EXCERPT FROM MANDALAY HAWK'S DILEMMA ...
The story begins on April 2, 2030, in a small town in Maine.
Part 1: Getting to Know Mandalay Hawk
Chapter 1: The storm that lit the fire
Mandalay could hear and feel the panic in her dad’s crackly voice. His last-ditch effort to get emergency supplies before they evacuated had become a nightmare. Through the phone static, she heard him say he wouldn’t be able to get home, because police had closed the roads.
There would be no evacuation. Mandalay was stranded alone.
She stood in her living room, staring out the window, seeing what Mother Nature had unleashed on the coast of Maine: The weather experts called it a MaineCane - the biggest hurricane ever to hit Maine - a category 4 storm expected to pack 150 mile per hour winds and dump more than three feet of rain. Trees in Mandalay’s yard were already snapping like small twigs. Water from the Back River was rising towards the house. And this was just the start.
Mandalay was 13 and lived alone with her dad, two miles from the closest neighbor.
Mandalay tried calling her father back. All she got was: “I’m sorry, the number you are trying to reach …”
She clicked off her ring phone as her house shuttered and shook from the wind. She knew she had little time and only one option, because they didn’t have a basement or a secure room. She needed to build a fort in the back of the living room, away from the window, a fort that would give her a fighting chance of surviving this storm. She was a strong girl from helping her dad chop wood in the backyard. She went to work.
She pushed and pulled the couch to the back of the room, then dragged the big chair next to it and tipped it over. Then she dragged her desk, her mattress and the coffee and kitchen tables and tipped them over, creating a sturdy perimeter. She pushed and pulled the dining room table and turned it upside down so it formed a roof. She tied a thick rope around the table and shoved the end of it into the fort. She then put on her dad’s rain pants, her heavy boots, gloves and two raincoats and climbed inside and yanked and yanked the table over her head. She didn’t recall ever praying in her life before, but she was now.
Within a few minutes, she heard the sharp crack of the living room window, then a howling wind so ear-splittingly loud she could barely hear the glass shattering, the tree limbs smashing through the house and the debris whipping around her.
She had draped a thick blanket over her head and held onto the rope for dear life - the rope that was holding the table in place despite the ferocious winds, holding onto that rope so that an avalanche of torn branches, cracked glass and broken roof didn’t cascade down on top of her. She held on for hours, focusing on one simple thing, holding that rope so that she could tell her dad how she kicked butt and survived. She then noticed water was creeping up, now covering the lower part of her legs.
As the wind howled, she heard more cracking, as if something was splitting open. Then something fell …
The next thing Mandalay remembered was hearing these words: “Our dog’s got a scent - over here!”
Moments later, Mandalay heard sloshing water, frantic scraping and digging and an electric saw cutting and shouting “Lift it!” and “We got to get her out!” Then she recalled being pulled from under a pile of branches, beams and a cracked dining room table, which all partially lay under three feet of water from the Back River, the river that flooded Mandalay’s house. But her head miraculously had remained above water, resting on a broken branch. She was soaking wet, chilled to the bone, with a bruised leg and a huge bump on her head, but she was alive. She blinked at the bright light - and realized that she was looking up at the blue sky and bright sun shining through where their roof used to be.
Then she saw her father.
“You’ll be ok, darling, I promise, you’ll be ok,” he said, as he burst into tears and hugged her tight.
**** **** ****
For Mandalay, the next few days were a blur of doctors, nurses and more people telling her how lucky she was than she would have liked.
You’re lucky to be alive.
You’re lucky you didn’t drown.
You’re lucky you only got a concussion and a bruised ankle.
Thousands of people died in the storm.
“How does it feel to be the luckiest girl alive?” a TV reporter asked her. “You were lying under a crumpled roof in flood water for more than 12 hours.”
Mandalay really wasn’t sure what to say to that. But she knew she wanted to go home and get on with her life.
When Mandalay left the hospital a week later, on April 9, spring had returned. In 2030, this meant sunny and high 80s, and the cleanup was underway.
**** **** ****
Mandalay’s life returned to something like normal. They had to live with Uncle Jim, her father’s best friend - because they didn’t have a house anymore. But, soon after, she was able to return to school, in a walking cast and after her concussion protocol was lifted. She was an eighth-grader at Nagatoon Regional Junior-Senior High School.
The first morning her dad drove her to school it took twice as long as normal because one road had been wiped out by flood waters and a second road was blocked by dozens of downed trees.
“You know dad ...” Mandalay said, as she looked out the car window at all the damaged houses and buildings. She didn’t finish the sentence, as she shook her head and grimaced.
“Yeah, what?” he said, as he gave her a quick glance.
“I don’t know,” she said, as she continued looking at the flattened buildings and cars turned upside down.
But she did know. In 6th grade, her teacher gave the class a special assignment, to write 500 words on what they thought was the biggest problem in the world. Each student could pick the problem, research it and write about the problem and how to fix it.
After talking about it with her dad, Mandalay decided to write about global warming. Mandalay recalled reading an article in Environment Kids that was titled EVERYTHING! The article explained how EVERYTHING! was getting worse because of global warming - more people were dirt poor, more people were starving, more people were getting sick and dying, and just about everything else bad was happening a lot more: more floods, more droughts, more forest fires, and of course, more deadly, sudden, extreme weather, like MaineCanes, which hit even if it wasn’t hurricane season. And, of course, it was hot. They had summer weather, and it was only early spring.
“Gosh, the world’s a mess,” she wrote. “Something has to be done.”
After she handed in her assignment, Mandalay had decided to take a stand. At lunch that day two years ago, she jumped up on the food counter, alongside that day’s hot selection of spaghetti and meatballs, and shouted that everyone had to write to the local congresswoman because “Global warming had to be stopped!” She got so carried away that she didn’t realize her sneaker dipped into the large, metal dish of spaghetti, with dozens of students on line waiting to be served lunch.
The letter home that day from the principal said:
Dear Mr. Hawk: Although we appreciate Mandalay’s enthusiasm for a cause - even if it is a lost cause - she actually violated a Maine health code today and forced us to have to throw out much of today’s lunch. I informed her that she will have detention after school for a week to think about what she did. Please discuss this with her.
Hubert Bushwick, Principal
“Dad, Bushwick’s a bum,” Mandalay told her dad, after he read the letter.
“I understand you may not like him, sweetheart, but he is your principal and you did step in the spaghetti.”
Mandalay did her detention, and used the time to write letters to members of Congress. She convinced a dozen classmates to write also.
The responses they got all seem to say the same thing: That Congress was doing its best.
But what were they really doing? Mandalay was smart enough to wonder at the time. It was 2028, things were getting worse and not nearly enough was being done to stop global warming, even though it was causing more and more problems around the world.
But Mandalay didn’t do anything else. She was in sixth grade, she just went along with the flow.
So now it was two years later, and Mandalay was angry with herself - angry because she had waited until a cat 4 MaineCane, the result of global warming, had killed almost 3,000 people in Maine and almost killed her before realizing she’d have to take the next step.
