An old friend and fellow transplant had a good line about what it means to live in Florida. Summer, he was fond of saying, is our penance for not having to deal with winter up north. I’ve said it a few times myself. Given the ominous nature of our tropical weather the last few years, however, I might amend my friend’s expression with two words: Hurricane season. Surviving our hot, humid summers has become second nature after 36 years living here. You deal with it, dress light and go about your life. Of course, being able to move quickly from one airconditioned place to the next helps. So maybe you don’t do things like go to the beach as often, if at all.
Instead, you look forward to, say, December or February, when you’ll be hitting a favorite stretch of sand on Holmes Beach and making the obligatory stop at Duffy’s Tavern afterwards on a gorgeous winter weekend afternoon. Then you think, yeah, if we can just make it through hurricane season in one piece. It’s the price we pay for living here, all right. Like wearing a bull’s-eye on our backs beginning every June. It’s six months of dread. A lot of folks hereabouts have the admirable ability to put all that out of their mind. Why worry, they say as they make another cast on Lake Manatee. Or as they concentrate over a three-foot putt at Bradenton Country Club, River Run or Waterlefe. Or go kayaking on the upper Manatee River or Braden River.
Then there was the philosophical response by a Palmetto pal to the distinct possibility of losing her home and everything in it to a monster hurricane. “So what,” she said. “It’s just stuff.” If that works for some people, cool. Not me. Must be my Irish fatalism. Take that September morning when I was on my bike, heading home from the gym, enjoying the cooler temperatures, refreshing breezes and blue sky. This is what it’s all about, I thought. Won’t be long before it cools down even more. October’s right around the corner. Then another voice spoke to me: Count your blessings. There were two more months left to hurricane season and it had been a lulu already. Within the span of a few weeks, we dodged Tropical Storm Fay and Hurricane Gustav, and then there was Hurricane Hanna lollygagging off our east coast before lumbering north. Then Hurricanes Ike and Josephine lurked right behind, somewhere beyond that distant horizon on the Atlantic.
Talk about deja vu all over again. I decided I wasn’t going to take any chances. Up went the plywood the weekend when we were in Ike’s so-called “Cone of Death,” but then the storm skirted the Keys and blew by Florida en route to the Gulf of Mexico and the Texas coast. Rather than fool with taking all that plywood down and putting it back up for the next hurricane alert, I left it all up until October. Crackhouse chic suits me fine at this time of year. It harkened back to 2004 when Charley, Frances, Jean and Ivan stormed across Florida within an emotionally draining six weeks that August and September. But we made it past that, took the shutters down after two months, and Manatee County managed to avoid any more tropical calamities in 2005, 2006 and 2007.
We got to enjoy a fall in Florida just the way we love it. Didn’t have to put up the plywood once, thank goodness. Got to do some really important things, too. Like being swept up in high school football season for three years in a row without any postponements or cancellations brought on by the threatening tropics. One of my small pleasures of living in Florida is being able to revel under those Friday night lights.
The only hurricanes I want to see this time of year are the ones playing for Manatee High School. Indeed, another reward for enduring our steamy summers is enjoying our beautiful autumns. Which reminds me. My pal who came up with that line about summers being out penance? He finally had it with hurricane season. After Frances and Jean thrashed his tony subdivision on Florida’s East Coast four years ago, he up and sold the house and went back north. He retired in Gainesville, Ga.
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