It's been a long time since I've lived anyplace where the weather is anything more than an every-few-years topic, like when El Nino hits. Oh, sure, we have the "marine layer," but that's almost every night and it's no calamity- a little fog, that's it.
Hurricane? What's that?
Of course, I know what a hurricane is. I got to see what a 'cane can do first hand after Andrew, when Fran and I drove around Cutler Ridge and Kendall and pointed out what wasn't there anymore- one of Fran's old college-era houses, gone, flattened; a restaurant along U.S 1 we'd enjoyed when we started dating, vanished; strip malls and housing developments and drug stores, all gone, replaced by trailers or the beginning of new construction or nothing at all, waiting for the insurance money to finally come in so the owners could rebuild, this time with better roofs and maybe cement or cinder blocks instead of wood and shingles. Andrew ripped right through southern Dade, swept through like a John Deere and left a tangle of wood and metal and leaves and dazed, newly possession-free people sifting through what had been their homes until, while cowering in a closet listening to Bryan Norcross tell them what to do, the house shook and the noise like a bullet train rushed around their ears and the structure began to disintegrate around them.
That was Andrew. Hugo did that to the Carolinas. There have been others, but more false alarms than anything else, which is why I expect plenty of thrill seekers to be sticking it out in the Outer Banks and Virginia Beach and the Eastern Shore, holding impromptu Hurricane Parties and maybe even taking the surfboard out for some real West Coast-style wave riding as Isabel approaches. And there's some romance in that image, the rebel humans challenging nature- we're RIGHT HERE, we ain't goin' anywhere, damn it, we're gonna ride it out, this ain't so bad, not with a cooler full of MGD and batteries in the boom box.
And most of the time, it isn't so bad. We tend to overreact to weather emergencies, like when L.A. television news goes into STORM WATCH 2003 mode over a slight mist in Alhambra. The blizzard that will paralyze the Delaware Valley turns out to be a couple of inches that melt off the Blue Route within 12 hours, the tornadoes bearing down on Kansas City make a left turn somewhere before Independence and never make it downtown, the heat wave breaks, the below-zero cold warms up. We live through it with central heating and air conditioning and weather stripping and rock salt and whatever Lowe's or Home Depot throw in the bins you pass while queued up to pay.
But sometimes, there's nothing you can do. You can prepare all you want for hurricanes and earthquakes and tornadoes, you can have emergency provisions and an evacuation plan and everything figured out to the last detail, but if the weather's gonna get you, it's gonna get you. It's gonna wash your house away, suck your car off the road, rip a crack down the middle of your foundation, and there's nothing you can do to stop it. We like to think we have control over these things, and we laugh at those who are victimized- poor guy, but what was he thinking living out there and not taping his windows and...
...and we know, deep down, that we're powerless. It's the same feeling you get when you hear about terrorism- hey, I wouldn't get on a bus in Jerusalem! I would have tackled the hijacker! I would have... You wouldn't have done anything of the sort, because this stuff happens and you can't prepare, you can't plan, you can't avoid it. If fate is gonna put you in harm's way, you can't do much about it.
Man, that's grim. Sorry.
So for those of you staring down the barrel of Isabel, I wish you all the luck in the world, I really do, and I urge you to take any precautions you can- board up, tape up, move stuff to high ground. But most important, get the hell out of there before the storm hits. Bring the cooler and the boom box with you. You can't control the weather, but you can at least try to get out of the way. That beats earthquakes by a mile.
Share
