No point trying to reason with hurricane season

There’s no taking sides with the weather.

We may root for different football teams, stand on polar ends of the political spectrum and have opposing views on religion, but we all live under the same sun.

Weather is the great common denominator. We drink from the same cup, read from the same page, bail from the same boat. We don’t pull against each other when the weather turns severe. There’s always enough sunshine for everyone.

We don’t make small talk with strangers about the stock market when we’re on an elevator. We chat about the wind picking up and the clouds moving in. Or the crispness of the air. A weather forecast is the universal remote of conversation.

In a doctor’s waiting room one afternoon last week, there was a group of us watching The Weather Channel. We didn’t know each other. We didn’t introduce ourselves. Not one of us mentioned where we lived, what we did for a living or what ailments we might have.

We shared the common thread of an approaching hurricane. Our eyes were fixed on the TV screen, where a monster storm was smashing across the Caribbean. We mumbled out loud, as if we were experts on storm surges. We looked with trepidation at the projected paths of more “spaghetti models” than you will find on the menu at Olive Garden.

In land-locked Middle Georgia, two hours from any measurable ocean breeze, we fear the fury of these gales that rise out of the sea.

We have our own history with them. They don’t automatically brake when they hit the coast. They still have enough legs to hammer us with wind and water. Evacuees come here in search of higher, drier, safer ground.

They fill our motel beds and crowd our restaurants. We embrace our guests, like gracious hosts, giving them shelter from the storm. But we often must prepare ourselves for the inclement backlash of the storm that somehow has followed them.

In the tornado alleys of the Deep South, we have learned never to take our eyes off the sky. Twisters can jump on us like a rattlesnake, suddenly and unexpectedly.

By contrast, hurricanes carry upgraded hype and high drama. They are giant, aquatic anxiety attacks, with no predictable GPS system. It’s a guessing game.

We don’t give twisters names like Rudolph, Dorothy or Wendy. They come and go too swiftly. Floods, droughts and ice storms apparently aren’t name-worthy, either.

But we do give personalities to hurricanes, and their little sister and brother tropical storms. The 2017 season already has brought Arlene, Bret, Cindy, Don, Emily, Franklin and Gert. Jose and Katia are lining up behind Irma, waiting for their names and numbers to be called.

Harvey and Irma sound too mild-mannered to potentially go down as the two most destructive back-to-back weather events in modern history.

Harvey sounds like your favorite uncle, who wears a bow tie and carries a briefcase. The name Irma evokes images of a retired librarian. Or the little old lady in your mother’s bridge club.

Yet we’ve never seen hell-raisers like them on our weather radar. Almost before making landfall, Irma was being touted as the most powerful Atlantic hurricane on record.

A family friend, who lives in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, arrived at our house on Thursday to stay with us for a few days. There is no telling when she will be able to return, or if there will be anything there when she does.

My sister and her family are evacuating their home in Savannah for the second time in 11 months, just as they fled the fury of Matthew last October. They will make the trip up Interstate 16 this weekend, when it turns into a one-way street and bottleneck parking lot.

My church, Vineville United Methodist, has opened the gym doors of our Christian Life Center as a shelter for evacuees.

I hope you got to see Steve Hartman’s special report from Texas on the CBS News last week. (If you missed it, you can find it online.)

“How the worst of Harvey brought out America’s best” is about the people who needed help, and those who reached out to help them.

“I think most Americans are heroes, just waiting for their moment,” Hartman said.

The segment closed with a video of a car sinking in the floodwaters in Houston, and those who answered the call of duty to save the driver.

“I don’t know who the folks are, but I do know this,” Hartman said. “If you took out a Christian, took out a Democrat, an immigrant, a Republican, Muslim or Jew, remove any link in this brave chain of Americans, the whole group is adrift and a piece of humanity is lost. In this case, the chain held. When Mother Nature is at its worst, human nature is at its best.”

Is this our moment?

We soon will know.

This story was originally published September 9, 2017 at 9:18 AM with the headline "No point trying to reason with hurricane season."