18 pages • 36 minutes read
Problems with Hurricanes
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Themes
Appearances Can Be Deceptive
The campesino in “Problems with Hurricanes” argues that appearances can be deceptive, especially when it comes to what humans tend to worry about most or interpret as the greatest dangers to themselves. The figure of the campesino embodies the unexpected power in seemingly simple people or things. The campesino is humble and appears to be a simple man of the countryside, but he shares some unexpected wisdom and is highly cognizant of the unpredictability of nature. He provides the speaker with new knowledge that could potentially be lifesaving.
However, even more surprising than the character of the campesino is the characterization of hurricanes. To most people, a hurricane is to be feared because of its awesome natural powers. The campesino acknowledges that the more obvious powers of nature—the winds, waves, and even the “noise” of a natural disaster—tend to be what attracts the most attention (and fear) during a hurricane. Nevertheless, he argues that it is not the hurricane itself that is to be feared most, but a byproduct of it: the fruit that flies like projectiles. This demonstrates that while most people will notice and worry about the largest and most obvious dangers, things that are seemingly small, simple, and unexpected might be the most dangerous things of all.
Readers might be reminded of the butterfly effect theory, which posits that if a butterfly flaps its wings on one side of the world, it could potentially spark a hurricane on the other side. While this theory attempts to create a cause-and-effect relationship between everything in reality, it also demonstrates how random cause and effect can be, and how something small can have a large impact in some way. The campesino’s advice is therefore to always be alert to the dangers that are harder to spot because they are small and simple enough to easily overlook.
The Danger of Simple, Beautiful Things
Another theme in the poem is the danger of beautiful and even “sweet” things. Cruz makes this abundantly clear at the end of the poem when the campesino delivers his final piece of wisdom, after building up to the climax of the poem with the repetitive lines:
Don’t worry about the noise
Don’t worry about the water
Don’t worry about the wind (Lines 29-31).
Instead, he argues it is essential to:
[B]eware of mangoes
And all such beautiful
sweet things (Lines 33-35).
By focusing on fruit, the campesino transforms the fruit into a figurative representation of life’s hidden dangers. Fruit generally has positive connotations: it is nutritious, naturally sweet, and healthy. Fruit is even used linguistically to demonstrate the reward for hard work, as in the idiom “the fruits of one’s labor.” In essence, fruit is generally regarded as harmless.
However, for the campesino, even fruit can be transformed into something dangerous under the right circumstances. He represents it as a weapon, calling the various fruits flung by the hurricane “projectiles,” conjuring the image of bullets, arrows, or cannonballs on a battlefield. This weaponization of fruit also echoes literary fruits that led to chaos, such as the fruit Eve eats from the Tree of Knowledge, the apple in Snow White, or even the golden apple in Greek mythology. As the campesino sees it, fruits represent the dangers of “all such beautiful / sweet things” (Lines 34-35) in life that can deceive and bring harm in unexpected ways. For that very reason, he argues that one must never lose sight of the potential dangers of something even—or perhaps especially—if it is something “beautiful” and “sweet.”
The Random Power of Nature
The poem also emphasizes the power of the natural world, especially since it can be dangerous. In this poem, the speaker does not seem to belong to this rural world, whereas the campesino is educating him about knowledge that is well-known to the locals. This knowledge comes with an appreciation for just how unpredictable and powerful nature can be.
The campesino depicts certain types of death in a natural disaster as something that is not shameful, but rather, just an example of nature’s merciless strength. He insists, “Death by drowning has honor” (Line 14), as does getting “slammed” against a “mountain boulder” by the “wind” (Lines 15-17). Such deaths do not carry “shame” (Line 18) because the force of nature is, in such cases, overwhelming and undeniable to all. By contrast, the campesino depicts the flying fruit as a more dishonorable or even embarrassing way to die because it would mean dying through something small and seemingly harmless—something that one should, in theory, be able to notice and avoid. In this way, the campesino urges the speaker to remain humble, depicting the forces of nature as something that humans may think they can understand but that, in the end, are sometimes beyond any predictive abilities.
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