Yesterday it felt like everyone was expecting twins that were due in mid-July, and we were too cumbersome and uncomfortable to actually do anything but wait. Forget about painting the nursery or stocking up on booties and tiny t-shirts. We just wanted to eat Doritos and watch the weather updates.
Here’s one thing I didn’t know before. Waiting for a hurricane to hit is not only terribly exciting, it’s mind-numbingly boring as well. At the same time.
A close relative lives nearby on Merritt Island. I’m not naming names. While most people were evacuating the island, since, like most islands, it is surrounded by water that has a tendency to rise during hurricanes, she’s staying in, taking advantage of the forced imprisonment to get her husband going on the to-do list she’s been writing for him since 1997.
Yesterday afternoon she emailed us a map of the hurricane, showing it hitting Cocoa Beach by Halloween, Jacksonville by Thanksgiving, Charleston by Christmas and Wilmington by New Year’s. This hurricane is slower than 5 p.m. traffic around the Cloche d’Or on a Friday afternoon. It really felt like being nine and a half month’s pregnant. Consumed by lethargy and nervous energy, we couldn’t do much yesterday to distract ourselves – we could barely muster up the energy to make enough microwave popcorn to last until 2021 and keep watch out of the one single window that is not yet boarded up.
The animals are getting anxious and all riled up too. A 7 to 8 foot long rattlesnake stopped traffic yesterday as he made his way across US1. Seriously? When I was making my Hurricane Dorian wish-list, I specifically said NO snakes and NO gators and they’ve already coming out in the open.
A few people came out in the open too. The next door neighbour came over three times - first to stay they were staying put, then to say they were evacuating, then to say they were staying after all. It isn’t that she is as indecisive as I am, it’s that the forecasts changed. One small wobble for a hurricane, one huge difference for mankind. If Dorian comes right to the coastline, this whole area will be devastated. If it stays out a hundred miles east, we’re just in for a couple of days’ downpour. My personal soundtrack played the same Clash song on repeat – do we stay or do we go?
I also kept overhearing TV reports about what the European model said about the situation, and I thought this celebrity cult was really getting out of hand. Already, half the TV reporters here wear such thick fake eyelashes they can only half open their eyes, but really, who cares really what Heidi Klum or Gisele Bundchen think about the hurricane threatening the eastern seaboard? I want to hear from a qualified meteorologist! Turns out, the Europeans experts have devised a more accurate prediction tool – and they don’t even have hurricanes. Yet. I remember thinking I was safe from tornadoes in Luxembourg until this August.
When the evening reports showed the storm veering off the coast, my youngest son high-fived us. ‘We’re going to live!’ we cheered. That’s not something you really celebrate every day, but it might be a good habit to get into.
Reading this, you might wonder why anyone would play roulette with a major storm anyway. Why not just pack up and go immediately when it looks threatening? Well, because these things are unpredictable and numerous. Hurricane season is officially from June to end November, but most storms occur from mid-August to late October, so my family has an annual subscription.
My father spent all of his working career as a weatherman - he regularly flew into typhoons in the nose of an Air Force aircraft in Asia - so he knows a thing or two about storm, but he’s also now 87 years of age with serious health issues. And down here in Florida, he’s in good company – there are a lot of older folks here who traded in their snow mobiles for golf carts – and it isn’t as easy for them to pack up and go as it is for younger people. But younger people tend to be employed or in school, and it’s not easy for them to pack up and leave either. Of course if the forecasts showed that it was still likely Dorian might slam us hard with 200mph winds, I’d be writing this from the lobby of an Economy Inn somewhere in the middle of the state, if they had any rooms left and still had internet.
I’d have driven there this morning looking like a warrior going into battle, because I have a scarf tied tightly around my head. It isn’t because I think it will lend me courage and make me look fierce, it’s because I get migraines when the air pressure changes, and it dropped like a bowling ball down a well due to the storm. A tight scarf, Excedrin and Coca-Cola are my only reliable remedies, and I stocked up just in case. Migraines also make me sick to my stomach, and I can’t really imagine driving my sons and older parents down a crowded highway packed with panicked people, stopping for the occasional rattlesnake and gator, with a barf bag on my lap and the local weather reports blasting doom and gloom from the radio. Even the Taco Bells and the Chic Fil A’s would all be closed – it would have been a real nightmare.
But that scenario is going to stay wadded up in the big trash can in my imagination, because those European models, bless them and their high cheekbones, say that we are only in for a category three hurricane off shore. Last week I would have been nervous about that – now it sounds like we’ve been let off lightly. We’re in for two-days labour, but in a nice clean hospital where everything is expected to go smoothly and we have a private room, rather than out in the jungle on our own, with complications.
Those labour pains have started this morning. The wind is cooing and whistling rather than howling, and the rain has begun, insistently but gently. It will get worse and will stick around until Wednesday evening or maybe Thanksgiving, at the rate it’s been travelling. But we can live with that, emphasis on the ‘we can live’ part. I’m going to go nurse my migraine and watch the Weather Channel (I hope there’s a support group to wean me off it), but I’ll send out the birth announcement later saying just how big this baby turns out to be!
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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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Part 1: I’ll have the hurricane light please, beans on the side, hold the snakes
