Hurricane Memories

With the possibility of Hurricane Irene aiming at Florida, though recognizing that it is still early yet and she may change course, I am going to relate some family history regarding hurricanes.

My earliest memory of a hurricane is when my family lived in Jacksonville the first time, in 1951.  We lived on the south side, on Peachtree Street.  My memories of this hurricane are quite vague, as I was only three years old.  But I do recall there was a lot of rain and wind and we stayed inside the house. 

The next hurricane I experienced was Hurricane Dora in 1964.  I was in my senior year in high school, and my mother and I were sharing a house with a nurse my mother worked with.  There were several 60-foot-tall pine trees in the yard, and I remember looking out and seeing them swaying in the winds.  The thought that they could snap and come down on the house was worrisome. Fortunately, they proved flexible enough to bend but not break.

There was some humor, though.  At the height of the storm, when the wind was whipping through and the rain was falling in buckets, there was a commercial for an airline which had just begun serving Jacksonville's airport.  The commercial startled me, then made me laugh out loud, when it began with the phrase, "There's something new in the air over Jacksonville."  Timing is everything.

This was in September, just after the beginning of the school year.  In those days, we didn't go back to school until after Labor Day.  After the storm passed, I drove over to my high school to see if there had been any damage.  Other than a few trees down on the grounds, there did not seem to be any real damage.  We were out of school for a few days, though, because of the interruption of electric service to the area.  One of my classmates later told me her family had been without electricity for two weeks.

When Hurricane David came across us in 1979 I was a registered nurse working at a hospital in downtown Jacksonville.  I shared rides with another nurse, and that evening I was driving.  I picked my co-worker up and we drove into town.  With the winds at that time at 55 miles per hour, I decided not to go across the Mathews Bridge, which is very high and has a rather treacherous metal grille at the top.  Instead I went through the southside and went over the Main Street Bridge.  It has a grille, too, but it is much lower, and I thought the wind might be less.  Later that night we were told that we would all be doing a double shift, as the storm had worsened and the hospital nursing supervisor had called the next shift and told them to stay home rather than get out in it.  We had a "hot rack" room set up, where we could each take turns grabbing a nap during the 16-hour shift. 

For a time in 1999, we thought Hurricane Floyd was coming at us.  We boarded up the house, my husband having installed a system with which we could board up pretty quickly.  But Floyd passed us by and hit North Carolina (which is what Irene may do, too).  I discovered during our boarded-up period, a couple days and nights, that I sleep much better when it is pitch black dark, with no clock dials or moonlight or someone else's outside light filtering in.  So now I use a sleep mask.

In 2004, we got brushed by a few storms, as Florida got smacked and smacked again.  We suffered enough damage that we got payment from our insurance company to replace our roof, after it was all over.  It wasn't until November that the insurance adjuster got to us to assess the damage, and the roofing companies in Florida were so busy, we did not get ours done until February.  We called upon an established and well-known company in Jacksonville, recommended by friends who are very picky in such matters.  They did a great job.  I called that hurricane season the "Big Wind Tour" of 2004.

We have friends living in Lake Wales, and my husband got a big laugh when he saw a National Geographic cover with a satellite photo of Florida covered by the tracks of four of 2004's hurricanes -- all of them intersecting over Polk County, where Lake Wales is located.  My husband scanned the photo, placed a target at the intersection with the words "you are here," and sent it for her to use as wallpaper on her computer.

That's what's called Florida humor.

So we sit and watch once more, and prepare.  I bought more bottled water today, and tomorrow my husband and I are going to place new foam tape on the outside window sills preparatory to putting up the boards, if we need to.  We have a Coleman stove, flashlights and battery-powered lanterns, radios, and other supplies.  I'll make sure I have all my medications current, and we'll fill the cars' gas tanks.  And with any luck, Irene will turn and head out to sea, not bothering Florida or North Carolina or any other part of the inhabited land masses.
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Weather in our Ancestors' Lives

It is June, so the weather is really heating up in Florida. It was 95 degrees (F.) today, and will be hot tomorrow, too. My washer and dryer are in the garage, which faces west, with a metal door which really gets hot in that summer afternoon sun, and puts the temperature in the garage during a Florida summer day in the range of 110 to 120 degrees. This is the time of year I start doing my laundry at 2:00 in the morning!

Thinking of that got me to thinking about weather and our ancestors. Weather influenced our ancestors' lives at least as much as it does ours, and in many ways probably more. Florida's early pioneers, the Spanish, went mucking about in the jungly Florida forests in all the heat and humidity, wearing mail, plate, or quilted armor. Not only did they not have air conditioning, they didn't have Gold Bond powder, either! Even in the late nineteenth century, when my husband's great-grandfather Daniel McLeod Marshall arrived from Alabama and settled first in Apopka and then in Lakeland, the weather was not suited to the clothing! Men dressed in suits, sometimes three-piece suits, and women had dresses that covered just about everything. I cannot imagine how uncomfortable people must have been in 1883, wearing all those clothes in a Florida summer.

Further back, weather was very much a factor in the life of my ancestor Samuel Packard, who arrived at Hingham, Massachusetts, in August of 1638. Hingham at the time was only three years old, and conditions were fairly primitive. Add to that the fact that the climate in New England was harsher than that in England, both in winter and in summer. Samuel and his fellow immigrants were mostly farmers, trying to get a living in harsh weather out of rocky New England soil. There are not many people more dependent on and more influenced by the weather than farmers.

It is also now hurricane season in Florida. Hurricane season begins 1 June and ends 30 November. When I was a child, the season ended on 1 November. The extension of the season to the end of the month is no guarantee of coverage; several years ago, there was a hurricane in April. I remember my mother telling me about the hurricane of 1926 that hit Pensacola, where she was raised. She was nine years old at the time. Back then, there was not the predictive capability we have today. We know a hurricane is coming several days before it gets to us, and we have time to take precautions, from boarding up windows and clearing potentially airborne items from our yards, to evacuating.

The captains of Spanish treasure ships in the sixteenth century didn't have any foreknowledge of approaching hurricanes, any more than my mother's family did in 1926. Many such ships came to rest at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, driven there by hurricanes. Some peoples' ancestors from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helped shipwrecked sailors and passengers on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Other people's ancestors lured the ships onto those shoals with false lights, so they could plunder the cargo. The rescuers were hampered by the weather, the "wreckers" abetted by it.

From sixteenth-century hurricanes to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, weather has been part of our ancestors' lives. We should try to find out what sort of weather events or climate factors may have influenced our ancestors' lives. And we would do our descendants a favor by noting important weather events in our own lives.