Due East

Posted by Manda(rific) on August 24, 2011 in Island Life, Ramble | 1 comment

I grew up with hurricanes.

I remember when we first moved to the Outer Banks in 1995, Hurricane Felix hit. I was terrified that my parents didn’t want to leave (despite us moving in only days/weeks before, if my memory serves me) because hurricanes were big and bad. The phrase I should have been using was great and terrible or overwhelming beauty.

We went out on the beach in the middle of the storm. According to Wikipedia, it was a Category 4 that never made landfall. All I remember are the huge waves that towered over my head (from a distance, we weren’t swimming), being in awe of the newscasters making a big deal out of what seemed to be so pretty, and picking up dozens of giant conch shells like the ones you see in tourist shops – only these were fresh, washed up on shore by the storm.

After it was all over, we drove around to survey the “damage” – there was none. Some houses were missing bits of siding, I think I remember seeing a fence on a tennis court that had been bent a little, no doubt from something flying into it. The rest of the island was fine. The weather was beautiful. The sky was blue. The wrath of the storm lasted…maybe half a day, maybe a day. And then it was paradise.

That’s how they all were. The eerie calm before the storm, the photography of different buildings boarded up, the pounding wind and rain, and then the beauty that followed. Somewhere, my parents have photos of me standing outdoors in a raincoat in nearly every storm we weathered. Most of them are funny – they might involve me clinging to a car and pretending to be blown away. In several I’m wearing my pajamas, grinning. It was always fun and happy.

We left only once – maybe twice, it’s hard to remember – and while it was a fun “vacation,” we got stuck in tornadoes and flooding in the area we’d evacuated to. The islands were fine. From then on, we stayed. It was never as bad as the TV made it out to be.

And then came Isabel.

Hurricane Isabel was one of those late-in-the-year storms. The bad ones, when the weather systems near the coast are getting ready to batter us with nor’easters for the rest of the winter. It was a Category 5, the worst a storm can get. It died down before it hit us, but carried with it a huge wall of water and wind. It was the first time in nearly a decade that I’d actually been scared of a Hurricane.

Our power was in and out. My dad had backed his Jeep Cherokee up to the house and ran this special generator plug-in “thingy” inside that ran off the car battery when the car was running and let us boot up a lamp, or a laptop, or the microwave if we really needed it but-try-not-to-use-it-just-in-case. The first sign of trouble was when my then-boyfriend called to ask how I’d weathered the tornado.

“Tornado?” I asked. I laughed at him. Up until that point we’d been having fun. When the power was on, I was online chatting with friends and working on website stuff, playing games. When it wasn’t, the side of the house that didn’t have shudders on it was bright enough for me to read.

He’d seen my street on the news from his dad’s house up in Virginia. A tornado had gone right down it not 10 minutes before. The wind was so loud outside that I’d heard nothing.

I ran outside and looked, sure enough: the brick wall around the pool at the condo complex up the hill was completely battered and all over the road.  I’d never seen a tornado, and to this day I remain terrified of them – but there it was, that close. Those bricks could have been our own brick house. I wasn’t sure if anyone was around for miles, but the wind was blowing so hard I could barely walk outside.

That night was the longest one I can remember in my entire life. The power stayed out. I slept in my parents room to avoid listening to the wind battering against the shudder on my bedroom, which was situated to the north east side of the house; the side that got the most wind. It didn’t do much good. The night was bitch black, and all you could hear was the howling of the wind. The occasional zzzzzzt of salt fizzing on the powerlines. Thunks and thuds and whumps as bits of siding and sand and whatever else hit the side of our house and the houses around us. I thought the night would never end. I was certain I wasn’t going to wake up alive in the morning.

The power stayed out for days. When we woke up to the beautiful, sunny day the next morning, we were quarantined to our house. They didn’t recommend anyone leaving. We had no idea what that meant. Were we the only house left on the island? Our neighborhood looked fine, but what about beyond that? All I could go on were photos from the internet that had already been uploaded to the weather sites. The beach road torn into bits not far from where I lived. Hatteras had a new inlet because the ocean had ripped right through the narrow strip of sand that was considered “island.”

Once we finally left the house, it turned out that the bypass, the main road was completely flooded near our house. This was why we were “quarantined” – there was no way to get out. The back roads were flooded. The main road was flooded. Unless you had a kayak and felt like hauling it down to the road, you weren’t going anywhere. Not like there was anywhere to go anyway – everything was closed.

Eventually, the water retreated. I visited with a friend and showered at her house for a few days while our power remained out, seemingly the only cluster that hadn’t been turned back on due to damage. We went back to school. Everything went back to normal.

It’s hard watching a storm unfold from a thousand miles away. Despite all those years of having fun, having friends over during hurricanes for slumber parties, taking silly photos – there’s a part of me that, while far away, can only remember Isabel, not all the countless storms that went by without so much as a nod.

People are busy. It’s a time for boarding up, helping tourists get off the island, time for tying down and stocking up. There’s no time to chit chat – understandably. It’s a busy time. I get that.

But that doesn’t make it any easier to watch the countless news reports that I mocked so much growing up, to see varied reports on how bad the storm will be. Back home, you just board up and weather it out and everything’s fine. Up here, everyone asks me about my family. How they’ll be doing. Are they going to be okay. It’s hard not to worry a little bit.

But you know what? Jim Cantore can suck it. Everyone’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be fine.

And if it’s not, the next day everything will still be gorgeous and beautiful as if it’s the most wonderful day the Earth has ever seen, and somehow that’s alright with me.