Let's guess what the five things are. I bet they're regular hurricane things.
1) High winds topple trees and cause other injuries
2) High water levels flood roads and lower areas. Roads flood.
3) Electrical wires get knocked down. People experience loss of electricity
4) Rush on groceries cause shortages.
Um. I need one more.
5) People underestimate the danger and hang in instead of relocating. People die of exposure and being battered and drowned.
That's all I got.
Back to the article.
The first few paragraphs are the usual stuff as if the reader is new to planet Earth and is hearing about tropical storms for the first time .
Along much of Florida’s east coast, as the storm approached, shoppers rushed to stock up on food and emergency supplies at supermarkets and hardware stores and picked the shelves clean of bottled water. Lines formed at service stations as motorists topped off their tanks and filled gasoline cans.Oh. This is happening in Florida. Oh. people buy groceries, water, and fuel.
I wouldn't do that. Because my truck's gas tank is already full and I have no intention of going anywhere, and because I just went shopping. My pantry is full and so is the freezer and refrigerator. I have an excellent water filter and tons of bottles and jars.
About that. It's been a month since I've been shopping. That means I haven't been using the juicer. It just sat there this whole time. What a waste. I really need to fill the 4 bins in the refrigerator with things I can juice.
So I made a point to stop at Whole Foods after the hospital. And I was reminded again how gorgeous and how gracious the people are there. Workers and customers alike. Without exception, everyone I engaged was responsive. It's actually a lot of fun. I learned that I get genuine sourdough bread, not the fake-o sourdough bread at the regular grocery. I got a lot of fresh vegetables and lot of fresh fruit, quite a lot of fresh fish, meat, and deli. I've been enjoying the heck out of it.
Apparently I went a bit overboard. The cost was over $200.00. I knew it would be a lot but I didn't know it would be that much. Still, it's all great stuff and it's all things that I cannot get at the regular stores.
I did not get milk and I did not get eggs. So I would make a rush to the grocery for those. I can get those by walking across the street.
Back to the article.
1) It's forecast to strengthen to category 4. A lot more words at the article and this threatening photograph. You can see Cuba and the outline of Florida.
I'm always tempted to photoshop a wire whisk into the picture. But this is a serious blog.
Or even Virginia or Maryland or Delaware or New Jersey or New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island or Massachusetts, New Hampshire or Maine. It's all a wild guess but historic probabilities project it on Florida.
3) There's a risk of life-threatening storm surge.
Right. It wouldn't be much of a storm with that.
4) It could make a second landfall.
5) South Florida is already sodden from an extremely wet August.
Florida is wetlands afterall.
My dad used to get offers to buy land in Florida all the time. He joked that the whole state is a swamp.
Actually, he wasn't that great of a real estate investor. Investments in real estate worked out well for him but not because he was an astute investor. Rather, simply because he bothered to buy it.
But I'd like to tell you an entirely different story.
I have a few typhoon stories to tell you and a few hurricane stories too.
This one happened in daytime while at school. It probably wasn't that bad of a storm.
The school was called Narimasu and it was on the Grant Heights AFB in Tokyo. Duckduck.go images are veritably useless. They show everything but the school. The websites are better because the picture files are not named Narimasu so they don't show in images. Looking at one I see a paragraph "Puff the Magic Dragon" and I'm cast back to first weeks of school there and singing that song everyday right off. But that was at Tachikawa, not at Grant Heights. And I thought "sealing wax" was "ceiling wax" and just couldn't form a good visual image of that. It's a stupid song. And the teacher strummed one of those ridiculous instruments. A zither.
Ew, I hate those stupid zithers to pieces.
They're not even an instrument.
The school was huge but not big enough. To meet overload enrollment they build four or five quonset huts to accommodate overflow. These are the sturdier kind. They were actually all over the place. I hated those things too because they're obviously temporary huts, although rather sturdy, and passed off as permanent. This was my third 5th grade class and I hated that too.
I hated everything.
I was super critical of everything. I was a super critical little shit. Like an old man in a boy's body. And nothing could be done to improve me. Except age even more.
Our teacher was a French national.
So. Right there. We've got a problem.
