Weather notwithstanding, sometimes it’s best to ride it out

Native North Carolinians — one of my favorite subsets of humanity — used to roll their eyes when I wished for a Category 5 hurricane.

“You damn Yankees,” they’d drawl, “ought not be temptin’ fate.”

But I made no secret of my deep desire to witness the worst.

I’d ridden out a couple of Cat 4s, a few 3s and more 2s than I could count, but I harbored a hope to experience a 5 in all its fury.

My wife and I used to make a point of heading to “our” spot in Atlantic Beach, setting up the chairs and the umbrella, our lunch and sundry beverages packed in the cooler, and just stare into the distance, watching clouds building on the horizon, waves crashing.

That was the thing about hurricanes … you got plenty of notice.

Three, 400 nautical miles offshore, weather experts fanned the flames of fear, using scary language like “apocalyptic,” “biblical proportions” and “worse than an ABBA reunion.”

Well, I made up that last one, but you get the general idea.

Most of the time, those bundles of potentially devastating energy dissipated or headed out to sea, where they died quiet deaths.

And still I bided my time, for more than 20 hurricane seasons, awaiting a Cat 5, something that never happened. There’s a lesson in there somewhere, something about being careful what you ask for, but that’s never really been my style. I’m a weather daredevil.

I remember a Sunday night in summer 2000. I had no job, no prospects, hadn’t even typed up a proper resume, preferring to spend my days and nights in the pursuit of more, well, satisfying pleasures, things like cooking and bike riding, writing, playing ball.

The house we rented was an antebellum monstrosity, with a top floor we never dared enter, believing there were dozens of bats hanging from the spider-webbed ceiling, patient, knowing that one night, someone would open that creaky door and they’d be set free.

The basement was even weirder. The unfinished floor was just dust and dirt, the walls a water-stained concrete prayer that was never answered and a furnace more fickle than a ’70s girl in a tube top.

But my favorite feature was a walk-in freezer that stored — somewhat inexplicably — a vast collection of canned goods, items like stir fry vegetables, bamboo shoots and chow mein noodles.

The door to the secret room was padlocked and chained, which only piqued my curiosity, but I was wary of Chinese cunning, having watched a lot of “Pink Panther” movies that always seemed to have a fight scene between Inspector Clouseau and Kato Fong.

The house’s front porch was even more foreboding, what with its unreliable wooden slats forming flooring that might best be described as adventuresome, which made sense in an “Addams Family” kind of way, offering a dangerous walk to the doorbell.

That hot August night, to return to our narrative, I was all geared up for a whopper of a thunderstorm, the transistor radio tuned to the oldies station, the charcoal briquettes cooling after a steak and baked potato dinner, the sky filled with jagged bolts of lightning.

I had no way of knowing — because the town’s tornado siren never went off, at least I never heard its clarion call — a twister was roaring in from the west, about to lay waste to vast swaths, hopscotching its way down Main Street, heading directly at the house.

Fortunately, I learned the next morning it skipped us by a block.

But tornadoes aren’t like hurricanes. Oh, they both possess damaging winds and seem to have it in for shotgun shacks and trailer parks, but twisters can just casually drop from the sky, something we all understood after seeing “The Wizard of Oz.”

What, then, to make of blizzards such as the one we experienced over the weekend? On the one hand, folks had plenty of notice, color-coded maps dominating the news feeds, shots of anxious shoppers and empty shelves in grocery stores, warnings about downed power lines and roadways too dangerous to challenge. On the other, there was a skeptical, “been there, done that” mentality.

That, you’ll doubtless not be surprised to hear, was where I chose to pitch my tent as the warnings grew more dire and panic spiked. I remembered the winter of 1978 when a storm they called a “hurricane blizzard” roared through town, leaving behind a couple of feet of snow on top of a killer glaze of ice, buffeted by howling winds that hit 70 mph, all but paralyzing the place for several days.

I was a month into my first real job, living in my first apartment, closing in on my 23rd birthday. There was no way I could coax my ’69 Impala out of the parking lot, so I sort of slid downtown, my sneakers giving me enough traction to make it safely to the office, where a skeleton crew of newspaper pros was gathering.

We printed a paper every day during the crisis, though only a few were delivered, owing to the impassable road conditions. Still, we took pride in not shutting down, going above and beyond the call.

In the end, I suppose, that’s all anyone can do when fire and ice rain down and it’d be easy to give up. You keep on fighting.

Any alternative is unacceptable, and if that means that occasionally it looks like the worst could happen, it’s gratifying to tempt fate.

Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 1317 Troy Road, Ashland, OH 44805. He invites you to join him on his Facebook page, where the whole point of living fully is riding the storm out.