Waiting for Earl

For over half my life now I've lived in close proximity to the ocean and in areas prone to be pummeled by hurricanes. It is always an interesting phenomenon when a hurricane threatens because, of course, you often don't know until it's too late whether it is going to be a bad one or not. I remember my first hurricane in Houston. I forget the name of it but we got warned for days that it was going to be a bad one. Having no experience in these matters I took all the warnings seriously and stocked up on water and food and taped windows and did everything I was supposed to do.

Nothing happened. I mean absolutely nothing. We didn't even get rain. Somehow the hurricane took a turn before it made landfall and went elsewhere and left me with taped up windows and tons of food and water.

For a couple of years nothing much in the way of storms happened and then came Hurricane Alicia. I'll never forget that one. It hit directly downtown Houston and, while it was a couple days until I got back downtown, it looked like a war zone. Colored glass was piled knee-deep in Louisiana Street and beds were hanging out of the broken out windows of the Sheraton Hotel behind the HNG Building where I worked. It was a nightmare that hit during the night with a roar like a freight train going overhead. The flat I lived in faced a courtyard and when the light finally dawned the pool was full of lawn furniture and two enormous weeping willow trees that had uprooted and landed in the pool.

Eventually I moved North and was living in Marblehead when Hurricane Bob hit which didn't much effect the house I was living in but then a couple months later the infamous Halloween storm, a.k.a. The Perfect Storm arrived and I'll never forget that night. I was living in a house on the ocean and that night the house shook so hard that the water sloshed out of the toilets and by morning you couldn't see outside because all the windows were completely plastered with the fallen autumn leaves.

I was living here in Gloucester when the two most brutal hurricanes in memory hit. Katrina beat the crap out of my much loved New Orelans and Ike (the bastard) destroyed Galveston's Balinese Room, one of my favorite places. Alas.

So, here we are with Earl moving up the coast. It has been brutally hot and humid here for several days and I keep watching the weather maps. It's hard to say. The Hurricane is losing strength but is still strong enough to be pretty awful but it is gorgeous here now. I have to go out to a meeting in a few minutes and I keep checking the weather maps on the internet like that will somehow make a difference. But I remember these hot humid days that preceded the other devastating storms.

Wherever you live the natural world has something to say about it. Tornadoes, hurricanes, blizzards, forest fires, mud slides, sinkholes --- you can't be safe from them all. So you live where you are happiest and hope for the best. If the weekend goes well it will be almost fall when it is over and I love fall. And if the hurricane beats us up – well, it will pass and it will still be fall when its over. And I'll have another story to tell.

Thanks for reading.