Chapter Sixteen: Orville

At first, it had no name. At first, like everything, it wasn’t anything. At least, as far as we know, as far as our understanding extends. 

Meteorologists can explain the way a hurricane takes shape: how, from the warm seas off the west coast of Africa, sun-struck, moisture rises. Met with winds blowing in, off the continent, clouds form, then grow, and pressure drops along the surface of the water. They call this a disturbance. And if conditions are right, it builds to a depression, winds drawn in by the low pressure spiraling upward, gathering clusters of thunderclouds together—a feedback loop destined to continue as long as the water is warm. And the water is, increasingly, warm. 

Currents egg each other on until the system reaches the pitch of a tropical storm, a distinction based on the speed of its winds. At which point it is christened. 

What’s in a name? 

Think of God. Gesturing toward a force so far beyond our comprehension, so much vaster than the limits of language can contain. A name’s a failure. Think of God and you and I are not likely thinking the same thing. 

A name deceives us, suggesting that we know of what we speak. A name divides us, implying separate selves that might be nothing more than an illusion perpetuated by names. 

At the same time—think of God—a name is a valiant attempt. To comprehend. To connect, to bridge the gap between—you and I; God and we—to close the self-same distance it creates. 

A name is a double-edged sword. A convenience. A necessity? A name can be a blessing or a weapon or a prison or the key that sets us free. Declaration of independence. Symbol of the self. 

A name is an aim, an intention, a dream. A star to steer by. A mirage born of our longing. Think of God. In a word, both limit and liberation. Insufficient. Maybe impudent. But in its impudence, in its foolish, sweet essay, is a name not also a prayer? 

Orville’s name came from a list at the World Meteorological Organization. No one thought about it, took a look at the radar and said, Gee that one seems like an Orville. The choice was made decades past, when the list was devised. The winds of TD23 hit thirty-nine MPH and, automatically, Orville was applied. Only three days later, when models began to suggest that it would make for the Outer Banks, did people start remarking on the coincidence. 

Like the achievement of flight, the science and technology that predicted Orville’s path are a proof and a product of the human character. We are clever, we are curious and we are stubborn, determined to be ever expanding our spheres of influence and experience. And, as a result, as the centuries have accrued, so too has our knowledge—beginning with observation, folding in experiment, finally building instruments to measure more than our senses can detect. 

Probably we have always been meteorologists, to the best of our ability. Aristotle gets credit for the first comprehensive study of weather and climate. But some four hundred years before he published his Meteorology in 340 BCE, the authors of the Upanishads were remarking on the interplay of elements and the formation of clouds, just as they described the interplay of Ātman and Brahman and the formation of the world. 

It has taken our species millennia, has taken the invention of the barometer, thermometer, anemometer, radiosonde, Doppler radar, supercomputer, satellite imaging…to make it possible, today, for weather stations across the east coast to say, with a voice of authority, that Orville will make landfall tomorrow, along the south shores of Hatteras and Ocracoke, in the early afternoon, at approximately 1 P.M., its arrival coinciding with the high tide. 

They advise that storm surges may exceed twenty feet, that rainfall may exceed eighteen inches, that wind speeds may exceed one hundred sixty miles per hour. They present their graphics, make their predictions, issue watches and warnings accordingly. But for all this effort, with all this knowledge, still we are children in our comprehension, making best guesses on the basis of what we are able to measure. And just as naming something limits what we see of it, doesn’t our reliance on technology blind us to what it cannot trace and track? 

We have found no way to account for more subtle influences. What about sorrow? What about fury? What about love? 

When Desirée despairs that life has no meaning, when Ann cannot find the thread of her story, when one Linda is dying and the other doesn’t know, when it dawns on Pastor Frank that he is preaching his last sermon, when the Roanoke Players, in their synergy, transcend their separate identities, when the founders of One Point Five Degrees Celsius debate the fate of our species, when Tricia and Tom fear they have lost their daughter, when Jesus believes he has found his calling, when Søren recalls the death of the love of his life, when Noah falls in love and the world feels brand new, when The Seven assemble to make their deaths a statement, when Nancy crosses a continent to save them, when Kim detects the presence of an angel, when Z doesn’t know what they should do next, when Hazard rides triumphantly into the night with the feeling of Don Quixote… do their lives not have the power to stir the skies? 

Could it not be such pangs of hurt and hope, tugging at the web of existence, that draw Orville across the Atlantic, toward the Outer Banks? 

Certainly some would dismiss the idea as whimsy, as superstition. But science allows it is a possibility.

One way physicists like to describe the universe is as a network of relationships. Yes, like a web. Or, like the ocean above which Orville takes its form, from which it takes its power: in a constant state of flux; all things—all particles, all events—bound together in a complex network of cause and effect; each, in its motion, moving others. 

It’s a picture of existence familiar to readers of the Vedas. Not a new idea, but an ancient one, expressed in modern parlance—quarks and leptons and Higgs bosons; strong and weak forces; dark energy and dark matter; relativity, uncertainty, entanglement and superposition. 

And if this is how it is—that our lives are drops of water in a cosmic sea—and if our comprehension is so nascent—of the forces that sway us and the threads that connect us—why should anyone say that Orville is not an incarnation of heartbreak? 

However it came to be, satellites show that off the coast of South Carolina the hurricane is slowing down, gathering strength. Already a Category Five. Will it become the strongest storm to make landfall on the continent? Will it live up to their predictions? 

A convergence of factors, a collection of atmospheric conditions, born of chance or assured by fate, call it what you will—that which we understand to be Orville inches ever-closer, in the night, toward the shore of Hatteras, toward the lives assembling there.