Some days are diamonds, some days are stones.—John Denver
The weather is here. Wish you were beautiful.—G.S. Jackson
The Dragon Strikes
One thing about hurricanes. You have a hell of a long time to prepare for them. People in harsher climes are not so fortunate. Earthquakes pop up uninvited at the drop of a hat, often at inconvenient hours, burying their victims in rubble. Floods suddenly appear as if from nowhere, sweeping granny-ladies in their nice SUVs down the avenue. Tornadoes materialize out of thin air, or maybe it’s thick air, turning the Grange headquarters into toothpicks. I know about these things. I’ve been around.
One fine 1969 day in sunny Stillwater, Oklahoma, my old pal Jim Lavendusky burst into the off-Broadway fraternity I was pledging and made a solemn declaration. We knew there was danger afoot for there was fear in Jim’s eyes. “It’s comin’ the tornaduh!” he announced, petrified. “Everybody get your butts to the storm cellar.” They have storm cellars in Oklahoma because this kind of stuff happens all the time. The natives have a certain reverence for the tornadoes, a respect born of terror, a deference to their whirling might which requires immediate submission and a rush to the cellars. Perhaps the proud tornadoes will take note of their homage and back off. If not, well, at least everybody is in the storm cellars. Three of us uninitiated dimwits from the North—myself, Joe Alexander and John Muscato, both from upstate New York—scoffed at this utter subservience and went out in the front yard to witness the goings-on. Shortly, the twisters disintegrated and the all-clear sirens sounded, dispatching Lavendusky and his pals from the basement. The three of us laughed at such pantywaist storms and regaled the sullen Okies with tales of he-man weather in our neck of the woods—fearsome nor’easters and violent blizzards. We weren’t laughing a couple of weeks later, though, when we drove to the nearby town of Sapulpa, still in ruins from a recent whirlwind. All things considered, we’ll take the hurricanes.
So now we wait, generators poised as the lights dim now and then, perhaps the victims of an errant tree branch prodded by bullying winds onto a nearby electric line. Forest Gump would have thought hurricanes were like a box of chocolates—you never know what you will get. The people on the coast, of course, will receive by far the worst of it, little to impede the galloping storm a mere forty miles offshore. Fairfield, on the other hand, is another seventy miles inland, as the crow flies, and the potential effects are unknowable. Unfortunates in the path of the eye of the storm are not to be envied. The mortal fear created by a hurricane at the height of its powers, its screaming winds and blinding rain, is impossible to overstate. The noise builds to an awful crescendo, an unearthly din humans rarely experience and we are positive something apocryphal is about to happen. Sometimes it does. Sometimes The Fates intervene and stay the disaster. But with hurricanes, at least we get a warning, a time to prepare, to escape or hunker down. We are writing this section on Friday, the day Hurricane Matthew slides up the Florida coast and does its worst. We are in no grave danger and in no position to describe the worst of the storm but we decided to keep a little journal of the afternoon so those of you new to the ways of hurricanes will get a better sense of what it’s like out here on the periphery.
A Diary
11:00 a.m., Friday, October 7—Modest rainfall, slight increase in winds in the last hour. Minute Mart and Post Office open, adhering to the pledge that “neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” I asked the local postmistress about this. She said the oath doesn’t include flooding or situations where the power goes out. But what if there are no customers for seven boring hours? “I brought a little book,” she said, holding up War And Peace.
12:00 p.m--The Reptilian Vaudevillian, governor Rick Scott, is at it again, grabbing every microphone in the vicinity to self-publicize as much as possible. Governors everywhere love these hurricane opportunities and all the free air time they provide. Scott is now terrifying coastal residents and mobile home occupants by advising them to relocate pronto since all their trailers will inevitably be shredded to smithereens, leaving them dead in the bargain. Geez. Whatever happened to a gentle nudge?
1:00 p.m.—Modest increase in wind speed, some rain in squalls. Storm appears to be one hour from arriving directly East of Fairfield. ABC’s primo weather girl, Ginger Zuidgeest, has been hopping up and down on the beach telling everyone she’s “really scared” of what the storm will bring. Calm down, Ginger. The eye, which savaged Haiti, is forty miles offshore and is only thirty miles wide. The winds diminish rapidly outside the eye. So far, most of the damage has been from storm surge. Nobody dead yet and no spaghettied mobile homes.
2:00 p.m.—Is this it? Is this all ya got, Matthew? We’ve seen meaner hombres at the petting zoo. Petite little Hermine delivered more gusto, for crying out loud. Where’s the Vaudevillian Reptilian? He didn’t show up for his hourly rant. Must be out helping with the body bags. Can we at least get a brownout to scare us a little bit?
3:00 p.m.---Horses all fed. They wanted to know what the big deal was. “We race in worse weather than this,” one of them mentioned. Orlando TV reporters, who have been predicting doom for two days, are scurrying around to get video of the one downed tree they can locate. A few minutes ago, people from two of the three networks were broadcasting from the same tree.
4:00 p.m.---Obviously, storm surge is the most damaging component of this storm. St. Augustine is flooded , as usual, also Jacksonville Beach. TV footage from Flagler Beach shows A1A crumbling and impassable. Anyone who has driven that road knows there is a considerable dropoff from the highway to the sea, so the extent of the damage is surprising.
