Two things are funny about this: First, I didn’t actually experience Andrew, because I didn’t move to Florida until 1993. Second, that was the extent of hurricane preparations back then—duct tape to be sure that if the windows shattered, the glass would stick together, instead of splintering into tiny and dangerous little pieces. When you’ve grown up with hurricanes, their memories—like the tape residue—never quite go away.

My first real hurricane was Erin in 1995. Then nine years old, I had no idea what to expect, but figured that all hurricanes were the same and this one would tear my house apart. So I took matters into my own hands. I got that green plastic mover’s wrap you can find at U-Haul, fully wrapped the 13-inch CRT television I’d negotiated having in my bedroom, and put all of my books, Barbies, and beanie babies in plastic storage bins.

During Erin, every window in our home was covered with plywood, so inside the house it felt like it was 2 a.m. even during the day. I plopped down to watch the living room TV, but all broadcasts had the same information on loop until the next National Hurricane Center forecast was released (every 6 hours). After several hours of this, I decided that my house was not going to flood and that I could unwrap my bedroom television and go back to watching The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

I don’t mean to be flip—I know that hurricanes can kill people and destroy entire regions, and, when response and relief are slow to arrive, the aftermath of these storms can be even deadlier, as Puerto Rico is tragically experiencing right now.

The author as a child in front of her family home in Davie, Florida, October 28, 1994. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

But for those who have lived in hurricane-prone places, these epic disasters can come to feel routine. For me ever since Erin, hurricanes have been business as usual to me. Floridians rarely flinch at anything weaker than a Category 3. You go through the motions: put plywood on the windows, get enough water and non-perishable goods, fill every car you own with gas to the brim, and hope for the best.

As a kid, I always hoped the hurricanes would come during the week so school would get cancelled. If we were really lucky (which I was a few times), the storm would hit on a test day and I’d have a few extra days to study.

The familiarity of the pre-hurricane procedure was, in its way, comforting. My family would sit on the couch and flip between The Weather Channel and Spanish news. My mom would go up to the TV and point to all possible trajectories, always deciding that we’d be a direct hit. My dad would then reason with her. But we were all experiencing it together.

The feeling that this was a holiday continued during the lull after the storm passed through. It almost feels like Christmas morning, where everything is quiet, and no one is in the streets yet and riding their bicycles.

The storms, like birthdays or holidays, eventually become part of the way you remember life.

In 2004, there was Ivan, which made me late for my first day of college in Chicago. The airport didn’t reopen until an hour after my flight was supposed to take off. Similarly, Ernesto in 2006 made me one week late to my study-abroad program in Paris.

I remember Katrina. My mother’s prediction of our home being a direct hit finally came true in August 2005 when the eye of Katrina made its first landfall just north of Miami as “only” a category 1. It was nothing compared to what happened in Louisiana, but it still managed to leave a million Floridians without power and cause $630 million dollars’ worth of damage.

In the lull after that storm, sitting in my bedroom, I managed to write to one of my dorm mates from college, who lived in New Orleans. I warned that as a category 1 storm, it’d been very powerful, and hoped he’d be careful. He wrote back to confirm he and his family had evacuated to north Florida. When we got back to school a few weeks later he let us know that his home was under 6 feet of water and was a total loss.

That same season was when I experienced my first hurricane from afar. Wilma ripped through Florida later in 2005. It was one of the latest-forming storms I can remember, hitting in late October. Comfortably welcoming fall in Chicago, I talked with my parents every day. They called to say they were safe and had a generator to power the fridge. Within a few days, my dad had run hundreds of feet of extension cords to power our three neighbors’ refrigerators. It took three weeks for their power to get restored.

A map showing the author’s family home during Hurricane Irma, September 6, 2017. Photo courtesy of Dulce Vasquez.

I still visit often, but I haven’t lived in Florida since 2005. As it happens, no major hurricane since Wilma in 2005 had made direct landfall in Florida, until this year. Over the last 12 years, my family had dealt with warnings and evacuations, and my parents, instead of scurrying to Home Depot for plywood, replaced those outdated jalousie windows with some double paned windows with beautiful colonial grilles. To protect them, they invested their tax refunds on accordion shutters that take no more than 5 minutes per window to close.

But Irma brought the hurricanes back home. From Los Angeles, where I live, I started tracking Irma as soon as it became a category 5 storm. On Monday, my mom texted “Looks like pinche Irma is coming.” Harvey had just destroyed Houston, and this was poised to be an even stronger hurricane, so there I was again, every six hours looking for the next National Hurricane Center forecast update.

On Tuesday, I asked my mom if they wanted to evacuate, and volunteered to book their flights. She said they’d wait and make a call on Thursday. On Wednesday, I sent my mom a graphic of the latest trajectory, which showed Irma blowing directly through their house. I asked again if they wanted to evacuate.

On Thursday my mom said she wanted to evacuate but my dad didn’t want to. My anxiety and frustration grew. That night I had a dream that the roof of our home tore off. On Friday, I took action and told mom that the safest place in the house was in the bathroom (most inner, central place in the house, without windows). I wasn’t sure if that’s true or not, but it made me feel better.

On Saturday, my aunt, uncle, and cousin came to my parents’ house—they live in a mobile home and those are always unsafe. Curfew started at 4 p.m.

