They Call the Wind… Fay? (2)

[Continued from yesterday's brief "We're still here!" post.  All images accompanying this post come from the online "Readers' Gallery" of photos posted at our local newspaper's site.]

Dear Family –

I know some of you have been keeping a watchful eye (“eye”: ha ha ha) on The Weather Channel for news of the damages suffered to our neck of the woods.

You may remember a post by my good friend FLJerseyBoy, three years ago (in his long-defunct Where Left Is Right blog), which talked at greater length about TWC:

The point is this: The Weather Channel doesn’t need to scare us. Yes, of course, people need to be warned. They need to watch the skies, especially with the help of The Weather Channel’s (and NOAA’s and others’) undoubtedly informative and beautifully computer-enhanced images. They need to have supplies on hand, and to prepare themselves for the interruption of essential services like electricity and water.

What people don’t need is a bombardment of ever-more alarming reports from shouting jackasses in windbreakers, leaning into the wind and rain as floodwaters rise around their ankles and houses and cars tumble by in the background. They don’t need it for themselves, and their distant families and friends — unfamiliar with the relevant geographic scales, and thus unaware (for instance) that a hurricane’s likely landfall is hundreds of miles away — sure as hell don’t need it either.

I’m with him. There’s no way The Weather Channel’s talking rain-spattered heads can possibly paint a decent picture of every neighborhood’s experience during a storm. So I hope you aren’t even now watching the statistics scroll by on your screens, with voiceovers by grim-faced tight-lipped anchorpeople — watching, and wondering what on earth might be happening with John and The Missus.

So let me put your minds at ease.

To begin with, when I woke up yesterday (Saturday) morning, it was as always with a view out the upper windows of our bedroom — the ones which we’ve never curtained, because they’re so high up off the floor as to present no privacy problems. Er, we hope. (He said, listening for the sound of ladders being unfurled by Peeping Toms.)

It was a blurry view, because a lot of rain had already washed over the glass. But it was clear enough that I could see the tree-tops lashing to and fro.

As you know, we don’t have many palm trees here in North Florida. We’re more like South Georgia (at least in that respect) than like South Florida. What we have instead are a variety of plain-old broadleaf trees such as oak and maple, as well as evergreens — pines and such. Naturally, this being Florida and all, we don’t have what I thought of as plain-old trees when I lived up North with you. You can find pin oaks, for instance, but you’ll find a lot more so-called live oaks: big gnarled twisty things whose breadths often exceed their heights. You’ll find pecan trees. And the pines, often, don’t assume the stereotypical Christmas-tree cone shapes I always knew and loved; instead, they’re tall honking lodgepoles, with a fringe of green way up there somewhere tickling the undersides of passing aircraft.

Those are the kinds of trees I was seeing through the bedroom windows. They didn’t lean waaaaay over, as The Weather Channel’s quick images would suggest is true of all trees in Florida during tropical storms and hurricanes. They were thrashing back and forth.

If you’re feeling spendthrifty, go to your pantry and open up a box of spaghetti — the thinner the better. Take it all out of the box and hold it upright, grasping the stack with your fist at the bottom. The top will fan out. Lean in so your face is just a few inches away, and blow. Steadily, for the most part, but every now and then let out a big poof.

That’s what I was seeing through the bedroom window, with branches and leaves added for extra interest.

Once we got up, though, throughout the day we didn’t see a lot of wind. (Max windspeeds were in the 45mph range: a brisk brief ride around town in a convertible with the top down.) We just saw an enormous amount of water poured from the skies.

You may have seen the number 6-something inches mentioned as the official rainfall here yesterday. Yes, and even that broke the previous record for the day of 3-something inches — set in 1908.

But…

See, our official weather station is out at the airport — on the extreme southwestern corner of the city. Thus it often misses the more interesting conditions to, oh, say, the extreme north side of town, even downtown (as the photo of Lake Ella, above, demonstrates), and, umm, out on the east side of town. You know: the side where we live.

Out here to the east, where Leon County butts up against Jefferson County, we got in the vicinity of 20 inches of rain yesterday. Two-zero. Twenty.

Now, that’s not to say that we had flooding locally, within our neighborhood. Individual houses may have experienced that, but to our knowledge none did. (However, our neighbors across the cul-de-sac did have a tree fall across one side of their house — one of those gigantic, like, 70- or 80-footers.)

No: very locally, within our little household, we experienced no actual rain or wind damage. Lots and lots of leaves across the deck and yard, of course, as well as a good number of branches. (Some of which I wouldn’t have wanted to be standing under when they fell.)

Rather, the bulk of the excitement we experienced actually here yesterday had to do with our retrieval of young Sophie from her ordeal across town.

Sophie, you will recall, is our recently acquired 1-1/2-year-old, 2-1/2-pound Yorkshire terrier. We’d taken her to the animal hospital on Tuesday to have her spayed. But there were complications (couldn’t keep food and water down, lethargy, and so on), so although we took her home at the end of that day we took her right back on Thursday morning.

With Fay churning her way in our direction, we’d hoped we could pick Sophie up at the end of the day Friday. But no (said the excellent, honestly excellent vets there), they really needed to keep her one more night. They wanted to continue to observe her and continue the regimen of frequent light feedings which they’d instituted.

Now, my dear family, you may imagine for yourselves what must have led us to conclude that Sophie really needed to come home on Saturday rather than just waiting until Monday. (The animal hospital is closed Sundays, so that wasn’t an option.) Suffice it to say for now: there was no getting around it.

Because the animal hospital closes at noon on Saturday, The Missus and I decided that 10:00 would be a good departure time. (Under normal circumstances, it’s about a 15- to 20-minute drive. Of course, these weren’t normal circumstances.)

