Bring it

I'm looking forward to Ike. As the barometer plunges, so rise my spirits.

I've been through my share of hurricanes, growing up in Houston. When Alicia hit, I gathered with friends in a Woodland Heights cottage, where we dropped acid and went outside to cling to trees and have the laughter torn out of our mouths by the screaming wind. The next morning I went downtown to marvel at the scene: streets knee-deep in shards of glass; rivers of glass sparkling in the skyscraper canyons.

When I moved to New York a hurricane made landfall there (Gloria, I believe) for the first time in 50 years. We had a boat we kept in Northport -- a 28-foot Dutch-built wooden sloop. My ex-husband, a Gulf Coast boy himself, was afraid of the damage the dinghy would do bashing over and over against the hull, so together we drove the valiant, ancient Plymouth out to Long Island, our headlights the lone counterpoint to the thousands and thousands streaming inland. Once we got to the marina, no one was there to take us out to our moorage, so J. stripped to his underwear and plunged into Long Island Sound to swim out and sink the dinghy. I stood on the shore in stinging rain and rising wind and utter dark and wept, convinced he would drown. He did not, and the dinghy was sunk, and the boat was saved, and New York was spared the full force of the storm.

There is no green anywhere else like the green of a hurricane sky. It's impossible to capture on film -- I've tried and tried. It's a watery, liquid green, but deep and strong, too, and in it even the enormous grey thunderheads look overwhelmed and pallid.

I vaguely remember a dreadful, dreadful hurricane, one of the C's, Celia, maybe, or Carmen, that came ashore while I was staying with my maternal grandparents in East Texas, so east we were pretty much in Louisiana. I say it was "dreadful" because that's what the grownups said, but in my heart I rejoiced with every flicker of the lights, and when the electricity failed we lit candles and burned them all the way down, then lit some more -- it took time in those days to get your power back, especially after a hurricane. I would beg to light the candles because I loved the faint sulfurous smell of the burning paper match, the pop of the wick as it caught fire, the curl of smoke when the match was blown out.


I'm really looking forward to Ike.

Must remember to buy some candles today.