Someone needs to tell hurricane Fay that she needs GPS. We never (well, ALMOST never) get hurricanes here in Northeast Florida. Local lore is that it is that cute little tummy tuck up there at the crown of the state just to our north that sends them up to either Georgia or the Carolinas.
I can remember living in Jacksonville during the late '70s when Hurricane David decided to march straight up the coast to give Jacksonville a good shake, rattle and roll. My dad was a general contractor down in the Bahamas, so having experienced some serious hurricanes first hand, I took things very seriously. I hauled plywood from the lumber yard on top of my car and boarded up my brick home. My neighbors stood out in the street and laughed at me.
"Didn't you hear? Hurricane's coming," I yelled over the screech of my circular saw. (Hey, I just said my Dad was a builder! I know how to measure twice and cut once. Besides, I was a starving student and couldn't afford to hire it out. It was tough enough buying the wood. "They had a sale on Spam at the Winn Dixie. I have plenty if y'all need any. (Y'all was one of the first southern exspressions I learned when I moved to America. I liked it then and I like it now.)
So there I sat, hatches battened down, house boarded up, lights on in the middle of the daytime in my now windowless house . . . and my neighbors worked in their yards, washed their cars, watered their lawns, cleaned their windows and laid out by their pools. These people don't take hurricanes very seriously, I thought as I organized my cans of Sterno, spam, tuna, Vienna sausages, and the 36 gallons of water.
I waited. And waited. I finally went out on the patio and threw a couple of steaks on the grill. My neighbor was the professor of something or other at Jacksonville University, and he may have been all of five feet tall. He was a shy man, or so it seemed to a twenty-year old who was going to set the world on fire. Maybe I just scared him by making him wonder if I was in any way truly representative of the future leaders of business and industry. I could hear him speaking to me in whispers from behind the weathered cypress fence we shared: "We don't board up around here unless George boards up." He was such a nice man to quietly tell me the way things worked here, sort of like he was letting me in on the secret.
The George my scholarly neighbor was telling me about is George Winterling. George has been at local TV Channel 4 as the Grand Po-Bah of weather for over forty years. Maybe more. I think George may have invented weather. Or TV. Still, the fact that George wasn't boarding up seemed sort of reckless to me, so I wasn't very impressed by the Grand Po-Bah of weather. George knows weather and he wasn't boarding up? Had George never ridden a hurricane out? I was skeptical that a weather guy wasn't boarding up when all of the models showed the hurricane coming in at Jacksonville.
After all of my preparation, hurricane David stood Jacksonville up. Totally missed us. I think the storm went in down at Daytona and crossed the state, fizzling out somewhere west of Gainesville. We never even had a drop of rain nor the faintest wisp of wind.
Twenty or so years later, in 1999, there was Hurricane Floyd. I remember the date because I had just finished the remodeling of a waterfront condo that I had purchased in a very low area. One foot of rain would put the water table at the second step of my interior staircase. George was boarding up. That was good enough for me. Floyd was a pretty large and powerful storm and unsure of whether the building would make it or not, I decided to load up the munchkins in our motor coach and head off to Tallahassee. Better to be safe than sorry and, after all, George was boarding up.
My neighbors stood out in front of my condo and laughed at me as I loaded one cat, four dogs and a budgie onto the coach. Noah's ark. "Hey, y'all," I called, "Didn't you hear? There's a hurricane coming! Right at us! Even George is boarding up. Y'all heading out? I've got a extra water and a skill saw if you need it. I bought way too much Spam and Harris Teeter had a great sale on corned beef hash. It's the good kind 'cause you don't need a can opener. Y'all help yourselves while I finish loading up."
As I carried the family bible, baby pictures, rare works of art created by seven year old artist, plus my entire Beatles record collection to the coach, one by one my neighbors wandered off to water their pots of posies, take their cars to the gourmet car wash, and plan the community picnic for that evening. The association pressure washed the buildings and washed windows exactly as planned.
I drove out of the community heading west across the flatest, most boring section of road in Florida, wondering if my building would be there when I got back. Not only were people fleeing west from Jacksonville, they were fleeing north and then west from Daytona and I spent ten hours sitting in traffic on I-10 West for a trip to Tallahassee that normally takes me two and half tops. As I sat in my plush captains chair behind the wheel, I looked over at I-10 East and saw two empty lanes of black top headed in the wrong direction. What a waste of road. As I inched past every on ramp to I-10 East, a sheriff or HWP vehicle blocked anyone from getting on to head back toward Jacksonville. Why didn't they get the west bound interstate using the wasy bound lanes? We sat. And sat. One by one the carcasses of cars were pushed to the sides of the highway as they ran out of gas or overheated. This coach gets seven miles per gallon, I pondered, so how much fuel by the hour? Should you cut the generator and save the fuel? By the time I made it to Tallahassee, all of the campgrounds were full, so I drove on to Panama City Beach. Having never been there and so close . . . it seemed perfectly logical to me.
From the comfort of my spot at the Panama RV Resort, I sat and listened to the weather report. Floyd totally missed Jacksonville. I think that Floyd came blowing up the coast, dartied in and spit at us. I know because I felt a drop on my arm. All the way over in Panama City Beach. Didn't Floyd know that even George had boarded up? Where was Floyds GPS? By the time I made it to Lake City a week later, located halfway between Jacksonville and Tallahassee, there were T-shirts for sale at every gas station that read: Floyd the Barber, A Close Shave. For those of you too young to recognize Floyd the Barber . . . go ask someone over 50.
Having lived for many years down in the Caribbean on an island that today seems smaller than the property my current home sits on, we were used to a good blow or two each year. It simply wasn't summer unless we went through the drill of battening down the hatches, boarding up the windows, securing the boat, and stocking up with canned goods that I wouldn't normally eat on a bet. Our island was the size of a pea on a football field. Even if the hurricane gave us wide berth, chances were that some part of it snagged our little island and shook the coconuts out of the trees for us. Often, we wouldn't have power restored for weeks.
I have a great respect for the damage a hurricane can cause. I've rode out far too many not to fully understand what a hurricane can do. The one advantage that we have with a hurricane is that we can prepare. So, if you are reading this and you hear that hurricane Fay is headed your way, please don't blow it off. Follow the hurricane preparedness guidelines and secure your homes, family and pets.
In the meantime, I am going to head up to Publix and grab a few cans of Spam to tide of us over. Oh, and I am going to check with George and see if he is boarding up. I don't want my neighbors laughing at me.
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