I’m not sending anyone back in Europe a ‘wish you were here’ postcard from my summer vacation this year, although they can be found at nearly every convenience store and gas station around here. In fact, I’m getting a lot of texts from friends in Luxembourg saying that they wished I wasn’t here, because I’m in Melbourne, Florida, and this area may or may not be in the direct path of a category five hurricane.
How forecasters track Hurricane DorianForecasts now show it veering off the coast a ways, which will greatly reduce the impact, but hurricanes are as indecisive as I am. To give you some idea – it take me about a half an hour to make up my mind when I’m confronted with a restaurant menu, and even when I’ve decided, I usually end up wishing I’d ordered what other people had ordered instead.
So we’re not high-fiving down here and celebrating just yet because the storm could change its mind again and order a side of Cocoa Beach just as well as it could opt for Charleston, and in any case, missing the brunt of a devastating hurricane doesn’t mean we’ll get an ‘get out of Dorian free’ card. In fact, we’ve been paying the price for this approaching storm all week, which is maybe something landlocked people in Luxembourg might not realise. When the forecasts start showing a major storm building up and headed your way, you can’t just sit around and watch the Weather Channel – you have to do something. When the storm’s a few days off, a lot of people run to Walmart for batteries, flashlights and water, and a lot of people run, period. You either get ready or you get ready to go.
Dorian was first expected to hit this area over the weekend and has been pushed back now to early Tuesday. Already by Wednesday of last week, stores were running out of bottled water and bread, although if you are okay riding out a major storm drinking Dr Pepper and subsisting on Cheese-its and M&Ms you are still in pretty good shape. At the check-out, where I had a few plastic pails, a dozen cans of beans and the biggest size jar of peanut butter I could find, I saw a guy with a huge cartload loaded with nothing but cases of Budweiser. The cashier and I agreed it would be way more fun to hang out at his house when things got rough. Who needs a can of beans when the wind’s about to rip off your roof – a can of beer (or preferably your third or fourth) is going to do so much more for your peace of mind.
The brewing storm may or may not have a huge impact on the coast, but it’s definitely impacted our stay here. Instead of driving back and forth to the beach and going wherever we want, we have to limit our excursions to save petrol. It isn’t just that gas will run out, it’s that in a power outage, the pumps don’t work, so you can’t fill up even if there were something to fill up with. So there’s that. And we were supposed to have gone to a seafood buffet on Friday night with my parents – my 17 and 20 year old sons can do hurricane-force damage on a platter of crab legs and I love not having to deal with a menu selection – but that long-anticipated event my parents had booked for us weeks ago was cancelled. Lots of things are cancelled – even church, but I think people are making up for it around here by saying a lot more prayers than they usually do.
‘Catastrophic’ Dorian strikes Bahamas with full furyWhat we can eat, and what we have to eat, is everything in the freezer. This too, is part of hurricane preparedness you might not think about if you’re not from around here. So instead of eating crab legs and all-you-can-eat lobster, instead of visiting our favorite pizzeria down the street, we’re eating the salmon, the hamburger patties and the little dabs of leftovers my mom put in the freezer over the past few weeks. But we’ve also had to help get rid of the three tubs of ice cream my mom bought before we came, and I’ve had to chip in and eat my weight in premium butter pecan. And speaking of weight, I overheard someone say that she’d already gained five pounds eating her hurricane snacks prematurely.
Despite the imminent threat, the boys and I drove out to the beach on Friday and Saturday, trying to catch some waves and sun before the dark clouds roll in. Friday the waves were great for boogie-boarding – I was whooping and hollering and laughing my head off, feeling like I was hanging ten on 10 footers instead of splashing around in shallow water where I could actually touch the ground.
Saturday the red warning flag was flying, so I asked the lifeguard why. Rough water and high risk of rip currents. As long as no one had spotted sharks, I was up for a swim, but I ditched the board and just body-surfed in full view of the lifeguard’s hut. I played a long game of human punching bag, standing, getting knocked down, standing, getting knocked down. Once home, I realised the game had turned me into a human sand bag – I had taken half the beach back home in my swimsuit. Showering off, I noticed a disturbing dark spot around my navel and my mind raced at gust-like speed to the ‘flesh eating bacteria’ that have also been in the news here in Florida. Then I remembered I’d just been punched by a six foot wave, so that was one less major catastrophe to worry about.
Actually, I am not really all that worried about our safety right now, although it is a little unnerving to be shut up in a house darkened by hurricane shutters. We left a few windows open for light and a view, but those are going to be boarded up Monday morning, and the sky will cloud over too and the winds will come. The winds are already starting to sing, lightly and we all got ‘hurricane watch’ warnings on our phones this afternoon, so it’s starting to feel real now. Part of me is indeed scared, a little. If it truly is as bad as it could be, we are in serious trouble. But the forecasts don’t seem to be that dire for Central Florida now, and I think in a way, we’ll be a little disappointed if we only get a few days of rain like we get back home in Luxembourg after spending our vacation buying beans and peanut butter, filling up pails with water, doing all the laundry, putting up shutters, eating up the contents of my mother’s freezer and obsessing over the updates on the Weather Channel.
So for once, I actually know what I want to order off the menu. What I’d like is two solid days of howling winds and a downpour worthy of the name, during which we have a few hours when the power goes off and we get to huddle around listening to the broadband radio and eating our trail mix and doing puzzles. I want a decent, respectable-sized storm, where palm trees sway and the rain on the skylight sounds like Alex Van Halen doing a drum solo and we all feel a little nervous but not downright scared, and where we continue to have air conditioning and flushing toilets. I don’t want any trees falling down or any flooding and most definitely I do not want any snakes or alligators coming out and crawling around in the streets and gutters post-storm. What I want, I guess, is something like a hurricane on birth control – all of fun and none of the consequences. But now that my mind’s made up, I’m not even sure that’s on the menu!
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Local journalist and ARA radio show host Wendy Winn sent in this personal account of preparing for Hurricane Dorian - she and her sons picked a rather inopportune time to visit her parents in Melbourne, Florida. They are bracing for the worst and hoping for the best, and will keep us posted if they have still have a roof over their heads and internet connection. Since writing this piece, the indecisive journalist said she changed her mind again - she’d be happy if the next few days were blissfully uneventful!
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