Hayseed at the Beach

In August, Miami moves from being the seventh circle of hell to the second. The only reason it isn’t first is because I’m told the heat in hell is a dry heat, not the humid variety that we here in the tropics enjoy. How appropriate that a break from the heat would come in the form of a tropical storm.

We were told to prepare for Tropical Storm/Possibly Hurricane Faye. A newbie to such weather, I obeyed. We brought the lawn furniture inside to the living room (no room in the garage). We dragged in all the potted plants. We cleaned out the garage so we could temporarily park a car in there. In order to extract myself, I had to crawl out the back because our garage isn’t wide enough to both hold the car and allow one to open the door of said vehicle. We dutifully removed anything in our yard that Mother Nature could use as a projectile. Yes, I noticed that none of our neighbors were doing the same. I figured these were the same folks who shrugged at Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma and paid the price.

I volunteered to babysit a few of my daughter’s friends, because although schools closed, Corporate America didn’t see the need. This time Corporate America was right. The eleven year old Florida natives smirked when they saw my lawn chairs piled in the foyer. One gently remarked, “Er, Mrs. Anderson? It’s not even a category one hurricane. We aren’t in the cone. We aren’t even on the dirty side.”

Cone? Dirty side? Well kid, while living in Peoria I didn’t always flee to my basement during tornado warnings. The fact that I survived untouched doesn’t mean that was a wise choice. Of course, the tweens were right. As it turns out, tropical storm and hurricane forecasting is far from an exact science. There are many possible outcomes, the storm may organize itself into a hurricane at anytime, change direction, pick up speed and head straight for my house, only to make a hard left at the last minute, pick up even more speed, and clobber Tampa instead. I could pack up and drive to Orlando in an attempt to avoid the entire mess, only to end up driving directly into the heart of the storm. We have friends who responsibly evacuated Miami during Hurricane Andrew, the only problem was that they fled to Homestead which was unexpectedly flattened.

In this situation, it was hard to know if I was joining the paranoid or just taking sound precautions. I didn’t see anyone else removing lawn ornaments, and yet there were no milk or eggs left at the grocery store. In fact, fearing that power would be lost, the grocery store in our neighborhood closed.

In the end, Faye ended dumping a lot of rain on us. They tell me the rain is badly needed because Miami is suffering from a drought. It’s hard to wrap my brain around that fact with all the moisture in the air. Seriously, if you leave a damp towel outside it will grow spores of mold that very day. Faye’s wind didn’t so much as cause a palm frond to fall, let alone damage a limb or a branch. For a few moments it looked as if our swimming pool might overflow. On the other hand, Cuba and Haiti were not as lucky.

What did I learn from this experience? Better safe than sorry? Paranoia self destroya? When in Rome -or Miami- do as the locals do? Not exactly. Frankly, the only thing I know for sure is that warm rain is very odd.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 20th, 2008 at 11:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.