Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Once more, into the beach, dear friends - good luck

By HOWARD TROXLER
Published June 12, 2006

After hours of steady, heavy rain Monday morning, the sky lightened up some at midafternoon and the sun even peeked out for a few seconds. But the wind already had begun to kick up from the south, and where I stood on the edge of Tampa Bay in southern Pinellas County, the afternoon high tide already was above the sandy flats and pressing up against the green grass of back yards.

In a world without radar maps and cable weather channels it would have been just a wet, blustery day — a welcome day, in all honesty. Hands of bananas peek out from beneath purplish flowers in my little grove; they need all the water they can get. After weeks of drought, Florida gardeners wake up to a morning like Monday’s and their first selfish thought is: At last.

But being the sophisticated modern media types we are, we know more than the weather of the hour tells us. Those winds that started in the afternoon and steadily picked up only confirmed the news from all the radar maps and Web sites and pinwheel-filled TV screens. Sometime today, Alberto, our first unwelcome guest of the 2006 tropical season, will bully its way onshore somewhere close to Florida’s Big Bend.

As often is the case with a gulf storm, the second question (the first being, how bad will the direct hit be?) is how big a slap on the backside the rest of us get. Experience teaches that such a storm doesn’t even need a given name to build up a surge, let alone the arbitrary distinction between 73-mph winds ­— a mere “tropical storm” — and the label that we apply for 1  mph more.

What is the right attitude for a Floridian, then? In the old days, it was jaunty disdain. “It’s just a rainstorm,” a friend from Miami told me Monday, a throwback to the spirit of bygone hurricane parties.

A different way is to make fun of the name: “Sounds like a hairdresser who owns a Pekinese,’’ another said. Alberto: the VO5 storm.

This is, after all, “only” a tropical storm, or a minimal hurricane at worst at landfall. If we go on red alert now, if we chain ourselves to the Weather Channel and every tropical update, what will we have left for later?

Yet the experience of recent years and the constant warnings of our political leaders now impose a tinge of political incorrectness to jauntiness. After playing dodgeball with nature for the past two years, after seeing what happened to our neighbors last year in Louisiana, after watching so many projected paths with bleary eyes (“Don’t pay attention to the red line,” they keep saying, while putting red lines on the map), frankly, all the fun has been plumb wrung out of the experience.

Is this a bad time, or an especially good time, to bring up the fact again that the 2006 Legislature didn’t really do much about hurricane insurance? Despite everything we’ve been through, despite all the cancellations and the problems of Citizens Property Insurance Co., we enter the new season with no more protection that we had before.

I wonder if somewhere this morning, somebody in an office in, say, Omaha, or Bloomington, Ill., will be shouting into a telephone: “Another hurricane in Florida! We had no idea this might happen when we took those people’s money! Quick! Cancel some more policies!’’

Maybe we ought to make the Legislature meet in emergency session when a storm is heading in the general direction of Tallahassee — and stay there in session until they do something.

Neither will today be a good day to be a Realtor, especially one with clients from out-of-state thinking about that adorable second home with a “water view” — a phrase which, today, may end up carrying a special irony. In the old days the con was to sell Florida swampland; better these days to sell condos built on ex-landfills.

In the end, each of us decides for himself or herself how much to worry. I hope that Alberto sloshes ashore, dumps some rain and falls apart. I hope that if you live on the coast, your surge today is only a few feet at worst, and nothing but a timely reminder to finish that checklist — you have been working on that checklist, haven’t you?

I hope that at the end of this day, all Floridians are able to say: One day, we know full well, we will have the worst. But it was not today.

[Last modified June 12, 2006, 23:22:38]