On Sunday, as soon as I woke up and still in bed, I texted my mom to check in, but my iMessages were not going through. That meant they lost power and/or cell service. I started to panic. I texted everyone else in the house: Mom, Dad, brother, cousin, aunt. Nothing. Finally, after what seemed like the longest 20 minutes of my life, a message finally came through. All were safe. Relief.

Through the whole process, every ounce of me wanted to be there, in the storm with my family.

The post Longing for the Softer Side of Hurricanes appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Though people didn’t use the word “hurricane” much back then, it assuredly was one, most likely a Category 4. The Great September Gale was the second major hurricane to strike New England since the coming of white settlers, and since that time, only the famous “Long Island Express” hurricane of 1938 is believed to have been more destructive.

I came upon the Great September Gale while I was researching Americans’ perceptions of climate during the 1810s. This decade is particularly interesting because the climate all around the world temporarily cooled for about a decade. And at the same time, many social institutions, including science, were in significant transition. The September Gale is one of numerous weather and climate events that people remembered and recorded, especially in their diaries. Some peoples’ descriptions of the 1815 gale took me back to a tornado I experienced as a teenager in Nebraska in 1988. After that storm, the streets of Omaha filled with branches and bricks, much like Boston’s after the gale. When I read a newspaper account, the centuries just telescoped into a common moment in time.

Hurricanes have loomed large in our consciousness lately. Last month, the nation observed the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, an event whose meaning and legacy we are still quite painfully trying to evaluate. Unlike Katrina, the New England hurricane of September 1815 did not cause significant demographic shifts or provoke hard questions about our responsibilities to care for each other in disaster situations, but it does provide an opportunity to consider Americans’ attitudes toward storms—and our climate—then and now.

In 1815, most New Englanders called events of this size and intensity a “gale” or “tempest.” In an era before detailed weather forecasting became widespread, people tended to view extreme weather events as simply a natural feature of the places where they lived. Their understanding of weather and scientific phenomena came from the kind of earthy knowledge, colored by folklore and astrology, found in popular farmers’ almanacs. For example, the Boston-published Physician’s Almanac for June 1817 is a dizzying jumble of planetary and zodiac symbols and precise notations of tides and solar positions. Simple advice such as, “Good weather for vegetation, if not too cold,” and “Look for much rain,” is interspersed with platitudes and sayings such as, “Weakness is the only incorrigible fault men have.”

Americans’ views about weather and climate in the 1810s were more holistic than ours today. Gales and tempests were related, many people thought, to phenomena like lightning, volcanism, and earthquakes. The 1815 storm occurred only a few years after the powerful New Madrid earthquakes in Missouri commanded public attention, and less than a year before the bizarre climate anomalies of the “Year Without Summer” (1816)—which involved snowstorms in June and killing frosts in the dog days of August. In the 1810s, the idea of an “electric fluid” surrounding and suffusing the world—disturbances in which manifested themselves as earthquakes, waterspouts, hurricanes, and thunderstorms—was quite mainstream. “[A]ll observation convinces us,” wrote one author in an 1812 article in The Port-Folio, referring to this electric fluid, “that these phenomena are marked by its presence and arise from its agency.” For most people the Earth, the oceans, atmosphere and the heavens above it were all interconnected systems like those of a human body.

We ask very different kinds of questions today about the weather—and they mostly concern the future. Is that tropical depression going to become a hurricane? How strong is it going to be? Where will it come ashore? Many of the factors that made Katrina such a painful experience involved this future dimension, centering upon questions about what authorities should have known or done in advance of the storm’s landfall. It’s right that we ask these questions; the people of Boston and Providence could not prepare for the 1815 gale in advance. When they talked about weather, their preoccupations centered mostly around agricultural concerns: when to plant your winter wheat and when frosts could be expected that might damage your corn. Their conception of future weather was vague and mostly cyclical, tethered very tightly to natural rhythms observed in previous seasons. For them, the most important weather was that of the past.

Our current emphasis on weather in the future tense—and our reliance upon minutely specialized fields of expertise to explain scientific questions—has made it harder for us to appreciate specific weather events as part of a global ecosystem. Hurricanes are not a singular phenomenon. They are powered by warm sea surface temperatures and set in motion by wind patterns. The scientific consensus is that industries and other human activity are affecting these processes, driving up sea surface temperatures, increasing the intensity of hurricanes. Yet the connection between climate change and hurricanes is somewhat murky in public consciousness because it’s impossible to prove that this individual hurricane or that one was “caused” by global warming. The compartmentalization and specialization of modern scientific disciplines has greatly increased our overall scientific understanding, but sometimes it makes it harder for us to see the forest for the trees.

For many New Englanders in 1815, it was intuitively obvious that everything in the sky, and most everything on the ground, was connected somehow to everything else. It would have come as no surprise to vintners in 1815 New England that wine grapes harvested in the aftermath of the Great September Gale tasted like salt. Some took the interconnectedness a step further, seeing in it a higher meaning. Shortly after the gale, a deeply religious young woman wrote in her diary, “[W]ho can tell what providence has designed by this judgment? We cannot think ’tis sent for nothing.”

In 2015, we obviously know much more about hurricanes than we did 200 years ago, but looking back closely and carefully can be useful, too. History is more than a laundry list of problems or mistakes that we keep solely so we can avoid repeating them. Sometimes it’s a reminder that the view from the present can be more narrow and restrictive than the view from the past.

The post When Americans Understood That Weather Was Connected to Larger Forces appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.