Sometimes we need a superhero

Editor’s note: This column is being reprinted from Oct. 19, 2005. Jack always had stories about trips to the cabin Connie’s family owns in New Hampshire. They frequently involved some sort of challenge that comes along with vacationing in a spot that lacks some of the modern conveniences we sometimes take for granted.

“The dam has broken,” said the voice on the phone.

Now, I don’t know about you, but those aren’t words I’ve ever encountered in a phone conversation before.

“The bridge has washed away,” said the voice.

Alien words. Words out of a comic book or a Hollywood blockbuster.

Broken dams? Washed away bridges?

The sense of unreality was unshakable.

But, then again, there’s been a lot of that this year: The tsunami, the hurricanes, the ongoing dreadfulness of Iraq, the earthquake in Kashmir, and the sudden deaths of good friends who were here one minute and gone the next.

The voice on the phone, however, was insistent. The dam had indeed broken. The bridge had indeed washed away.

New England has been trapped in a purgatory of rain the past couple of weeks, seeing 2 inches an hour for hours on end, witnessing flooding in places no one had ever witnessed flooding before, and seeing dams break and bridges wash away.

Since early in the last century, Connie’s family has had a cabin on a hillside above Gregg Lake in southwestern New Hampshire. It’s a charming place, as long as your idea of charm involves no heat except the fireplace, exposed wiring, no insulation, water service from a gravity-driven, spring-fed system of hoses above ground, and a 90-foot hike up a 45-degree hillside from the parking area to the front door.

In other words, it’s heaven, within unique definitions of that word.

The lake itself dates from 1793 when a guy named Samuel Gregg muscled enough boulders into place to create a primitive dam, creating what was then known as Gregg Pond. In 1847, in the watermill era, the locals improved the dam in a new location, creating Gregg Lake.

Since then, of course, it’s been rebuilt a number of times.

But in all the time I’ve been visiting the cabin — dating back to 1969 before Connie and I were married — the dam has been there and it has held the waters of the lake out of Great Brook and controlled the flow into the little town of Antrim.

This month’s rain changed all that.

While we’ve been enjoying a tranquil end of summer and nascent autumn, New Hampshire and the rest of New England have been getting hammered.

On Saturday, the call came.

The dam had broken, at least a portion of it which was used to control the flow of water. The surge washed away the bridge we’ve driven across hundreds of times and sent a torrent down a ravine where it was almost certain to do damage to more than one house.

Meanwhile, with the dam’s failure and the bridge’s absence, the folks who live on the same hillside where the cabin is located were suddenly cut off from civilization.

They had power, and they had phones. But they couldn’t leave except by boat.

The last we knew, eight or nine folks — most of them people we’ve visited with each summer for decades — were stuck. They were going nowhere.

I’m sure they’ll be OK. Inconvenienced, of course, but OK.

But I keep thinking back to that phone call and those words — just as I keep thinking back to the tsunami and the hurricanes and the earthquake and the shock of the sudden death of friends — and I find myself wishing that Superman really existed.

He was the guy, after all, who took care of breaking dams. And tidal waves. And earthquakes. And even the sudden deaths of good friends.

But he’s not there.

And, instead, I’m stuck with a very difficult reality: “The dam has broken.”