“Our flight is cancelled.” The announcement came in a whisper but fell like an anvil.
It was barely dawn. The gray Northern Irish sky was pushing through an opening in the curtains of a house in Belfast, where, on camp beds and makeshift pallets, our family of seven had tucked in beside a family of five. Old friends had squeezed us in for the night so that we could more conveniently catch an early flight back to the States.
The night before, they’d welcomed us with a candlelit supper of champagne and fish pie. There had been much bonhomie; a feeling engendered not just by the reunion of old friends, but also by the cyclical pleasure of a calendar pivot. Summer was over (actually, in the United Kingdom, it never really began — brrr!), everyone was looking forward to the autumn. Once the taxi picked us up in the morning, our hosts were leaving for a final weekend en famille before their eldest went to college.
Alas, Hurricane Irene had her own plans.
“Well, at least you’re here,” our hostess said kindly, as everyone absorbed the news over coffee.
“Yes, imagine if you were stranded at the airport, with children crying and all the hotels full,” said our host. “Appalling!”
Their flagstone kitchen was warm and quiet, mercifully unlike the relentless metallic horror of an airport terminal. We knew that thousands of other families were in the same predicament, stuck on the wrong side of the Atlantic with suitcases full of dirty, end-of-holiday clothes; we knew many of them were in less pleasant spots, and we were, indeed, grateful.
“At least you’re here,” our friends repeated later that day, as we sat monopolizing their phone while we tried to get through to a ticket agent. Four hours later, we got our booking — to a stateside airport nowhere near the one where we’d left our car, and not, crucially, for three more days.
If the saying is true that both guests and fish begin to stink after three days, we were already beginning to give off a whiff of low tide.
“Nonsense. At least you’re here,” came the firm refrain.
That sentence began to take on the self-soothing properties of a mantra as the days unfurled. It was no imposition, really. It was like having an extra holiday! It was absolutely fine that we’d turned from overnight houseguests into long-term squatters.
As the hurricane progressed up the coast, the U.K. papers began filling with sensational stories of impecunious newlyweds stranded along the Eastern Seaboard, forced to take refuge in seedy hotels while they tried to find flights home. Real horror stories filtered in of gawkers being swept into the Atlantic, of children crushed by falling trees.
Through time differences and sporadic Internet connections we tried to follow what was happening at home. A local heroine went to our house and removed objects that might, in high winds, become missiles. She texted us: We still had power. Rain was bucketing down. The wind wasn’t too bad — but the neighborhood had gone dark.
My husband and I looked at each other across that warm Ulster kitchen. We may have been exuding fishy fumes, but at least we were there.
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
