…The town
feels sick: an arbitrary thing
this dragging down Hard to blame
the lake the graceful boat … Though no one’s fault
it stings us like a slap
across the face from someone
we trusted…
When we were young and hurricanes approached, Jeanne and I would say, “Let’s stay and go down with the house,” on which we had invested so much work, and loved with the sin of pride. But in 1985 when Elena approached as a Category 2 hurricane, and the wind was picking up, a police car rolled by with megaphone braying “Mandatory Evacuation NOW!” and we and our daughter Gretchen bolted to our appointed shelter, Lakewood High School, spending an uncomfortable and unnecessary night, as Elena moved westward.
Now, in old age, we really did mean it when word of Irma began to spread. This was not our brightest idea, but we felt, simply, too tired to move. Of course we’ve talked about “the end,” and how we’d like to go; and going down in a storm with our house sounds better than long stretches in hospitals or nursing homes while incipient Alzheimer’s — its hour come round at last — slouches toward our brains like a hungry slug.
One thing: If we, in our mid-80s, went out with Irma, no one could say, “O poor Jeanne and Peter, taken from us before their prime!” We vacillated during the long run-up to Irma’s arrival, which seemed to go on forever, like an American presidential election, with the predictions regarding Tampa Bay almost equally unreliable and, in the end, wrong. We recognize the difficulty of this task, and the storm’s great width made every prediction ambiguous. But after a while, as Irma chewed up the islands of Barbuda, Antigua, St. Martins and others on the way to Cuba, we were caught between apprehension and boredom, as the forecasts went all over the place. In the early stages we were encouraged when they thought the eye was going up Florida’s east coast, and in St. Pete only the “A” areas were mandated to evacuate. Then suddenly they saw it was going up the west coast, and there was Tampa Bay right at the bull’s-eye spot. But by the time Governor Scott ordered our “B” area to evacuate, our decision had hardened, so we stayed in our house.
As Sunday was getting dark, the winds arrived, and our rain-soaked oak limbs began crashing down. We went to bed in the midst of much noise, expecting to wake up and see the worst, if we could see anything. Instead, of course, Irma had swerved east of Tampa; we awakened to an eerie quiet, our yard trashed like a war zone — but Irma had passed, we were fine, and we still had electricity.
Irma was a disaster, but most of us in the Tampa Bay area were very lucky: It could have been much worse. Still, these recent alphabetically linked attacks — Harvey, Irma, Jose — shouldn’t surprise us. This is the pattern predicted by scientists: Global warming means warmer weather bringing warmer water fostering stronger storms. But our leaders are natural disasters themselves: President Trump wants to pull out of the International Paris Accord; his appointed Environmental Protection Agency administrator Scott Pruitt doesn’t want to talk about global warming; the governors and senators of the two most battered states, Texas (Gregg Abbott and Ted Cruz) and Florida (Rick Scott and Marco Rubio) are obtuse hypocrites who don’t know their HIJs, and I wonder about their ABCs. Here in shallow-rooted Florida, soon there will be nothing left to do but follow their advice: Let us pray.
…Subdued in church we sing
‘Morning Has Broken’ ashamed
that we can sing at all
that in a world so easy to slip
from we remain not only not undone
but healthy strong and prospering
by ducking water wind and flame
though faintly from afar atonement calls
—Both quotes from “The Storm” by Peter Meinke, in Lucky Bones, (U. of Pittsburgh Press, 2014). This poem is “about” an unexpected storm that drowned several people sailing on Lake Norman, NC, in 1989.
This article appears in Sep 21-28, 2017.