Everybody asks this question when you move to or live on a tropical island. Do people ask the same question of folks who move or live in Florida or the Carolinas or apparently even Washington, DC and New York? I just don’t know. Yet, here I am enjoying a lovely day in the tropics. My cisterns are now full from the recent rains. The sky is a pretty light blue with some fluffy, white clouds. The breeze is quite comfortable. Life is good. It is, however, August, so I am tracking a hurricane.
What is unusual is that this is not a storm that is coming towards me (thank goodness). This is Hurricane Irene. She is traveling up the east coast of the United States. The outer banks in the Carolinas have been evacuated. The dedication of the MLK monument in DC has been postponed. New York City is bracing for the storm. One surfer has already died surfing the storm waves. It makes me wonder if people always fixate on the threat of natural disasters when pondering places to live or if there is something about the Caribbean that makes then focus on the hurricane risk.
I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, a place that Mother Nature generally overlooks when she gets aggravated. Sure with all those rivers coming together there is always the risk and the reality of flooding. And every how-many-ever decades there may be reports of a tornado, but generally Pittsburgh is a pretty safe place. So we didn’t really think about nature’s wrath.
I suppose that when I moved out to California, people must have commented on the earthquake issue. Surely they would have; but I was a new graduate in love moving across the country with a guy I had only known for a couple of weeks so everyone was warning me about so many apparent errors in my judgment that the whole earthquake thing must have gotten buried in the mountains of unsolicited – and unheeded – advice. (BTW, yes ‘that guy’ is my husband, Michael.)
Whether you are talking about earthquakes or hurricanes, though, people tend to overlook the fact that the risk areas are huge. The Atlantic Ocean is very big, and Anguilla is very small. California is very big, and my house there was very small. So while, I felt a half a dozen earthquakes in my 15 years in the Bay Area of San Francisco, I never personally suffered any damage. Not even from the horrible, Loma Prieta earthquake that devastated the area in 1989. At my house, not a single picture was askew.
Yet, this week, in Maryland where my older brother lives seemingly safe in his nearly land-locked, mid-Atlantic state, he has already experienced an uncharacteristic earthquake and is right now waiting for Hurricane Irene to pass by. The irony is not lost.
Here’s hoping that in the end it’s not as bad as folks fear.