The most terrifying experience of my life started at 5:04 p.m. on October 17, 1989, and ended only 15 seconds later, but that was enough. One moment, I was watching the World Series pregame. The next, the 6.9 Loma Prieta earthquake was flinging me against a doorjamb as I watched a tree undulate like God was doing a rubber-pencil trick. Later, I walked out to the middle of the street, where I hoped a building or a tree could not fall on me, sat down, wrapped my arms around my knees and waited to stop shaking.

What makes an earthquake terrifying is self-evident. The ground, a metaphor for solidity and stability, erupts. The less obvious terror is the noise, a thunderclap roaring from beneath you, every surface of your home becoming a membrane playing the sound of the earth pulling itself apart. I would gladly live through all that again if it meant skipping another hurricane. If nothing else, there's less bullshit about earthquakes.

I'm in the Tampa Bay area now. The worst part of most hurricanes is the existential doom, knowing that your fate has been decided but waiting days to find out what it is, like a production of Waiting for Godot that lasts for a week and stands at least a slight chance of killing you.

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The process of waiting out a hurricane usually unfolds like this:

1. Despite being an informed news consumer with healthy relationships, you find out about the hurricane from a stranger.

2. You only recently finished eating all the canned food you bought last hurricane season and haven't gotten around to replacing it, and you were gonna do it any day now, but work's been a bear and, shit, now here you are in gridlock on a highway waiting for the chance to turn off into the Costco parking lot, where there are more cars than you have seen since the last hurricane. You have three more stores to go!

3. The Weather Channel—a station dedicated to making old people feel justified in their decision not to leave the house that day—becomes the only station you watch for at least 72 hours. You develop thoughtful opinions about the anchors and become intimately acquainted with all the products advertised during the commercials as essential to managing the symptoms of slowly dying of natural causes.

4. You text friends in-state to offer help and kvetch. You also field calls from non-hurricane folk, who don't understand that landfall may be hundreds of miles away, and suppress the urge to ask if they call to check in on Israeli friends every time a bomb goes off in Damascus.

5. Chances are, it misses you as slowly as possible.

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Of course, you could skip all this and leave; you should leave. We can't. My wife is trained in hazard mitigation and floodplain management and is one of the thousands of civil servants around the state who will help to put it back together. It's a refreshing break from spending 364 days a year being called a government parasite.

Since I've lived in Florida, I've watched with dread or endured Hurricanes Andrew, Erin, Opal, Earl, George, Dennis, Irene, Charley, Frances, Ivan, Jeanne, (another) Dennis (I think?), Rita, Wilma, Hermine and a few others that never quite got up to full speed. Most gave my area a miss. Some I recall only faintly because I was in college, didn't own anything I couldn't lose and spent most of the storm drinking hurricanes out of a fishbowl-sized wine glass.

Some I remember vividly. Frances was larger than Florida. A six-hour evacuation drive north became nearly 13—the right lane of I-75 grinding to a standstill when hundreds of cars would all, lemming-like, decide to exit and gas up at the same exit, pushing the gridlock onto the interstate. Charley carved a channel through Sanibel Island.

What I remember most is poor unlovely Opal, which never killed anything telegenic enough to become notorious, despite doing $5 billion in damages and destroying property from the south up through Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Vermont. It was a Category 4 storm that slammed into Pensacola Beach and, overnight, wiped the dunes off Okaloosa Island. The sand out there is mostly quartz and shines a glittering white—locals even named one of the dunes The Matterhorn—and when Opal was done, this sand was up on the ceiling of my friend's apartment and smoothed flat over Highway 98, a gleaming gray-white landscape, like the surface of the moon.

Irma presents a different sensation. It is awesome in its size, its shape, all that fearful symmetry of its perfect disc, its black eye. In parts, it is a 185-mph spinning Cuisinart. It inspires a profound morbidity.

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At one point, you find yourself entertaining a desire to summon it, to just get this whole fucking thing over with, to make buying all those supplies worth it, to see if the baddest storm in history can be endured. Then you realize how stupid that is.

(Irma has already claimed lives outside the continental U.S.)

We have everything on the checklist. Everything except D-cell batteries, a two-day search that took me to three Publixes, an Ace Hardware, Big Lots, Costco, Target, Wal-Mart, and Walgreen's.



Thursday was sandbag day. Neighbors are putting up their storm shutters. I've never done that before with this house—it came with some pre-cut steel shutters that screw into pre-sets around all the doors and windows—and, let's be honest here, I'm afraid I'm somehow going to fuck it up. These things are supposed to be idiotproof, and, well, Dr. Hammond, life finds a way.

Things are already quieter than normal. You can hear all the people who aren't here. Costco was hushed. Nobody freaked out; nobody swore; nobody was rude. Several people looked antsy, like maybe they knew they were trapped, but most people feel that way now, to some degree. (Later, the people in the long propane line at Ace Hardware were basically a cooler full of Bud Light away from being a tailgate, but a few of them seemed like they'd figure out how to do that on Sunday regardless.)

The Costco team had smartly set up a line for water in the back and flagged people down and moved them into it: 20 liters per person, no arguments. Stocks seemed reasonable for almost everything else. Then onto the big checkout line, which ran the length of the store; employees patrolled up and down, reassuring customers that it was the only line and fanned out at the registers to get people out as fast as possible.

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By the end of Saturday, it will be time to begin lying heavily to my son, who is almost three. To be fair, I've been lying to him since he was an infant because it's funny, but he watches the Weather Channel and says, "It's gonna rain," in his toddler voice, and I tell him, "That's ok, because mama and I are going to be here to keep you safe," which isn't true.



What I can't tell him is that his parents can prepare to the very best of their ability—that they have good shutters and a new house built to high safety standards outside of the floodplain—but that if a hurricane decides to kill him, however low the odds, it will. Even a lowly Category 1 storm capriciously spins off little tornadoes that can descend on a random house and tear a family to bits.

By the end of Saturday, it will be time to begin lying heavily to my son, who is almost three.

What I also can't tell him is that, whatever Irma does, it will have had help.

Most people watched Harvey out of fear, maybe out of fascination. I couldn't stop watching it because I was seeing the future. Irma may swipe Florida and spin off into the Atlantic, but we will have a Harvey again soon. Judging by what we've done to create one, we are so very eager to meet him. We truly prefer to heroically overpay to put back together what we have sundered through inaction. If America is a hero, then it's the rom-com dipshit who drops thousands of dollars on cornball stunts to win back a woman at the end of the movie that he spent the first 30 minutes ignoring in his own house.

So when Gov. Rick Scott speaks of the terrible cost that faces Florida and the rest of the United States, ask him how many zeroes he put on it by running an administration that forbids state employees from even using the words "climate change," "global warming" or "sea-level rise."

And when the bodies are counted—including the hundreds more in the Caribbean nations whose citizens we keep off TV and accept as collateral damage for cheap gas and a wide open road—ask him how many more his ideology cast adrift in the floodwaters.

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