I come from a long line of folks with a genetic predisposition of being extraordinarily loud. Loud talkers, loud laughers. Yellers. Even eaters. If you heard my Mother eating toast you would think she was grinding granite slabs into gravel. But there is one time when we all become completely silent, and not because we want to, but because if we’re not we risk real-life consequences. That time is when the weather report is on.
My father was obsessed with the weather. He would often stop a conversation and ask, “Did you feel that? I think it just dropped two degrees.” and stare off into the distance looking for storm clouds. Did it really drop 2 degrees? Unlikely, but when he said it, you sure thought it did. I have never known a person in my life that welcomed a natural disaster like my father. He’d see tornados in the forecast and you could almost see him fantasizing about saving people out of half-blown-out buildings, directing traffic around debris in a road, and eating nothing but canned food by a fire with a hand-carved ladle.
Some people like the holiday season, or apple picking season, not my Dad. The holiest of all seasons at the Walter house was Hurricane Season. From June to November, every moment of free time was devoted to either watching the weather report or scanning the weather radio for clues on when the next catastrophe would be on its way.
Once upon a time, the local grocery store handed out a little pamphlet about hurricane season safety and in this pamphlet, there was a map of the southern coast with a grid drawn over it so that if you were so inclined, you could plot the movements of a hurricane yourself. Why anyone would do this when you could just watch in on the television is beyond me, but I can tell you one fella that did. Yes. The minute a disturbance was given a name a brand new colored pencil came out of the box, the pocket knife sharpened it to a crooked point, and the tracking began.
First, the old man would watch the news and get an approximate location then he would fire up the weather radio and wait for them to list off the geographical coordinates. So help you if even breathed loud when the coordinates were coming through. “Now I lost it! How am I ever going to get the trajectory right if you keep breathing so loud!” I can not tell you how many times I was sent to my room as a child because I interrupted the weather radio giving coordinates to a storm that would never make landfall.
Things hit a real fever pitch around August/September when the Atlantic really started churning up. There were times he was tracking 5 systems at once. There would be so many colors on the tracking chart it would rival even the most spectacular Pride Flag. At a certain point the grocery store stopped handing out the charts but that didn’t slow down our rural hurricane tracking center. Graph paper with a hand-drawn Georgia/Florida coast did just fine.
The manual tracking died the minute my Dad figured out he could see a real-time radar on the family computer. Instead of worrying so much about hurricanes, he enjoyed sitting at the computer and watching clouds go overhead and then hitting the refresh button to see if any of them were picked up on the radar.
In all the time these shenanigans were going on I only recall one time that a hurricane came far enough inland to do any damage. A limb went across the road in front of our house and took out a power line. Before the electricity could go off in the house my Dad was out there in a poncho directing traffic, which was only 2 cars, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, a gleam in his eye. That may have been the happiest I ever saw him.
My wife brought to attention a fact I never knew the other day. Apparently, whenever I am talking with her and the weather report goes on I immediately go silent and give undivided attention to the news. I guess it’s another one of those things that have been ingrained in me. Although, I hate to admit that a hurricane came through last year and knocked my power out and I didn’t even know if we had a flashlight in the house.