His attitude was that American schools were behind everyone else. He pushed us. He was the man who identified my lisp. My parents didn't identify it and neither did the previous teachers. Nobody had time to correct that. So then, that late in development, I was told to attend a speech therapy class.
Yay!
I got out of his class once a week and went to another that was friendlier than his. He was a hard-ass. The therapist was not. There was only one other boy in the class who pronounced his "r" sound incorrectly. What a dummkopf.
He had to say:
I'm a little teapot shoRt and stout.
HeRe's my handle and heRe's my spout.
Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
And I had to say:
I'm a little teapot Short and Stout.
Here'S my handle and here'S my spout.
Shut up. It's not funny.
So one day we were sitting in the regular 5th grade quonset hut and the French national teacher began describing how typhoons work. Apparently he knew a typhoon was coming. He drew a large circle on the blackboard. Then another large circle the same size right next to it. Then another circle, then another and another, connected as a metal spring, so that he drew a line of large circles across the whole thing to describe how a storm moves across water and land.
We looked outside the small square quonset hut windows and saw in the yard a small sapling supported to grow straight up with cables to metal pegs sunk into the ground. The servicemen were very good at that sort of thing. The wind was so high that the tree bent hard to left. The young tree trunk veritably bent 90° above the ring with the wire supports. The wires kept the base of the tree straight. We were all amazed that the tree didn't break.
Because I think I did.
Stop me if you heard this already.
Finally, the wind stopped and the whole class was relived. That quonset hut that held only one class didn't seem all that secure. We'd rather be inside the large brick school. But there we were in that metal tunnel instead. I didn't like it. And neither did the other kids. And neither did the French guy. It was no place to be in a storm like that. But finally it was ended to our collective relief.
The teacher said, "Hold on. Not so fast. We're only half done."
And the whole class was all, "What?"
The teacher told us this calm that we're feeling is the eye of the storm. He referred back to his drawing. He told us we were smack inside the center of a very broad storm. Further, when the wind comes back it will be even stronger and the wind will blow in the opposite direction. His drawing on the blackboard shows this. We were in the center, not along the edge.
How did he know that?
The whole class was dismayed and strangely fascinated at the same time.
The teacher told us the tree outside will bend the opposite direction as proof that we are inside the eye of the storm.
Fascinating. Sick. Terribly interesting. Horrible. Incredible. Dangerous. Wonderful. Scary.
Son of a bitch these storms are amazing.
The wind resumed slowly at first, then quickly became even more terrible and frightening. We were all pissing our pants.
It's a simile ah'ight? We were scared. Ten-year-old children scared out of our wits. And nothing to do but sit it all out and learn how typhoons develop and die, and further, what the difference is between a typhoon and a hurricane. Tuns out to be no difference at all except the places on Earth where they form. With winds that lead in different directions. Generally, but not always. So we were taught.
Sure enough, the tree bent the opposite direction. And we were so well pleased that our teacher is a genius! He could actually predict the tree will bend dramatically the opposite directions.
We could not imagine a tree bending that much. Far less it bending in opposite directions.
Is that awesome, or what?
See, all this has vital importance to a boy who wants typhoon level winds to fly his kite. The box kite I made was a bit clumsy and it required a lot of wind. So when I'm out there next time I'll remember the direction will change. So be ready for that.
When that chance came in short order I was out there in the central area with my box kite and my dad came pounding toward me while still in his uniform. He is a storm within a storm. And let me assure there is nothing scarier than that. No storm compares in frightfulness to my dad pounding toward me and grabbing my arm and pulling me back into the direction of the house. The kite gone. Just like that.
As it turned out, that second typhoon was much worse than the first. That night we kids were truly terrified. We heard trees uprooted, the wind howling, and wood pounding, and the house being torn apart.
The next day my dad and I walked around surveying the damage. He told me to look at a red ceramic roof shingle dug into the ground. He told me to pull it out. I tugged and tugged and tugged hard as I could and the tile wouldn't budge. "That tile could have hit you in your head and killed you. That's why these storms are nothing to play around in."
In my defense, I had enough sense to come in when the wind got really bad. I was out there only when the storm started. It lasted all night.
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