Hurricane Musings

Now that I know all my kids, grand kids, nieces, nephews, sisters, aunts, uncles and cousins are safe after Irene - I thought is was okay to talk about some hurricane experiences of my own.  Growing up in New Jersey, we were no strangers to hurricanes  I won't be able to name most of them.  Even though the rest of the world started naming hurricanes in the 1800s, the United States Weather Bureau didn't start naming them until 1953 and until 1979 they were always named after women.  Not being a weather buff, I guess it wasn't important to me at the time.

In the 40s, when I was a child, in Chatham, New Jersey, there was a hurricane that was catastrophic to my aunts and their friends  They were in their early twenties and late teens.  Although Chatham is over 70 miles from the Atlantic Ocean we were hit with roaring winds and torrential rains.My mom and dad and I huddled in the living room around the radio.  In the midst of the storm there was a frantic knock at the door and, to our surprise, my aunts and their entourage descended upon our front hall, soaking wet and crying hysterically.  My parents figured that one of them had been injured in the storm.  It turns out that the hysteria stemmed from the impassable roads and their inability to get to a Frank Sinatra live performance - I know not where.  My mother made them some tea and my father dug out some Frank Sinatra records and put them on the  Philco record player.  Small conciliation to them but the best we could do.

In the 50s, when I was in high school we spent our summers at the Jersey Shore.  One summer we had a hurricane that caused the Atlantic Ocean to meet Barnegat Bay and turned the streets into streams of water several feet deep.  My mother and sisters all stayed huddled in the house and my dad and I went out exploring.  We found a passable path from the bay to the ocean  where we watched 40 foot waves put on a spectacular show.  Call us crazy,  but we felt invincible.  I love this memory. They have done a good job of building up the dunes so that doesn't happen any more.

Fast forward to the 80s.  There were many hurricanes between the 50s and the 80s, but living in New Jersey makes you take them in stride, and my  moving to Arizona in the 60s kept me immune.

In August, 1985 we arrived in St. Petersburg, Florida with our second youngest in tow.  She was heading for St. Leo College and we were stopping in St. Pete to spend the night with my sister and her family and to pick up our daughters zillions of boxes that had shipped ahead.  I'm not sure if we were crossing the Howard Franklin Bridge or the Courtney Campbell Causeway from Tampa to St. Pete, but it doesn't matter.  What matters is that the water was surging over the road and we felt like we were driving on Tampa Bay.  The palm trees were bending down to meet the earth,we could barely see where we were going and we were scared out of our minds.  It seems, that Elena, a category 3 hurricane, arrived at the same time we did.  ( DISCLAIMER::  I looked up the name of the hurricane and got the picture of Elena from the Internet - ain't Google grand?)

Our overnight turned into a week and my brother-in-law's friend and his family also came to bunk in, as they were too close to the water.  Crankiness and claustrophobia ensued with all those people trapped in the house.  It got so bad that we started taking turns going out in the hurricane, just for some solitude.

In 1992 we traveled to Key Largo for the first time.  We didn't experience a hurricane first hand, but we drove through the remnants of Hurricane Andrew and the absolute devastation it wrought on Southern Florida.  I have never witnessed anything like it.  There was not a palm tree and nary a house left standing.  To this day, they are still recovering and the vegetation is still struggling.

I hope Irene is the worst of our season for this year.  Looks like there are storms developing in the Gulf and the Atlantic.  I channel good thoughts to our nephew who is living in Houston after escaping New Orleans and losing his house to Katrina in 2005.  That's his story to tell.

 Keep that tropical storm out of Houston. Maybe if enough people face east and/or south and blow with all their might, we can chase those bad guys back where they came from.

Post Script:  My husband passed by and asked what I was writing about.  He said "Be sure to put in that I lived through seven really bad typhoons in 18 months while in the Air Force in Okinawa."  To which I lovingly replied, "Get your own damn blog!"

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