It's Hurricane Season Y'all

"Problems with Hurricanes" by Victor Hernández Cruz

Sometime in the beginning of my second-grade year in Mandeville Elementary, I got my first hurricane tracking map, which is funny because Houston (where I was born) wasn’t exactly immune to tropical weather, and the little towns in Brazoria County where I’d mostly lived until then were not far from the Gulf of Mexico. Lake Jackson, the last place I lived in Texas, is a 15 minute drive to the beach, whereas Mandeville is a New Orleans suburb on the north shore of Lake Pontchartrain, where the Causeway begins or ends depending on which way you’re going. Which is to say, it’s not exactly on the Gulf of Mexico. Sure, tropical weather can mess it up because Lake Pontchartrain is so big it can serve as a refueling station for a storm, but any storm that gets that far inland will have broken up some after traveling over land.

The Lake Pontchartrain Causeway, by the way, is an amazing feat of engineering—26 miles long which is far enough that even on clear days there are times when you cannot see either shore and when it’s foggy it can be an extremely distressing experience to drive on it. It’s still worth driving over at least once if you get the chance. I don’t know for certain that it was built just so wealthy white New Orleanians could still get to the city without having to drive three hours around the lake but given the racial makeup of the north shore suburbs, I think it’s a reasonable assumption.

Everybody and their grandma got to learn about New Orleans and hurricanes in 2005, of course, but my experience growing up there was that more often than not, hurricanes were cause for a party, maybe a couple days off of school, and maybe checking on your people who lived east in Biloxi or Mobile, since the storms so often jogged in that direction not long before landfall. I remember evacuating the trailer we lived in one time, for Hurricane Elena, and all we did was drive across town to a friend’s house. In fact, only hours before we went across town, I’d been camping on the Pearl River with friends, waterskiing and drinking beer (don’t tell my parents). We came home because a person from Wildlife and Fisheries came flying down the river telling everyone to pack up and go. We got some rain, a little wind. The streets on our side of town flooded for a bit but drained in a couple of hours. I don’t think we even lost the lights.

You get a sense of this refusal to get too worked up in the song “Hurricane Party” by Cowboy Mouth from their 1999 album All You Need Is Live. It opens:

My hurricane party got outta control
I'm lying in the gutter eatin' tootsie rolls
With red ant bites all over my ass
Beating on my buddies with a baseball bat

The rest of the song is about playing cards, getting drunk and inflicting violence on each other. Maybe some light immorality, though that’s only hinted at. Because the thing about those storms was that for every one that actually hit you and did damage, there were maybe dozens where it hit someone else. (We also averaged fewer storms per year.) And also, this was a time where there was a lot more uncertainty about where a storm was actually going to go. If you lived anywhere but on the coast proper you just stayed put because there was a good chance you’d be expected back at work the next day, and nobody I hung around with could afford to miss work because they ran from a storm.

There’s a bit of this feeling in Ariel Francisco’s poem “Three Haiku Before Hurricane Matthew” from his book A Sinking Ship is Still a Ship.

Hurricane warning:

Bought the biggest bottle of

Black rum I could find.

Hurricane warning:

But Dunkin Donuts is still

Open—be right back.

Hurricane warning:

Water sold out everywhere—

The rain will bring more.

Francisco’s poems are about Florida hurricanes, but I think the general attitude is about the same. You hunker down and wait it out because running from a storm isn’t all that easy, especially if you live below a certain economic level, and you can do pretty well and still be below that level.

Here’s what I mean, and forgive me for moving away from the poetry for a bit. Take a look at a map of the Gulf Coast region. Focus on the major cities, which I’m defining here and cities with interstates running through them. You’ve got Houston, New Orleans, Mobile, Tallahassee kinda? and Tampa. Go up the Atlantic seaboard and there’s Miami/Fort Lauderdale, Jacksonville, Savannah, Charleston, Norfolk, DC and so on. The farther north you go the less often you get hit by tropical storms. It can happen, sure, but it’s less often

.

Now look at the roads leading out of those places. There’s not that many of them, and they’re mostly designed to handle local traffic and a lot of them do that poorly. Some people who are going to evacuate if a storm is coming can fly out, but there’s not a lot of slack in air travel and it’s not like airlines will suddenly put more planes on a route at the last minute. Our air traffic system isn’t built to handle that.

So we’re back to the roads and now you’ve got large numbers of metro populations all trying to leave at once, but most people aren’t trying to get far. They’re just trying to get out of the way for now. If a storm does hit hard, you want to be kind of close so you can get back and see what’s been damaged and what can be saved. And if it doesn’t hit you, then you want to be able to get back and resume your life and maybe see if you can help out the people who did get hit.

But again, look at that map, and look at the cities and towns that you might be able to flee to. It’s not like there’s tons of hotel rooms sitting empty in Bunkie, Louisiana on a given Tuesday. Hazlehurst, Mississippi might roll out the welcome mat but it’s only so many people who could even find a parking lot to sleep in, much less food to eat and toilets to use. And that’s assuming you’ve got the money and the car to do that much. You can see why a lot of people might look at a storm in the ocean and think “I guess we’re gonna see.”

I lived in San Francisco for a couple of years and worked at a brewery for a little bit and some of the locals there asked me about whether I’d rather live with hurricanes or earthquakes. As it happens, I’d been in California less than two weeks when I felt my first earthquake and I had thoughts on the matter. (It was a minor one—I thought maybe the apartment building I was in had been hit by a truck or something.) My claim was that at least with a hurricane you could see it coming and prepare or maybe get out of the way, whereas an earthquake would pop up out of nowhere. Amy said that she was nervous about carrying knives around on the off chance that an earthquake might hit, but you can extend that to any number of situations. We lived in a second floor apartment and if one hit right then, I could tumble down the stairs and then anything is possible.

