So I was buying plywood the other day, which is what Floridians do these days, and talking about fasteners with the lumber-store guy. The word "fasteners," in its own modest way, has become part of the storm lingo, like more popular words such as "landfall" and "eyewall."
We settled on screws. I asked the guy: What about washers, too? All the Web sites say to use washers. Supposedly the wind has a harder time pulling the plywood off the screw heads.
"Listen," the lumber-store guy said. "If the wind is blowing hard enough to pull your plywood off your screw heads, I don't think a washer is going to help you much." This seemed like a fair point.
Oh, Florida! Once more, into the beach.
If the last predictions about Hurricane Frances were true, the storm should have made landfall on Florida's east coast sometime overnight, and begun its slow, soaking, destructive march across our peninsula.
Frances is no Charley, zipping across the state and scooting back out to sea before anybody knew what had happened. The maps for Frances predicted at least a 24-hour crawl from southeast to northwest.
None of us knows whether the storm will devastate the coast like an Andrew, flattening cities, or miraculously cause only minimal harm. But as Frances comes inland the land will fight back, eventually sapping the storm's power until only a weak-sister of a rainstorm remains.
Eventually.
And what about us locally? Again, if the predictions are true, we on Florida's west coast will feel gusting winds and heavy rains. Flooding is likely in some areas. Rain-loosed tree roots and high winds are a bad combination.
But in general, we over here will feel nothing like the full power of the hurricane.
How many times will we miss the brunt? First Hurricane Charley took that weird right-hand turn into Charlotte County (although our television weather friends immediately told us they knew it all along - thanks, guys). That, by itself, was enough to work up a pretty good case of survivor guilt.
Then Frances came toward us from the southeast. Maybe everybody else knew it all along, but I confess to not knowing until, say, Thursday that an east coast landfall was probably not going to produce hurricane-force winds around here. Hence the plywood.
The past few days seem like a daze. This was largely due to television addiction. In our house we clicked constantly among the Weather Channel and the local stations, as if one of them were going to have something different to say. As if we would be able to figure out what was going to happen if we watched enough.
The Weather Channel goes through these 10-minute cycles, see. Local forecast "on the 8s." Major new advisories at 11 and 5. Might as well watch until the next one. Each time they moved the line on the map a little, it seemed like big news - closer to us! Farther to the north! But it was not news at all. It was the average guess of a bunch of computers.
This storm-watching ritual began Wednesday night. And it was all-dominating. Normal routines started to slide. Laundry left in the dryer, who cares? And the all-too-frequent response to unusual conditions: exercise and good diet out out the window. These were emergency times, after all.
I was driving home Thursday and saw one of my neighbors unloading plywood. Having just dragged around a bunch of the 4- by 8-foot sheets myself, I knew they were a lot easier to handle with two sets of hands, so I hopped out to help.
We talked again the next day he told me about this idea he had, which was that neighbors could be organized to help each other board up their homes in an approaching storm, kind of like a frontier barnraising. The more hands working, the quicker it would go.
"Kind of like a neighborhood watch," I suggested. "A neighborhood storm watch." It sounded like a great idea.
In the end the plywood stayed in the garage this time around. Later, when it is sunny and there's a free weekend, we'll cut the pieces to fit and predrill the holes and be ready for the next one. Maybe Ivan.
