DIKKON EBERHART
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Finally: Texas

9/7/2017

14 Comments

 
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Dikkon Eberhart


As the waters ascended, the media descended. 
 
‘You’ve lost everything.  You are a victim.  Why aren’t you resentful?  What’s wrong with you?  Can’t you understand that you need to be resentful?’ 
 
The media was resentful.  The media knew how to run the big hurricane story, but it wasn’t getting the quotes. 
 
It had perfected the big hurricane story twelve years before.  The public was supposed to be pounded day after day by hopelessness, helplessness, and anguish.  The back story was to become the underlying theme of the week—people in America are powerless to affect their own lives, and blame must be attached.  Plenty of face time for talking heads attaching blame.    
 
No Cajun Navy wanted around here, thank you very much. 
 
What the media was baffled continually to experience was--
 
Thumbs Up for Texas! 
 
We can take care of ourselves and our own! 
 
Now, a person who has lost his or her house and all its contents is in a bad position and will be under stress for a long time to come.  It’s even worse, of course, in the case of injury or death.    
 
But--
 
It’s the attitude.  
 
It’s the people whom the talking heads pit against one another helping one another instead.  That’s what it is. 
 
That’s what heartened us in other parts of the nation while we sympathized with those who were flooded, and while we prayed, and while we did whatever else we felt called upon to do.   
 
 
 
 
 
All this takes me back twelve years to the Eberhart’s own personal Thanksgiving freight train.  Back then, our family lived way out a peninsula into the ocean, off the coast of Maine. 
 
Three of our children were home that year for Thanksgiving, which is all of them except our oldest son who was in Bulgaria.  One of our daughters had brought a friend home from college.  The friend lived in New Orleans, where three months before that Thanksgiving, Hurricane Katrina had landed.  That friend was eager for a calming Maine Thanksgiving experience. 
 
She did get an experience, that’s for sure. 
 
 
 
 
As a family, we took a cold, beach, night-walk the evening before Thanksgiving.  It was cold to us; it was frigid to the young woman from New Orleans. 
 
Pink and rosy we all returned to the house and bedded down.  Maybe snow tomorrow, we suggested—it smelled like snow out there, and there was a ring around the moon.
 
“Does snow have a smell?” the New Orleans friend asked, amazed.
 
“It does.” 
 
“Come back outside,” said our daughter, “I’ll teach you to smell it on the air.”
 
Sure enough, dawn came on Thanksgiving Day with lovely, fat snowflakes sifting slowly down the sky and piling up wherever the surface was not bare earth—the ground hadn’t frozen yet. 
 
For the entertainment of our New Orleans guest, we were happy that a flock of twenty wild turkeys came into our meadow, scratching away at the snow, searching for windfall apples from our trees and for the cracked corn the jays scatter widely from the feeders. 
 
The New Orleans friend’s own family’s experience of Katrina had been relatively minor, but destruction had been all around them.  By contrast, so short a time later, the comfort and the easiness of this Maine holiday for her, she said, was soothing.
 
 
 
 
About midday on Thanksgiving, the sky began to darken, and the snow came more heavily.  I was in the office, which was the converted loft of our barn.  I was writing.  The girls and my wife were in the kitchen preparing the creamed onions which are my wife’s specialty.  We always brought the onions—traveling about twenty miles inland to admire that family’s alpacas and sheep and then to dig in at a splendid meal, with children, friends, and family. 
 
Suddenly, from nowhere, there came a calamitous boom. 
 
It was not a single clap of a boom but a rolling, swelling, reverberating roar, as though a vast freight train were passing by—and passing very closely.  Its madcap passage lasted less than a minute but it shook the entire barn and the house.
 
I leapt up and dashed outside to see.  Frantically, I looked this way and that.  What was destroyed?  The barn?  The house?  The roofs?  The trees?  All were as before.
 
Something massive had just happened—but what was it?  And even now there suddenly came a sharp fall of icy, battering hail. 
 
We were stunned.  What had happened? 
 
