Living Dangerously

I was just a teenager in high school when I experienced my first Hurricane. The odd thing was, until that day in September, 1975, when Hurricane Eloise hit Ozark, Alabama I didn’t realize how often I would soon be involved in worrying about this fairly common natural phenomena.

They say that hurricane activity runs in cycles, and the first 16 years of my life had been lived in what is currently described as a lull in hurricane formation—1968’s monster Hurricane Cammile that struck Mississippi being the rather spectacular singular exception.

The Southern Atlantic and Gulf Coasts of the United States are known to bear the brunt of the effects of the worldwide hurricane activity almost every year. I think that you will agree, however, that most Americans will trade a nice fat juicy Hurricane Hugo or Hurricane Andrew for the Christmas Tsunami that hit southeastern Asia last year, almost any day.

Hurricane Eloise came knocking on our front door fairly early on that September morning. My father was out of town traveling in New England on business, and my mother and sister and I awoke expecting to begin a normal school day, but instead learned through radio and TV news reports that the storm had unexpectedly shifted its course overnight from a predicted Mobile, Alabama landfall to coming ashore with 110 MPH winds near Panama City, Florida. I hope Dennis doesn’t decide to do the same tonight.

Of course back then there was no Weather Channel and tropical storm forecasting was basically still in its infancy by today’s standards, so we couldn’t blame the local weather guys for missing the details until the last minute.

My memory is that the intensity of the storm built up incrementally, and just when you thought that the wind couldn’t blow any harder and the trees couldn’t bend any farther, the wind blew still harder and the trees simply broke off half way up. In then end, we had over twenty big pine trees down in our yard. Probably half of them started out not standing in our yard, but on the adjacent vacant lot.

My new little Honda Civic had been pounded to death with pine cones and looked like someone had beat it all over with a ball peen hammer. Large pines had just missed our motor home and the Honda—instead laying parallel to each vehicle in some miraculous God-given stroke of fate.

We had half of a big pine tree laying on and sticking through the roof of the house, the power lines to the house were down, and there were two or three dump truck loads of leaves and other organic litter in the yard. When you walked outside, you literally were walking on TOP of piles of pieces of trees.

When the eye of the storm passed over our town, I went outside, over my mother’s objections, and cranked up the chainsaw and started cutting up critical pieces of trees to get a head start on the cleanup. Over the next few days the Alabama National Guard came by and removed the tree from our roof with a boom-truck and some local pulpwood contractors came by to pick up the larger tree trunks. It was a couple of years before things returned to normal at our house, and we lived 120 miles inland from where the storm made landfall.

Since that time, Hurricanes Opal in 1995, Ivan last year, and several other tropical storms and Hurricanes have wrecked havoc on our lives in southern Alabama. Opal beat Eloise by ten or twenty percent in actual impact—particularly since I wasn’t there to help my parents do the clean-up. Last year we dodged a total of five tropical storms and Hurricanes here on St. Simons.

Until I moved to Mexico Beach in 2001, I made a point, every time I visited the beach, to spend a few moments looking out at the shoreline and meditating—realizing that when and if I had the opportunity to return to that location months or years later that it might not be there—or might have been substantially changed by a hurricane. I still think about how easily the landscape around me could change here on St. Simons any day this Hurricane season.

I hope, when it is all said and done this morning, that somehow the minimum damage and effects will be realized by Hurricane Dennis, where ever it decides to come ashore.

Based on what I’m seeing right now, things don’t look too good…