By Don Klein
I’ve never been evacuated before. There I was sitting in my daughter’s kitchen in Salisbury
We’ve be warned over and over again about the serious nature of Hurricane Irene and there is no reason not to believe the counseling. The storm served to remind us all that we are mere inconsequential human beings with limited power despite our delusions of invulnerability.
It also brings to the forefront the fact that we really care about each other when faced with the threat to life and limb. My daughter, Rachel, and her husband, Billy, opened their house to us without so much of a second thought. Besides everyone seemed to be phoning each other to make sure all is well this friends and family.
Interestingly the hurricane takes priority over everything else. It dominates all minds. Category one, or two, or three? News of the direction of the thrust and the impact of the surge inundate our grey matter. We all become experts on hurricanes, overnight. What to do? Where to go? What to take with you? And so on.
Cancellation of planned events clutter the list of what’s happening – or better still, what’s not happening -- that weekend. But for the most part all of this is just things to fill the mind while we all do the only thing people can do in a hurricane. Hunker down and wait it out, read a good book or watch television as long as you have electrical power.
Or just snooze in a comfortable chair and nibble on snacks between meals. Some fidgety people are inclined to take out their laptops and write essays about the storm. In the end the storm turned out to be less harmful than we expected, at least in our neck of the woods.
Others did not fair as well. Up and down the coast the damage was mostly from the rain than from the wind which is the ultimate threat from a hurricane. Floods ruined homes and businesses from North Carolina Vermont
The two-day displacement to the relative safety of Salisbury, however, was in a way a pleasant divergence from the ordinary – if you can call the threat of a vicious storm a mere divergence. We arrived at Rachel and Billy’s house in late morning after an uneventful trip from Ocean City
We expected the main roads to be jammed with coastal exiles like us so like clever locals we made the trip along all the back roads we had explored over 17 years of life on the Eastern Shore only to discover when we needed to go on the main highway for the last few final miles of the journey, it was wide open.
Where was everyone? we asked. They either left before us or after us but had the thoughtfulness to leave the roads open during our time of travel. That should have been an omen that the impending storm was not up to expectations. It was Friday, still a beautiful day and would not start raining until later.
This unscheduled visit had its benefits. My wife and I spent the afternoon with my daughter and two granddaughters shopping for school supplies, something I have not done for at least three decades or more. We went to a book store and had lunch together. When my son-in-law came home later he started battening down everything that was loose in the yard with the help of a few neighbors.
The best part of the weekend was that we had meals as a family on sequential days for the first time in years. It gave me a new feeling of kinship that seems to get lost when your children grow up, marry and move into there own homes. We have had occasional dinners at each other’s homes over the years, but never for two days or more in a row. We can thank Irene for rekindling that familial feeling.
On Sunday, after the storm had whizzed by overnight we watched on television as the mayor of our town announce that residents were welcome back almost immediately. Visitors had to wait a few hours longer. We packed the few belonging we had brought with us and left for home with smiles and hugs and kisses.
The journey back was an uneventful as the evacuation trip two days earlier and in less than an hour we could see the Ocean City skyline in the distance as we traversed one of the two bridges leading back home. Then a strange thing happened.
There was a police barricade on the road and we had to show identification to continue on the bridge. It reminded me of when I was first in Europe back some 60-plus years ago after World War II. Everyone, except GIs, had to carry ID cards with their name, address and picture wherever they went and had to show them whenever demanded by a police officer. To me that was as un-American as eating octopus.