In the event, it was a few minutes before 11:00 when we backed out of the garage, up the driveway, and into the cul-de-sac. Bucketfuls of water kersplashed down on the car. Wind, we could see, continued to lash the trees. With a last wistful look at the house which we’ve called home for seven years, I turned the wheel and we headed out.

We discussed the best route to take, eliminating any on which we knew we’d encounter low-lying spots (especially near bodies of water) and also eliminating, to the extent possible, the chance of traveling on any of the area’s so-called “canopy roads.”

(For the uninitiated, these are roads which are flanked on both sides by big sprawling trees, often covered with Spanish moss, whose branches effectively form, yes, a canopy overhead beneath which cars and trucks drive. Very picturesque, to be sure — during good weather. They lose their appeal in heavy wind and rain after you’ve seen what can happen to vehicles out for a sightseeing tour. The photo here is of the Timberlake neighborhood (which again is not our neighborhood); if there were trees on the right to match those on the left, you’d have a canopy road.)

As an aside, we (well, I) chose not to take the interstate highway (I-10) across town. Probably paranoid of me, but I had this image in my head of our little car being blown off an overpass by a sudden gust. (Or someone else’s vehicle being blown into ours.)

On the way to the animal hospital, here are some of the things we encountered:

• Lots of downed trees
• Utility and emergency vehicles aplenty
• Many traffic signals out
• A Wal-Mart, a Lowe’s hardware store, a Publix supermarket, and various fast-food establishments whose busy parking lots demonstrated (as if this were news) that area shoppers and diners don’t require much excuse
• …and yet, that said, gratifyingly little traffic.

Note the omission in the above list of any reference to water. That’s because shortly after we drove away, the rain slackened quite a bit from the downpour we’d been having as we left (and for the entire morning to that point). Oh, the sun was nowhere in evidence. But I could at least switch the wipers to intermittent for fairly long stretches.

Our drive to the animal hospital required us to double back and take alternate routes twice.

The first, we couldn’t see the reason for the closure on Meridian Road; it looked as though there might be water across the roadway, a couple hundred yards distant. But we turned around and doubled back regardless.

The second was when we attempted to turn north onto a broad US highway (US 27, a/k/a North Monroe Street) but were stopped by a police barricade. The reason, I learned today, was that a tree had fallen across some power lines. (The photo here doesn’t depict that tree, but you get the idea.)

We finally got to the animal hospital at about 11:45 — fifteen minutes before closing. We had a little bit of a wait because the principal vet on duty — with whom we needed to talk — was in surgery with another animal at the time. During the wait, I kept stealing glances out the front window. Out there, obviously, the rain band which we’d left at home, off to the east, had now caught up with our current position.

It was coming down in sheets, as the expression goes, and that was the effect: rippling translucent sheets of water, through which I could see (vaguely) the glowing red orbs of passing cars’ taillights. Every time one of those vertical sheets rippled in a gust of wind, I was reminded of the shower curtain in Psycho. Something interesting, indeed very interesting, going on in the foreground. While in the background, barely imaginable horrors lurked.

Predictably, Sophie was overjoyed to see us, particularly The Missus. She (Sophie *cough*) wriggled in her (The Missus’s) arms like a hairy psychotic dwarf anaconda: a creature without, evidently, any sort of spine, but lots of teeth. Licking, licking, licking. Quite a reunion.

After getting our instructions from the vet, we put Sophie into her carrier (which we wrapped a towel around); I brought the car up closer to the door and then we bore the still-squirming patient out into the storm.

Personally, I found the ride home much more nerve-wracking than the ride there. It was by now raining like crazy, again, and the wind had picked up some too. And yet the ride home was a little more uneventful than the ride there, because of course now we knew the route to take to avoid doubling back. The exceptions were that (a) some of the earlier route was now blocked off, and (b) we had a writhing whining recently hospitalized but not sedated Yorkie in the front seat, in The Missus’s lap.

(“Whining?” you say. “Was the little thing in pain still?” Well, no. Not pain, really. Suffice it to say that when we got her home, The Missus took her to the back room where we keep the so-called “potty pad” on the floor for her (Sophie *cough*) to use when outdoors isn’t an option. They were gone for several minutes. “You should have seen her,” The Missus said. “She peed and peed and peed.” Hence the whining.)

As I look down and out the upstairs window now, sunlight is dappling the back yard and deck. (The latter is camouflaged by greenery, so if you squint it looks almost as though the back yard has a plateau which comes right up to the door.) At the front of the house, across the street, I can see that the neighbors have enlisted the help of what looks like three or four guys with chainsaws. They’ve cut the downed tree in half and have dragged the top half out to where they can work on it more easily; it spans the yard. The bottom half still extends from the roots in the ground, up to the roofline, at about a 45-degree angle.

The official city tally of the aftermath has begun. Right now, about 2,000 citizens still haven’t had power restored. The Public Works Department (go, team!) has handled over 200 down trees within city limits; traffic is still closed on ten city streets, including a big closure of six lanes of Capital Circle NE. (Burst sewer main — ewww — which is not depicted in the photo here.)

Sophie (although the cats feel differently) is delighted that she is home from the hospital.

She has even resumed her relationship with the soft and floppy stuffed pig, the relationship which (among other things) we had hoped the spaying would resolve.

(We got her the pig, which is about her size but colored in a pastel-green fur — which helps to distinguish them — as something for her to sleep on. The Missus believed it to be pillow-like, which it is, I guess, if you’re a human scaled down to Sophie’s size. To Sophie, though — who remains a female in many respects — the pig is an object to be, er, mounted. If you thought a neighbor’s male dog humping your leg was embarrassing, you should just experience owning a female dog which will not stop climbing on a stuffed pig, straddling it, and proceeding to pound away while its (the pig’s but also the dog’s) eyes glaze over.)

And life goes on.