This year marks my sixth consecutive year as an outside observer of the Atlantic Hurricane Season, and I think I'm finally getting used to it. For the first nineteen years of my life, I lived right smack dab on the Gulf Coast in an area that had seen rather a lot of tropical weather over the years. So, every tropical depression, tropical storm or hurricane was a matter of concern for me and everyone I knew. At home, we would warily watch the Weather Channel of a summer evening, waiting with interest or anxiety, depending on the current storm's projected chance of reaching our area, for that night's tropical update. (I can still remember one Weather Channel reporter's laughable attempts at reading a Spanish-language warning during 1992's Hurricane Andrew: "Oonuh tore-men-tuh moy pelly-gross-oh.")
At school, every May as the annual Atlantic Hurricane Season kicked off, our local T.V. station's weatherman (or woman) would pay a visit to each class to pass out free hurricane tracking charts (marked with the station's logo) and teach us, yet again, how to track a storm using the coordinates given out on the news. For us kids, these days were particularly exciting because they gave us hope that an early season tropical storm might get us out of school early for the year.
My first full-blown hurricane wasn't until I was eighteen years old. It was July of 2003, less than a month before I was set to leave home (ostensibly forever) for college, and the storm was Claudette. She was small, barely rising to a Category 2 just as she made landfall...just in time for her to weaken again, falling quickly down the Saffir-Simpson scale, through Category 1 and tropical depression and, within a day, into mere "big storm" status. I even had to go in to work that morning, though they sent me home before the worst of the storm hit.
And then I shipped off to Abilene, Texas, a good 380 miles inland from the coast: 380 miles from all the action, as far as I was concerned. Oh, we occasionally got the remnants of a hurricane or tropical storm that had made landfall down near my hometown or, once, on Mexico's western shores. But it was nothing like being there to see the real thing, the storm in all her glory and terrific power. I consoled myself by printing out tracking charts from on-line (sadly, with no KVIC logo on them) and filling them out on my own.
Then in the summer of 2005 (oh, fateful season!) I started working at the International Office, and soon I discovered that one of my co-workers was a fellow native of the Gulf Coast who, unlike all the inlanders we worked with, sympathized completely with my need to track storms all summer long. That year, Lauren and I tracked storm after storm together, posting our beautifully color-coordinated charts on the office wall for everyone to see. From Arlene to Dennis to Katrina to Rita to Wilma and even on into Alpha, Beta, Gamma territory, we followed that inexorable line-up. As the season worsened into what eventually became the most active of recorded history, our record-keeping took on an ever more urgent tone. And after the disasters of Katrina, every new storm that threatened the Gulf Coast, and by extension our homes and loved ones, became the object of fascination not merely for Lauren and me but for everyone. Suddenly people wanted to hear our stories, wanted to know what it was like to grow up in the shadow of these massive monsters of storms. I said a little thank you in my heart to all the weather reporters over the years who had made sure my tracking skills were up to snuff.
A couple of years later, Lauren moved away, and though I kept our storm-tracking traditions alive, someone it just wasn't the same without her...
And now here I am, five years later, once again far from the action in the Gulf of Mexico. I haven't bothered tracking any storms yet, partly because this early in the season the storms simply aren't worth bothering with and partly because other disasters have sapped my attention (See "BP Snafu"). And one more thing: This year, for the first time, I'm planning to take an active interest in the Pacific Typhoon Season, home of about a third of all the world's tropical cyclone action. Next month will be August, the busiest month for storms in the Northwestern Pacific. Even now, I'm getting my blank charts and colored markers ready...
