A Poem for the Start of Hurricane Season
Hurricane Force
You never forget your first hurricane
Outside, the wind rages striking fists of oranges and pinecones against shuddering shutters, shaking shingles.
It doesn’t howl, or whine, or wail — that pitch reserved for lesser storms, spring torrents full of sound and light, fast floods of impotent drama.
The “Killer Pine” stands strong and tall and deadly, swaying with the music of the wind. Lesser siblings — pine, oak, sweetgum — crack! Limbs fly, seeking glass to break,
A car, a house to crush. Stones strike like bullets, unseen, deadly — sharp weapons loosed in the steady onslaught of an angry wind.
All who do not break must bend for this is no caress, no gentle breeze - this force of will, unstoppable, that rages on past dawn.
The hurricane that devastated Galveston passed almost directly over our house, but over an hour inland, it did little but knock down our back fence. All night, I could hear firm, soft things hit the side of the house. In the morning, I learned that some of them were oranges from the neighbor’s tree.
The “Killer Pine” — a seventy-foot pine tree that had stood in our back yard and survived many storms — made it through Hurricane Ike, only to be taken out by lightning that turned it into a flaming torch and dangled a branch the size of a large Christmas tree — a few years later. That same lightning blew up the Comcast cable, exploded a large clay pot, and threw dirt to the top of an 8' fence, where it stuck. It took out our oven, our alarm system, and a modem, for good measure.
Weather in Texas can be weird.
Of course, all that was nothing — Hurricane Harvey came along and said, “Hold my beer,” then proceeded to drop 50" inches of water on us, turning large swaths of Houston and I-10 into a lake.
“Weird” may be an understatement. I shudder to think what 2020’s Hurricane Season has in store. Will it literally rain cats and dogs on us? At this point, little would surprise me. Maybe I should start building an Ark.
Thanks, Akos Peterbencze, for making me think about Galveston, and hurricanes, and whether or not my disaster supplies are all up to date.