The truer answer was that I would rather live with hurricanes because their danger was familiar, as was the aftermath. There’s comfort in dealing with the devil you know. Earthquakes were things I’d seen on television, like the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989, the one that stopped the World Series and collapsed parts of the Nimitz Freeway in Oakland as well as a section of the Bay Bridge. I didn’t really understand that most earthquakes were minor things, shocks you might attribute to something else if you weren’t aware of what an earthquake would feel like. Loma Prieta was to California earthquakes what Hurricane Andrew was to Miami, a fairly rare but extraordinarily devastating occurrence.

That said, I still wouldn’t change my answer. I’d rather know danger is coming, even if I’m powerless to get out of its way.

The last hurricane I experienced was Hurricane Wilma in 2005. Same year as Katrina. That was the second-to-last hurricane I experienced, only it was a category 1 storm when it crossed Florida and then became the monster that ate the Louisiana-Mississippi Gulf Coast. That’s one a lot of people ran from, my ex-wife and daughter included. Katrina’s eye passed over their house. A seawall kept the storm surge from washing it down to the foundation, but they got a lot of water.

My daughter came to live with us while they started to rebuild the area so she could continue going to school only for Wilma to show up a couple months later. The eye passed over us too and the wind blew water under the front door but we were living in a single-story apartment built like a bunker in the 50’s and never really felt like we were in danger. I have a picture of my daughter sitting on a downed branch of an oak tree with her head in her hands. It was a lot. It was too much.

But the weather in the aftermath was cool, which is not something you can often say about south Florida, even in November, and we had a gas water heater and stove so we could shower and cook even without lights and the FEMA drop area was in the park a couple of blocks away and school was closed so Amy and I didn’t have to work and we sat around and played a never ending game of rummy and drank mixtures of whatever booze and juices we had on hand and called them Katrilmas. We saw stars at night, which is something that doesn’t happen in Fort Lauderdale. We watched the inland horizon for any evidence that electricity was coming on in our direction.

We were really fortunate. I don’t want to romanticize this moment. Lots of people lost a lot. Some people died. I almost used the term “terrible beauty” above to describe it but no, it wasn’t beautiful. There’s a sense of relief that comes when you realize that you’ve come through mostly okay and so have your people, but that’s not beauty, terrible or otherwise. It’s just life.

But you can find humor in the way you view these terrifying storms. And so now, given that hurricane season officially started just a few days ago, I bring you this poem, “Problems with Hurricanes” by Victor Hernández Cruz.

Hernández Cruz was born in Puerto Rico, moved to New York when he was young, and has been a distinguished member of the Nuyorican movement for decades now. I have loved this poem of his in particular for years in part because of the way he grasps the absurd power of the storm by treating it was great seriousness. He does this by putting most of the poem in the voice of a campesino, a peasant farmer.

A campesino looked at the air

And told me:

With hurricanes it’s not the wind

or the noise or the water.

I’ll tell you he said:

it’s the mangoes, avocados,

Green plantains and bananas

flying into town like projectiles.

And if you’ve never been in a storm like this, never experienced a tornado or derecho (for the record, I’ve been through those too and would rather a hurricane), then you might think “that’s crazy, of course it’s the wind and the noise and the water.” What damage could a banana do? The answer is that anything can do a lot of damage if It hits you at 90 miles per hour.

How would your family

feel if they had to tell

The generations that you

got killed by a flying

Banana.

Death by drowning has honor.

If the wind picked you up

and slammed you

Against a mountain boulder

This would not carry shame

But

to suffer a mango smashing

Your skull

or a plantain hitting your

Temple at 70 miles per hour

is the ultimate disgrace.

I remember during Hurricane Charley that there weren’t many deaths but the one I remember is of the guy who stepped outside while the eye was passing over so he could have a smoke, and a tree branch fell on him and killed him. And I feel bad that that’s the only thing I know about the guy. He had a family. He had people who loved him, I assume, people who were distraught at his death. But the thing he was briefly famous for, the thing that got him covered in the news, was that he died having a smoke in the eye of the storm when a tree branch fell on him. I would not call that a disgrace, but also I don’t think I would emphasize exactly how he died if he were my friend and someone asked me. It would get elided to “he died in the storm.”

The campesino takes off his hat—

As a sign of respect

toward the fury of the wind

And says:

Don’t worry about the noise

Don’t worry about the water

Don’t worry about the wind­—

If you are going out

beware of mangoes

And all such beautiful

sweet things.

What I love most about this poem is the way Hernández Cruz lands it. Because there’s real risk in talking about the idea of dying because you got hit in the head by a flying plantain while you were out in a storm. There’s an echo of slapstick in the idea, and it would be easy to make that a laugh line that overwhelms the rest of the poem.

It’s important, I think, that Hernández Cruz has a campesino be the speaker here, because he’s someone whose life is in the land, perhaps tending to the very things that could be so dangerous during this storm, and he’s presented as this plain-speaking person for whom family honor is important. And that gravitas allows him to say the lines about the mango and the plantain with complete seriousness, and so when he comes back to them at the end and called mangoes “beautiful / sweet things” that we must be wary of, you really feel that tension between the things that can bring so much joy in one context and such damage in another.

I’ve lived in the middle of the country for almost 12 years now, far from coastlines and fault lines and tropical weather. Wind storms are still a part of my life, but now they’re tornadoes and derechos which are devastating and come with far less warning, which now that I think about it is the worst traits of earthquakes and hurricanes balled up into a single glob of shitty. Great. Wait here for a second. I’m going to go look at what it costs to make my basement more usable.

Thanks as always for reading this far. What are your favorite weather stories or poems? Which devils do you embrace and which ones do you run screaming from?