I talked to my friend Marsha yesterday. She grew up in Florida so has lived through many hurricane seasons. In five minutes I learned more about highs and lows from her than made sense in a lifetime. By Republican logic, living in Florida would qualify her to head FEMA but she has enough sense to reject such an offer. Anyway, given that major hurricanes are grinding their way through the Caribbean, I wanted to know how she lives with them. To me they are colossal electro-magnetic cyclop ant-eaters lumbering through ankle-deep oceans rummaging for prey. They have lightning veins, thunderbolt hearts and claws of hail and rain. They ransack everything they touch, sea and land, jamming their whirling razor-edged snouts into the fray, sucking up everything in sight. She seems them as weather.
Typical Marsha, she'd been out sailing the gulf in the morning and got back just as Gustav's rain set in. Her sense of timing is well honed but then she uses NOAA to monitor winds even as they are born moving across the deserts of Africa. She watches them cross the Atlantic and follows their arrival via local TV and radio when they finally approach landfall. As a kid, gulf water made it all the way into the kitchen of their little island home. That would be enough for me but, like she pointed out, everybody's got something. I'll take rattlesnakes.
Gustav will miss her area so she's got her eye on Hanna and a couple of others still far out at sea off the news radar. I suppose they'll be trouble just about the time we arrive in Guatemala. I am not a hurricane chaser. Don't want to be one and M. Lee assures me we will be far far away but crap! There is even a mean south wind raging here in Nevada this morning. I say Gustav's claws.
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