends who are in a firetruck close by attending another fire.  But I don't have my cell phone.  I think what to do.  Finish shaving or go to find help?  I look for clothes and find only underwear.  I look out the window again at the terrible house-fire and realize no one could survive this if they were trapped inside that house.

~