After the storm: Patience and perspective

By Times staff | Thursday, July 24, 2008

Earnice McCain presides over the grill outside the Maple Ridge apartments in Rock Island where neighbors bring rapidly thawing brats, pork steaks and chicken. They sit beneath a wind-ripped maple tree that somehow survived, unlike uprooted pines and other maples all around the complex. McCain gathered limbs from that same tree to mix with charcoal and keep the grill going. But for how long?

These neighbors are preparing for the long haul.

The mess of limbs and wires left by Monday’s storm still is being untangled. Each estimate gets longer and longer. A Missouri utility crew spent three hours Wednesday resetting one split pole on Big Island along the same line that runs to McCain’s apartment complex at 3700 5th St. Dozens and dozens of broken power poles lie in between.

Patience and perspective are the keys for this unprecedented type of emergency and McCain expressed it wonderfully. “I think about those folks in the floods in Cedar Rapids and Waterloo who have no home to return to. I think about that poor family who lost one child at that campground and have another just hanging on.”

On a sunny, surprisingly cool July evening, beneath a surviving tree, McCain says she can live with cold showers, a dark apartment and neighborhood cookouts.

Patience and perspective.