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If you have to evacuate, try to do it like this.
So at 9:30 a.m. today this was going to be a column about possibly evacuating from a hurricane. By 11:30 a.m., it was a column about not-evacuating from a hurricane, and by 2:30 p.m. there was an earthquake in it. It’s now 8 p.m. and I’m just going to finish writing it before an asteroid plummets out of the sky or something.
We actually evacuated the building after we felt the shaking, although strictly speaking it was less of an “evacuation” and more of an “everyone walking outside for a minute to furiously operate their cell phones.” In fact, I’ve made it 36 years without ever having to really evacuate/flee/sneak out of a window/run screaming down a deserted city street from anything. I kind of figure we’re safe down here in our little corner of the globe; we’re not around any volcanoes that I’m aware of, and if evil scientists create a super-lizard monster it’s a safe bet that it’ll be unleashed on a large metropolitan area first, leaving us plenty of time to summon an equally large super-lizard monster to combat it. What? They told us to have a disaster plan. Oh, I guess yours doesn’t involve creating a monstrous mutant lizard; we’ll see whose laughing when your “water” and “flashlight batteries” run out.
Yet here we are again (at press time anyway) watching a storm system swirl itself up in the Caribbean and point its Cone of Uncertainty — probably America’s scariest cone — at us. By the time this column sees print either 1. Things will be mostly OK here or 2. This magazine and others like it will be floating out to sea and, in a probably karmically fair turn of events, we will all be looking for new places to live in Ohio.
I take that back: Actually I guess we “evacuated” in 1999 for Hurricane Floyd, the geekiest-named storm in meteorological history; packed our computers and valuables into a hilariously small Saturn, pulled the shades, hit the highway and then promptly sat motionless on that highway for hours. Actually our trip wasn’t that bad; instead of visiting the hundreds-of-miles-long parking lot that was the road to Atlanta, we turned north and went to visit friends in North Carolina, which was such a good idea that’s what Floyd did too. We were not terrifically good “planners” in 1999.
We were, however, pretty good returnees: Figuring it was safe to come back to an island that never had a hurricane over it, we split from North Carolina a bit early and came back on my birthday. We headed for dinner at the Old Oyster Factory, which was like half-open, was offering a partial menu, full bar and fully informal atmosphere; we had something like eight servers, as I recall. Also there was no traffic and no wait. Hurricanes we can do without, but if you get a chance to return early after a distant-miss, I recommend it highly.
