Wilma

This has been quite a year for chicks with attitude when it comes to storms. In the hours before Katrina it was hard to imagine that she could do the amount of damage that she did. When waiting for Rita to hit, having just watched the devastation by Katrina, it was excruciating and, while she certainly kicked the heck out of certain areas, the areas where my friends lived went virtually untouched.

I called my friend Sharon in Houston a few days after Rita had passed by. She had driven to Dallas with a car full of cats and, being a savvy, life-long Texan, she missed most of the traffic. When she returned home in Houston’s Meyerland a few days later, having waited out the storm at her sister’s home, she was happy to find that her house was just fine and there weren’t even any leaves or branches down worth mentioning.

So now we are waiting for Wilma. I have been checking on the weather sites and playing CNN weather videocasts from time to time and the weather folks are doing their best to get people to get the heck out of the way.

There is a weather guy I hear on the radio every day that I get a chuckle out of. This has been quite a year for him. On the one hand he’s a decent, concerned, compassionate human being and he doesn’t want to see people losing their homes, families and lives BUT, on the other hand, he’s a WEATHER man - weather is his medium. You can imagine that he has spent his entire education and career thinking about the Coming-of-the-Big-One. And this is the year he has been waiting for all his life. Can anybody fault him for that trembling note of excitement that creeps into his voice then he starts talking about millibars and barometric shifts and the intensification of the wind? As storms go this has to be the Pulitzer Prize of weather events. Can you blame a guy for getting fired up?

I suppose that’s the way it always is - in the midst of any natural disaster there has to be some sense of awe at the magnitude, the sheer colossal power of such things. It is why people scale mountains and chase tornados. There is something so awe-inspiring about a thing that has absolutely no interest in our individual, human lives that is really compelling.

Here in Gloucester we know a thing or two about storms. I have been on the beach or down at the fish pier enjoying the sunshine and the beauty of the day only to look up and see something very black and scary creeping into the sky from the horizon. (Photos above and left were taken on an evening this summer from the state fish pier. It was a beautiful evening when I looked up to see the cloud behind City Hall above and within minutes the harbor was churning and the black clouds in the other two photos swept by. The whole event happened in minutes.)

In his book Mark talks about squalls and micro-bursts that came out of nowhere, lasted but a few minutes and moved out to sea in minutes leaving shredded sails, smashed lobster gear, and wrecked boats in its wake. He tells the story of quiet day on the water when he was hauling traps. One got “rocked down”, a term fishermen use for a trap that has become attached to something on the bottom of the ocean and won’t come up. He was half out of the boat, trying to yank the thing free when he looked up to see a “freaker” (fishermen, I have been informed, do NOT like the term “rogue wave”) headed straight at him.

It’s a hell of a story.

So now we wait for Wilma which is headed for Florida nad could well bounce its way up the coast. I have a writer friend who always says “no experience is wasted if you get a good story out of it.”

Oh well.....

Thanks for reading.