5:00 p.m.---We’re going to call it a day from our Hurricane Headquarters at Weather Central high in the hills of friendly Fairfield, Florida, content in the knowledge we’ve provided the sanest and most reliable information on Hurricane Matthew extant. We’d hoped to provide greater angst, more excitement, better thrills and chills, but you’re only as good as your material and ours was wobbly and indecisive. Whatever happened to the good old days when women were women and men were men and hurricanes were surly brutes which came gallumphing through the underbrush to scare the wits out of everyone? Whatever happened to trees down everywhere and blocked highways and no electricity for days and mercy showers at the homes of generator-driven friends? Try to remember the kind of September when storms were grand and winds did bellow….try to remember, and if you remember, then follow….follow, follow, follow….
Twelve Years Ago—The Double Whammy
In 2004, Mother Nature was into steroids, like everyone else. The ‘04 Hurricane Season featured six (count ‘em—6) blowhards which reached at least Category 3 intensity and the year also spawned the most major hurricanes of any year since 1964. Florida was nailed by four of them—Charley, Frances, Ivan and Jeanne—and our neck of the woods was clobbered by the first two.
The benignly named Hurricane Charley was anything but. Originally scheduled to make landfall at Tampa and bobble up the coast, Charley abruptly changed plans, taking a hard right and charging directly up the aorta of Central Florida. At the time, the storm was the strongest to hit the United States since 1992 with winds at its peak hitting 150 mph. Locally, people were instructed to evacuate mobile homes and most of them did, including Ocala horse-trainer Steve Gaffalione and his family, who moved into what is now the Pathogenes building adjoining our house. The Gaffaliones included wife Shannon, daughter Cheyenne and son Tyler, then but a wee lad but eventually the 2015 Eclipse Award-winning Apprentice Jockey of the Year.
With no electricity, Siobhan cooked a dinner or two half-buried in the ground, ala the luau cooks of Hawaii. The winds blew down a large water oak smack onto the roof of our hay shed about two minutes after Siobhan had emerged from it. Trees also took out paddock fences leaving a gap for potential equine escape, a dilemma the group of us rectified by dragging fallen limbs over to block the void, all this in a driving rain. For horses used to being stalled, keeping them enclosed is often the correct option. For horses who come in only to eat, sudden 24-hour confinement can be confusing and even terrifying in the face of hurricane winds. The power was out at our place for a week but water was readily available for the horses in newly-formed ponds everywhere. The downtowns and the Interstate oases were the first to regain power, thus restaurant availability. It was a good time to have gym membership and access to showers. Utility restoration was spotty and neighbors who had power restored early became very popular with the great unwashed. Siobhan phoned our neighbor Gerry Theisen, one of the first to be hooked up, and was invited over for bathroom privileges. “When are you coming?” asked the friendly benefactor. “I’m on your front porch,” answered Siobhan.
Three weeks later, Hurricane Frances crawled slowly across the Atlantic and smashed into Fort Pierce at the clever hour of midnight. Frances was a giant, stretching almost from Cuba to Georgia, and she delivered 15 inches of rain to Brevard and Volusia counties and another 10 inches to us. The destruction was widespread with many roofs which had withstood Charley blown to oblivion, beaches savaged and thousands of homes compromised or destroyed. The Kennedy Space Center sustained millions in damage and the Vehicle Assembly Building was ripped open. Incredibly, the power loss in Marion County was only a day or two for most people, probably because Hurricane Charley had earlier disposed of vulnerable trees.
The back-to-back storms devastated the state. Traveling on the Florida Turnpike to Miami for our regular visits to Calder Race Course, it seemed like every other house was covered by a blue tarpaulin. The tote board at the track had been flattened and most barn roofs were in some stage of disrepair if they were there at all. The numbers of pine trees snapped off at the neck were uncountable. By the time Hurricane Jeanne showed up three weeks after Frances, there was nothing left to wreck. Worried about a stormy future, many Florida residents migrated elsewhere while people considering moving to the Windy State put their plans on hold. For a couple of unlikely years, more people left Florida than moved here. Ultimately, Maya, god of wind and storm, looked down and took pity on the woeful state of affairs. “Okay,” decided the eccentric deity, “That’s enough punishment for Gooberland. Let’s head west and light up some Californians.” Ever since, it’s been peace and quiet. But every August, the citizens of Paradise peer warily over the Atlantic, looking for brewing storms, waiting for signs of trouble, nervous in their good fortune. This year, it was just a tickle. Next time it could be the tornaduh.
They can’t spell, either.
Or Was It Hurricane Dick?
Earlier this year, Florida’s Gulf Coast was pestered by Hurricane Hermine, with sustained winds of 80 mph. While forecasters warned that Hermine, the first hurricane to strike Florida since 2005, could bring anywhere from six to nine inches of rain, many Facebook weather watchers were more concerned that the storm looked incredibly like a penis. “I’m no weatherman,” wrote Peter Rivera in the top comment on WJXT’s Facebook page, “but you can expect a few inches tonight.”
Sara Knapp immediately replied “My ex lives right there at the tip. Coincidence? “I think not.” After that, it was off to the races. Kyle Baker asked “Should we consult someone if it lasts over four hours?” James Lash said “I just hope this storm doesn’t hit too hard and isn’t too long. And let’s hope it goes limp after landfall.” Theresa Johnson complained “Hurricanes are just like men. Exciting at first but in the end you’re wet, frustrated and searching for batteries.” Alan Mayeur was worried. “Hope this doesn’t hit the navy base—there will be seamen spread everywhere.”
In the end, the thread garnered 75,000 comments, many of them hilarious. Who says Floridians have no sense of humor? First, we elect Marco Rubio, then Rick Scott and now there’s this. Keep on the sunny side. Shelter from the storm.
That’s all, folks….