 
 
 
What had happened was this--
 
Within two miles from us a type F-1 tornado (100 mph winds) whipped across our peninsula.  For 30 seconds it careened across the landscape, uprooting entire trees, snapping trunks more than a foot thick as though they were sticks, shifting two summer cottages off their moorings—one of them by seven feet—tearing dirt off the rocks, and wrecking a degree of havoc that was astounding to see when we explored it a day later. 
 
Then, as a waterspout, it rollicked off across the bay.
 
Almost never do we even get tornados on the Maine coast. 
 
 
 
 
A few days later, our daughter and her New Orleans friend flew back to college, in Virginia, having had a very unusual Thanksgiving experience in Maine, especially after New Orleans’ exposure to a massive hurricane shortly before. 
 
 
 
 
No one was physically hurt by our tornado.  It was miniscule as compared with the havoc of Katrina and more lately of Harvey. 
 
But I think of the experience of our Thanksgiving freight train when I contemplate the gargantuan power of nature unleashed.  Nature is more powerful than we are, and there’s not a single thing we can do about it. 
 
We should know our place. 
 
The universe is not about us. 
 
That’s why I admire the spirit of Texas.  
​

14 Comments
Rabbi yagod
9/8/2017 01:24:53 pm

Wow ! A masterpiece of an article. This is a superb, insightful, article that is 100% right on the mark.
I always knew you are an excellent writer but this is a classic that puts in you right in the major leagues.

Reply
Dikkon
9/8/2017 08:35:54 pm

Isaac! Thank you, my friend. Generous accolade indeed. I like thinking of myself--after reading such a tribute as yours--as a major league guy. But another couple of posts and they'll probably post me back down to the minors.

Congratulations by the way on your Parmesan prize. Bravo!

Reply
Peter Cutler link
9/9/2017 04:15:09 pm

My friend you have shown what you are capable of with this excellent piece! Many great points packed into a relatively short essay. I could not agree with you more about the culpability of the so-called mainstream media. They have bought into the Establishment vision of what America should be, completely ignoring the traits that have made America the great country that it once was and can be again if allowed to determine its own destiny rather than kowtow to the cultural Marxism that has been so carefully infiltrated into our society over the last century. What a wonderful example being set by so many of those independent and responsible Texans and augmented by generous and giving souls all over our nation. And for once, our government seems to be doing the right thing in a timely fashion. The Grand Lodge of Masons in Maine has already contributed a sum totaling five figures with appeals throughout the fraternity for additional funds and of course there are many, many other charitable organizations quickly responding to help in different ways. And Dikkon, you are so right in reminding us that "the universe is not about us" - but if we can only remember who we can be we may at least play a significant part in our tiny corner of it.

Reply
Dikkon
9/9/2017 09:52:25 pm

Good for the Masons! Blessings upon them, Pete. Blessings upon you, too, for your kind remarks. With you, I believe the country can veer away from the track it has taken lately, for the replenishment of our strength and character, but I believe that Christians must be among those who stand firm. May it be so!

Reply
cumberland,maine gal
9/9/2017 06:45:17 pm

i could not agree more with dikkon, rabbi, and peter.
i highly recommend reading dikkon's novel, paradise, if you want constant immersion in suspense, adventure, a poetic portrayal of the great outdoors and a sailing quest. the interaction between 3 divergent spiritual cultures is gripping and grounded.

Reply
Dikkon
9/9/2017 10:08:09 pm

Dear Cumberland Maine gal -- Why, thank you for your unexpected tribute to my novel Paradise! I'm thankful that you read it and enjoyed it, and also grateful that you took the trouble to mention it here.

I believe I may know who you are. I'll reach out by email and see if I am correct. If I'm wrong--whoever you are--thanks all the more so for your accolade from the blue!

Reply
floyd link
9/10/2017 11:17:54 am

Amen! I couldn't agree more. The independent spirit that made up this country is trying to be decimated, controlled. They want people to need a big government. They have forgotten, here, we are the government.

Praying for the people in harm's way. We should know our place.

"The earth declares His majesty".

Reply
Dikkon
9/10/2017 12:32:48 pm

Thanks, Floyd.

For about a year now, I've deliberately stayed away from even the slightest hint of political implication in any post.

