THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 13, 1995 TAG: 9508110349
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY DAVE ADDIS, STAFF WRITER
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Something sort of troubling happened a few days ago, when Hurricane Erin was trundling across the Caribbean, drawing a bead on the Florida coast.
Forecasters everywhere, from the local stations to The Weather Channel to CNN, were trying to show us where the storm might hit. That's vital information, and it's good they put so much effort into it. My little sister lives down there, so I was curious to see if it might hit her house. Or her new car. She's very proud of both.
Anyway, in the process of showing the storm's path, each forecaster followed the same routine. They would roll aerial photos of the storm across a big map of the Caribbean basin, and the hurricane would munch its way across the Florida Straits like some monstrous Pac-Man loosed from nature's own video arcade, gobbling up little islands as it gained strength for its attack on the mainland.
Each time they backed up the videotape and rolled the storm forward again, toward Florida, the hurricane would chew its way across Andros Island, one of the northernmost of the Bahamas chain. Back and forth went the storm, eating up Andros every time.
I must have seen that island disappear a dozen times, which was bothersome because I spent some time there a few months ago and consider a couple of its inhabitants to be friends. I kept wondering what had happened on the island as the storm broke across it. Did anybody die? Was the damage severe?
Nobody ever said. Not on the television, and not in the newspapers the next day.
Andros is a quiet place. Only 1,500 people live there, and they're friendly to the few visitors they get, most of whom are bone-fishers or divers. There is a small U.S. Navy installation there, too, but even that wasn't enough to merit a mention of how the island had fared.
Instead, there were many interviews with Floridians desperate to buy candles and batteries, and lots of videotape of broken tree limbs and damaged service-station signs.
This wouldn't have bothered me a whole lot until a couple of years ago, when a cab driver on another Caribbean island shamed me rather badly into understanding what's important when a storm is coming.
I met the cabbie about 5 a.m. at a cheap hotel on the road outside Castries, on the island of St. Lucia. I was working my way home after a long stay on Grenada, and had been out of touch with the States for a while. I was tired, nearly broke and in a foul mood. A couple of hours earlier I'd called my girlfriend to tell her I'd be home the next day. I learned that a hurricane was bearing down on Norfolk, that it was less than a day away.
The cabbie and I chewed this over on the ride to the airport. Then we were quiet while I mentally tallied the damage: All my deck furniture was still out, which I was sure would be pitched through my plate-glass doors in any real storm, and that would lead to untold wreckage inside my home, which faces the Chesapeake Bay. Water damage. Ruined computer, television and other electronics. And I'd been meaning to get a safe-deposit box for my insurance papers and such, but I hadn't, and they were in a box directly across from the windows that were certain to be smashed.
I was running these mental calculations as we pulled up to the little wooden terminal building. The cabbie set my bag down and thanked me for the couple of bucks.
Then, as I turned to go, he grabbed my hand, held it a moment and said, ``I hope your people are safe from the storm.''
I prayed that he didn't see the shame on my face, because I'd never given a thought to what might happen to any people I knew should the storm hit my town. I'd been worried about furniture and stuff, not much of which I'd really miss if it turned up gone tomorrow.
Upon telling this story to a friend the other day, he said, yeah, that's how it is down in the Caribbean: When the storm passes they count heads, and if everybody's there, then everything's OK. They don't have a whole lot to begin with, most of them, and what they do have is shared among the family. And family is a pretty loose term in the islands. Sometimes it includes everybody you know.
We could learn a bit from that. It would make us better neighbors.
There's another storm coming this week - it's like that in August. This one begins with F, but I forget its name right now. It's not important, yet, and I'm sure we'll know the name well in a day or two.
But this time I hope we'll hear a word or two on how the people are - the people in Florida, to be sure, but also the people on those little islands that hurricanes gobble up before they get to Miami.
They're our neighbors, pretty good neighbors at that, and they should count for more with us than broken tree limbs and overturned service-station signs. by CNB