Tropical storm Edouard arrived days ago providing a gentle reminder for each of us to assess our current plans and supplies. It’s something the experts say we should have already done, but by watching the news I’m led to believe many of our brethren wait for an imminent threat.
It also reminded me of one of the biggest things I despise about life in a coastal region: hurricane season. Humidity ranks closely as it affords me one bad hair day after another. Shallow, I know, but it affects my life with far more frequency than the storms.
Like many others, I’m completely stressed by things I can’t control. It’s difficult to wrap one’s mind around killer forces threatening cherished people and things. Worse, impending weather events between June and November tend to spawn storms of a different variety on my home front.
I want to be prepared to weather a category 5+ storm and the aftermath, while dear-husband Jeff feels such preparations are overkill fueled by media hype. Intellectually I know a direct hit from a cat 5 (that’s weather-speak) would wipe out everything, but I’ve got what we need to survive on the roof surrounded by rapid water and critters until we’re rescued and admonished for not getting the heck out of here.
In my defense, I was a resident of Baytown in ’83 when Alicia hit. The storm itself isn’t etched in my memory, but the aftermath is. Having been born into the luxuries of air conditioning and indoor plumbing, spending an entire month without electricity and water was rough on this girl.
On my storm-tracking chart, coordinates place Jeff dangerously close to nonchalance. In his defense, he’s not a native Texan, and doesn’t have what I would consider healthy fear and sense of urgency in avoiding last-minute preparations. He’s from tornado country, where there was little advance warning of impending disaster. Flying by the seat of one’s pants while assuming the crash position of kissing your hiney good-bye was about all that could be done in the seconds before a strike.
Here, we generally have several days notice, and I get into trouble when I want to discuss potential evacuation departure days out. Irritates the fire out of him, and his irritation is doubly irritating to me.
The whole Rita evacuation debacle did scoot him somewhat towards seeing things my way as we spent 31 hours on the road, got no further than Livingston, and were forced by fuel constraints to return home to ride out the storm.
Although losing electricity for a week was a bit uncomfortable, it was a shining moment for me. We had everything we needed, and came out on the other side feeling like we’d been on a family camping trip.
Still, when there’s trouble brewing in the Gulf, I can with 100% accuracy predict at least a cat 1 striking our marriage. Given how we weathered Edouard, I’d say Jeff’s done some predicting of his own. His newly-crafted emergency plan calls for removing himself from the path of a storm. He avoided me like the plague last week.
© 2008 Natalie Whatley
Tags: coastal living, hurricane season, weathering marital storms