I did a political newspaper column weekly for about two years around the time of 9/11 (after I'd finished restaurant reviews), and I finally got tired of being castigated by 80% of readers--though I'd been HIRED to provide a vivid conservative alternative to the newspaper's long-time liberal opinion writer.

I'm not surprised--and I am glad--that you share my idea.

There is a great deal of cultural energy nowadays trying strategically to eliminate any basis for individualism in this country--to eliminate anything except the STATE on which the citizens may rely. That is, to eliminate church, God, family, the Constitution (as written originally), respect for historical truth, the First and Second Amendments, etc.

Make way for feel-good, fuzzy tyranny--by engineering a populace of frightened followers--instead of one of self-directed achievers.

Bah!

Reply
floyd link
9/10/2017 12:45:57 pm

Man, I clicked on a link to respond, or what I thought was to respond, to your comment, and it unsubscribed me!

Anyway, just wanted to say very well said, sir. Not surprised that you started our position so eloquently and precisely. Wonderful.

May God wake this nation.

Katie Andraski link
9/10/2017 04:23:45 pm

Love this post. Wow, what an experience, to have a tornado on Thanksgiving! I so agree with you about the can do spirit of Texas. Great writing as always,

Reply
Dikkon
9/10/2017 05:09:53 pm

Thank you, Katie! With blessings to you and your whole family...including your horses.

Reply
Betty Draper link
9/11/2017 08:31:30 pm

The universe is not about us. Loved the true story about your eventful Thanksgiving but I super love the short line of, the universe is not about us. Nothing like a storm of any kind to remind us of this truth. I have to laugh when weather casters talk like they can control the weather and it does not do what they say it will do. Don't get me wrong I like being alerted that bad weather of any kind is coming but we simple cannot control it , only our response to it. While living in Papua New Guinea we experienced several times when there were no warning to bad weather and of course never a warning to the earthquakes that came often, way too often. Each time we were reminded how frail we were as we survived many times without being for warned. Not being forewarned breeds a thankfulness that makes God bigger then those weather forecasters. Great post.

Reply
Dikkon
9/12/2017 10:20:26 am

Thank you, Betty!

Papua New Guinea--I had no idea. That sounds entirely exotic to someone like me who hasn't traveled even slightly in that direction.

I happily agree that storms remind us of the fact that the universe is not about us. What I would consider even happier would be if we don't NEED storms to remind us of that fact, and instead we knew it inherently, without prompts from the weather.

How would it be if GOD weighed on us daily, just as a hurricane does for a few days, and if the media were out there doing their stand-ups with men and women on the street about how God impacts them?

Wouldn't that be an interesting news show!

Reply
Betty Draper link
9/26/2017 01:34:43 pm

Oh I think God does weigh on us daily by the power of His Spirit that indwells us. We just don't listen everyday. We are so prone to go our way, doing our thing, good things and just don't listen.
For sure it would be great if it did not take a storm to get our attention but then what would we write about brother since most of post are taken from a not so perfect world, not so perfect people, including ourselves.

Papua New Guinea was entirely exotic and a life experience we would have never dreamed of. But then we really did not dream of much except being used of God where He planted us. Was doing great in the states when we met a widow missionary serving in the jungles of Philippines. The challenge was laid out so clearly, unless someone went and told the gospel to these remote places how would they hear. We passed at least five gospel preaching churches going to our church. It weighed heavy on our hearts till we had to say , yes, we will go. First country we Bolivia, South america, then Papua. It's been an adventure, but I would not have went for adventure. I can get that on a roller coaster or theme park. But for a lost soul needing to hear of Jesus the one who died for me, well thats another story. WE tell others, it's not for you but if it isn't find what is for you that has the gospel right in the middle of whatever it is. There are so many opportunities to talk Jesus out there, enough heartache to start a conversation with. Which is why I love a good storm, great material to ask what would happen to you if the storm swallow you up? I so wish just once I would hear the weather media quote Job 26, that God wraps up the water in His clouds, He hangs the earth on nothing, He quiets the sea with His power, and these are the fringes of His ways. Have a great day brother.




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