Hanna is headed straight for my house presently, but i don't know if it'll stay on course. I've been through so many hurricanes I don't worry if they're not at least Category 3. If that happens I get in my car and go away until it's over. My house stands or falls on it's own.
The wind howling on and on gets on my nerves. Hurricanes may be the exact reason I don't like the windows open on cars. The idea of getting on a motorcycle and riding with the wind blowing in my hair is the furtherest thing from my mind. Besides that, they're just noisy. The people who like 'em though, are just crazy about them.
The place the wind really gets on my nerves is when I'm on a ship or a boat on the ocean. There is nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. Either you survive or not. On a ship you can see exactly what you'd have to put up with. The wind whips the water into a frothing foam. Waves crashing. High humidity. Dank. The worst part is being able to breathe and keep your eyes open and the salt out of them. I've spent maybe five years altogether on the ocean. I won't be going back. I hardly ever go to the beach anymore.
When me and my youngest brother and his wife flew to Seattle, one of the first things we did was to rent a car and take a ferry across the Puget Sound to Bremerton, Washington. Riding on a ferry is not unusual for me. There is a ferry that leaves from below Wilmington and crosses over to Southport several times a day that's only about seventy miles from here. It's not unusual for people in this area to ride down and take that ferry just to do something different.
The Bremerton ferry was similar, but the geography is much different. It was further than i expected. The ferry boat was lots bigger too. There were a lot of walk on passengers that were apparently commuting to and from Seattle. I forgot until the last day we were there that the Boeing plant is located right in or very near the city of Seattle. and they get paid some decent wages. Good looking crowd of people on that ferry.
I didn't realize how poor the South was growing up. I had too much information about how rough Reconstruction was after the Civil War, and how the cotton boll weevil had devastated the rural economy after the economy was finally getting back on track. I was taught from childhood to stay on the side of the lowly, but the South's lowly was much worse off than the lowly up north and out west. I write sometime that I must have taken an unconscious vow of poverty. My vow must have been based on Southern poverty, because now I am among the poorest of the poor in the United States. Since I visited my ex-wife and children for the first time in more than a quarter century, I'm more aware of my poverty than ever. I'm not going to do anything about it.
There is an eminently more powerful hurricane behind Hanna. Nobody seems sure of where it's going when it gets here. The ground is already soft from previous rains and storms. The hurricane force winds will uproot a lotta trees and the additional rain will make the ground into a soup waiting for the second storm to hit. This could get very strange, and the hurricane in New Orleans proves the government don't care if it's taxpayers live or die. There is something positively evil about the present federal administration, and it could get worse.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
