Hurricanes I have known
If it wasn’t the hurricanes, it was the Soviets. Or the gators cruising along the lakeshores or water moccasins coiled and sunbathing around cypress trees. Growing up in Florida in the 1960s, there was always something poised to pounce.
But hurricanes were, and remain, a constant threat to Floridians. Hurricane Ian promises to bring massive destruction to the Sunshine State as you’re reading this. Ron DeSantis, the state’s Republican governor, has ordered 2.5 million people to evacuate – and good luck with that, since most of the state is under a hurricane warning. Barring providential interferences, damage likely will be catastrophic for millions of people, wildlife, agriculture and, surely, the state’s chief economic driver, tourism.
As a native Floridian, I’m well seasoned and knowledgeable about tropical storms and the places that get walloped by them.
Even now, my childhood hometown of Winter Haven, located between Tampa and Orlando, is under a hurricane “warning,” meaning sustained winds could reach at least 74 mph following a direct hit on Tampa. My high school classmates who still live there have not forgotten a 1960 hurricane named Donna, considered by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to be “one of the all-time great hurricanes.”
Donna came straight across the peninsula and hovered over our little town, a “city of 100 lakes” and home to Cypress Gardens, water ski capital of the world. Memorable is the word for it: What started as a tropical wave off the African coast on Aug. 29, 1960, Donna is the only hurricane on record to produce hurricane-force winds all the way from Florida, through the Mid-Atlantic states and into New England. Fifty people died in the United States alone.
Donna was quite an initiation for our family, which had settled in Florida 10 years earlier and assumed, living so far inland, that we could ride it out. The uninitiated always think it would be cool to “batten down the hatches,” (a popular phrase among some people in Charleston, S.C., right up until the moment Hurricane Hugo devastated their city in 1989). But it is certainly not cool, and most swear off such boasts thereafter.
In any case, it’s best to have a survivalist in the house. My Midwestern father became one after Donna showed him what for, plowing as it did through our taped-up windows, tearing off the sheets of plywood covering the windows and flooding the house. No matter how many mops and towels we threw at Donna, she threw them right back. All the while, our hurricane house guest, an elderly widow from across the street I called Mrs. Harry G. Brown, sobbed incessantly.
Sometime after midnight, the eye settled over the landscape, and all became quiet. Some of the grown-ups wandered out to examine the damage before all hell broke loose again. A large cedar tree was nearly on its side, but its roots still clung stubbornly to the earth. The next morning, the tree was upright. (Reason: A hurricane’s wind changes directions from one side of the eye to the other.)
For the next two weeks, we all made do without electricity. The heat was no worse than usual, because our family had not yet been spoiled by air conditioning. We ate lots of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Mrs. Harry G. Brown returned home to minimal damage and her nerves in better shape than my father’s.
We’d learned our lesson. By the time the Cuban missile crisis rolled around two years later, we had a fully operational bomb shelter and, no kidding, drills – which included a three-minute sprint to change the air filter outside. My father, a lawyer by trade, became an expert on civil defense, which, as he told Floridians, was “a joke.” He took to the road to lecture others and discuss his “survival kit.” What I wouldn’t give to have one of those back.
Fortunately, the Soviets backed down before delivering their nuclear missiles to Cuba, but not before I learned a harsh lesson from my father about survival in our bomb shelter: If the Russians had launched its missiles, he told me, our widow neighbor would not be joining us in the shelter.
Suffice to say, parents didn’t coddle their children in those days, and we survived. I pray we all survive Ian, whose harshest lessons will soon be ours.
Kathleen Parker is a columnist for The Washington Post. Her email address is kathleenparker@washpost.com.