Well, right now it’s close to midnight Hawaii time, and this being a Thursday I should be in bed by now, except that my office, along with pretty much every other State function and most of the malls, is going to be closed tomorrow due to the extreme weather advisory. Seems that earlier this week the weather service discovered a pair of hurricanes, one right after the other, and they were both headed straight for the islands.
I remember my home withstanding the full savage brunt of Hurricane Iwa in 1984, which, I say with neither shame nor hyperbole, was one of the scariest moments of my life. I could see the building shaking down to its foundations, to the point where I had trouble standing…and this after we’d recently had the second story added.
Iwa was a life-changer. A milestone. One of those stark, indelible, monumental experiences that smacks a nervous boy square in the face and stays with him for life.
The same could not be said for the time I arrived at work one day, the sky sunny and clear and a refreshing breeze in the air, and being told to go home due to alarmist reports about…get this…a tsunami. That, if it actually frickin’ existed, didn’t make it within a mile of the property my office was on. My then-boss tried to calmly explain that tsunami’s could be serious, and if you found seawater just outside your driveway you’d have more sense than to go to work. Well, yeah. As opposed to the seawater-free driveway and seawater-free neighborhood leading to the seawater-free freeway leading the seawater-free area around the EXTREMELY seawater-free office, thank you very much. (Oh, and I received no indication at any prior workday that this was a possibility.)
And then there was the time one or two years ago when I was all set for another riveting episode of Whodunnit when KITV decided to burn up twenty minutes babbling random kindergarten crap about this HUGE HUGE HUGE DANGEROUS HURRICANE that was bearing down on the islands like a freight train bolted to the Starship Enterprise. Couldn’t give two minutes of safety tips and be done with it, couldn’t block off a non-intrusive time later that evening, couldn’t direct us to a website, no, they just had to cut into the first reality TV show I’d been excited about in bleeding forever. So what happened? Some wind, a few middling showers. And then I found out the stupid thing missed us completely.
So what’s on deck now? Well, it turns out that the first one has put the big island on hurricane watch, while Maui is on tropical storm warning, and Oahu is on tropical storm watch. I think. The other one is a tropical storm now…I think…and we’re hoping that it’ll weaken before it potentially really, really ruins some picnics. (And now, according to my dad, the first one is “breaking up”.)
Not to sound cynical here, but the news has been going on and on about the supposed double threat we’re face with. And I want to say, look, I survived The Big One, and everything since has been weaksauce. Heck, that earthquake that hit out of nowhere that one morning was way more intimidating than any of those supposedly horrific tsunamis and hurricanes, and I didn’t even know what the hell it was until I heard about it on the news. You know what’s going to happen Friday? There’s going to be a lot of rain and a lot of wind. And then Saturday it’ll probably calm down enough so I can vote in the primary without worrying about my ballot getting blown into a tree or whatever. And when that second whatever storm hits, the exact same thing is going to happen.
And I’ll think hardly anything about it. Heck, the weather here’s pretty dang weird as it is. There have been at least two freak thunderstorms this year alone. One week had sun showers four days in a row. The Leeward Costco recently experienced a torrential downpour bigger than anything that hit the island the past winter. Bottom line, you never really can tell; so long as it doesn’t cause heavy damage, there isn’t a problem.
I mean, not to downplay the massive damage natural disasters can cause, to say nothing of more mundane calamities like flooding (a lesson which struck hard that one winter I was at City Road Division, but that’s another story), but these are, thankfully, highly rare occurrences. The vast majority of the time, it’s really inconvenient and messy and nothing more. And maybe it’s my now deeply-ingrained and not ever coming out cynicism talking, but I do wish the alarmist news talking heads would give equal time to expressing thanks when the next one doesn’t turn out to be The Big One that they did hyping it up to begin with.
Sooooo…looks like I’ll be spending a relaxing Friday in front of the computer, following the PGA Championship, and deciding who to vote for Saturday. And when the rains and the wind come, my first thought will be, “[del]Man, what the hell did anyone ever see in Serg[/del] Finally, some cool weather for a change!”
