We arose this morning from a lovely sleep to find Sister Wilma still partying in Cancun, staggering a little, expected to head home in twelve hours. The bad news is, she has been on that barstool every morning for days now, having stayed past closing time for yet another night. The new track (which looks just like the old track) says she will stumble into “south Florida” sometime tomorrow night, a bedraggled Category 2, and end up passed out in the big Atlantic bano by Tuesday.
Predictions. Ha! Spit and air.
Wilma doesn’t move, and then she does, and then she stops, and then they predict that she will stand up any moment now, but she doesn’t, and then when she finally does, just a little, they say, okay, okay, here we go, and she resettles her butt on that bar stool and says, give me another one of those big purple ones with the paper flowers.
Day after day.
Every few hours, there are new discussions, advisories, maps. She's coming. We don't know when. She'll be big. She'll be powerful. Or maybe not. She hasn't turned toward Florida yet, but we expect it to happen in the next few hours, landfall tomorrow. Pay attention, they say, day after day, because once "Dangerous Hurricane Wilma" starts moving, she will be here in hours, not days. No time, then, for last-minute gas lines or plywood rage or mass evacuation.
Mass evacuation. Nobody wants to stand at the end of that line, now that we know what we know. And yet, we wonder about those people evacuating from the Keys and other points south, invited up to Disney country for our "many hotel rooms still available" just in time to be at a new ground zero, if the models shifting the storm more to the northeast turn out to be the winners.
And then we go back to worrying about our own lives. Will Wilma be here in time to cancel our Cardiac test, we wonder? (Sadly, no.)
We try to breathe normally, while we wait for the gun to fire. We check the weather at every opportunity. It gets worse, when the eyewall moves ashore in Mexico just far enough to harm the people there, but it does not actually change. We dig out the plastic cutlery and restack our cans of milk. We eye our neighbors' tree branches, and bring the trash cans into the garage. The clouds are here to stay now, Wilma's skirts flung all the way across the Gulf to us, far to the east, just to let us know we are not forgotten. Our air has gone damp and soft, and the pale grey light makes all the green things glow. There is something about the news, rerunning footage of hotel windows exploding in Cancun, that makes us stare into our freezers, defrost a few things we would otherwise save, and serve up a preemptive feast in honor of electricity. All over town, dogs with better manners are loitering in the kitchen this week, slick and giddy in the rain of scraps. Every night, there is a new report, but there is no news. We watch it again anyway, even those exploding windows, and go to bed.
This evening, Wilma has not yet made her move, but forecasters predict she will do so within hours, that she has begun erratic movement again, that this will resolve into forward motion any moment now, that she will make landfall (somewhere) in Florida (sometime) day after tomorrow (-ish). Slowly, progressively, we are failing to react to these bulletins. Recently it has come to light that all over Florida there are survivors of last year's hurricanes whose losses are unrelieved, whose livelihoods are gone, whose homes are unrepaired. Still, we are lucky, and we know it. Our situations are not nearly the worst, not even on the list of the global truly terrible. The world has grown so full of disaster that it cannot fail to change us all, in some basic way. We grow used to a trip that is very unlike the brochures, and we learn how to pack for it. Tonight, we will watch the news again from Mexico, where the tragedy is written and not yet told; from Pakistan, where the snow has begun, while people sleep under chairs and bits of carpet; from Afghanistan and Iraq, where we are daily reminded of all that is obscene about war and ignorance and hatred; from the tsunami belt, where children are sold, and from the lost villages of Africa, where they are slaughtered by those who are charged to protect them; from empty ground on our own Gulf coast, where people were blasted into the stone age in a single day, with not a scrap left behind to rebuild; and from Utah and Texas and the other dry places to which New Orleans has gone for good, while developers snap and snarl over her soggy remains.
Wilma has not moved, but will certainly do so any moment, or not, because that is the way of things. Tonight, while the lights are still on, and some of the plumbing still works, and it has not yet begun to rain into the living room, snug in our hoarding of canned goods and bottled water, pleased that we failed to restore the yard to order after Charlie and Frances and Jeanne (which means the lawn chairs and other flying objects are still in the garage), we will bunk down between central walls of concrete block, in hallways and closets and windowless corners of ex-dining rooms, on mattresses and futons, with sleeping bags and quilts, the lantern and radio and dog crates standing at the ready, as we have every night for the past thirteen months, and feel safe.
Sort of.
