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MIAMI - Lixion Avila can't contain himself.
"Look at the size of that!" he breathes, staring at a satellite image of Hurricane Ivan, a pure white sawblade of wind and water spinning around a tight black eye.
The storm is just southwest of Jamaica, where people are still watching their houses collapse beneath the season's fiercest hurricane. But on Avila's computer screen, the natural disaster is a thing of perfect order and transcendent beauty.
You could fall in love with a storm like this. At least if you're a meteorologist at the National Hurricane Center you could.
"Oh, I love it," Avila murmurs as he moves a computer model of the storm along its projected track between Cuba and Mexico's Yucatan peninsula. He prefers this new course, which shifts the storm west of the Florida peninsula. He thinks South and Central Florida could use a break, but there's something else: He wants the storm to stay alive so he can keep watching it.
The National Hurricane Center is a place of discipline and precision. The tile floors are spotless, the pencils are freshly sharpened and the computers are sleek, fast and silent. Scientists trace the storm's path on a paper map. They use a school stencil to mark the location of the eye with neat red triangles. They erase errors.
One room away, ham radio reports crackle in. On Sunday afternoon they are from Grand Cayman. Areas are under water that have never been under water before. There's 5 feet of water in the streets. There's 4 feet of water in my house. There's 2 feet of water on the airport runways. The roofs are blowing away. There's no trees left. Unprecedented destruction on the island.
The forecasters stare at their screens, trace lines on their map.
They know the storm is simply an arrangement of water and air, a spinning knot of thunderstorms. It is nature's way of redistributing heat. It is a series of equations, a string of numbers.
But the storm had a birth, and it will have a death. It has grown and changed since it left the waters off western Africa on its way to the Caribbean. On Sunday, it was losing its eye wall and building a new one like a snake shedding its skin.
The meteorologists insist this is pure science. But there is room here for awe. The hurricane moves them.
They speak of novas and galaxies, of natural forces, of art and painting and whether a storm can be said to have a mind of its own. They talk about beauty and symmetry, strength and intensity. Ivan has all of these.
They respect the storm. They admire the storm. Can they be said to love the storm?
Maybe. Until they think about the damage it will do.
But they all started by falling in love with a storm, usually one that did some damage.
They'll never forget their first. Donna. Ginger. Doria. Betsy. Edith. Carmen.
For Avila, it was Donna in 1960. He was 8, living in the seaside village of Bacuranao in Cuba. He remembers the red snappers flapping on the sand after the waves receded.
He had already started asking about the weather. He asked the farmers and the fishermen, who could always predict it. They told him to look at the color of the mountains. If you could see the mountains clearly, that meant there would be rain.
It wasn't pure science, but they knew their land and their climate. And Avila later realized that there was some science to it: A clear view means that the air is moist, that it can rise and form clouds that later turn to storms.
Avila has a thing for Ivan. He'd almost call it his favorite.
Storms like this don't come along every year, he says. A hurricane like Ivan requires certain atmospheric conditions. A warm ocean. The right upper level environment. It's rare for such a strong hurricane to come all the way from Africa. On Saturday, Ivan had the sixth-lowest pressure of any storm ever measured in the Atlantic.
"I haven't seen this more than three or four times in my lifetime," said Avila, who is 53. "In the 1960s, you had ones with that track: Beulah in '67. But I was young. I was in school. Alma in '66."
Ivan is bigger than Charley. When Charley was hanging around Jamaica, it had just begun to be a hurricane. Frances was bigger than Ivan, but Ivan is more intense. Ivan was a Category 5 hurricane on Saturday with wind speeds of 165 mph, making it the strongest storm of the season thus far. Now it's a Category 4, but forecasters say it could strengthen again before it makes landfall along the tip of Cuba.
Avila likes the way Ivan looks. He can't say exactly why. It's like a painting that you like but you don't know why you like it.
"I cannot tell you the colors are brighter," he says. "It's because of the perfect eye, the upper level outflow, the way the mechanism works, like you read in a textbook. It lives long enough that you can observe it."
With some hurricanes, you can't find the eye. In Ivan, it's like a drop of blood in a circle of snow, a clear, dark hole in the air.
Avila steels himself against the storm's seduction.
"When I'm making my forecast, I have to put aside every emotion," he says. "There's no such thing as, "I have a feeling that's what it's going to do."'
On Saturday morning, Avila's mother called the hurricane center collect from Cuba. Avila feared the worst.
"Typical mother," he said. "She knows I work here. But she's never done this. She's too scared of the hurricane. She wanted a forecast."