If you’ve read my blog at all, you know we try for the adventure. And we manage, most of the time, to live an exciting life. But we really only mean to about *half* the time. Like when we moved across the world to Okinawa and were there for the biggest typhoon (hurricane) in ten years. Or when we planned a marvelously adventurous trip to Newfoundland but then lost power in their biggest wind storm in years in a house that wasn’t ours, in freezing cold temperatures and blizzard like conditions.
So it really only makes sense that we would move to Florida a week before Hurricane Irma. And I’m going to be honest, I wasn’t too worried. We had done all those storms before, so we’re pros, we’re not near water, we’re inland from the more heavily hit coastal areas and north of the projected path.
Even when I had a few people mention it (and by a few, I mean two; a friend I met today and the lady that used to own this house. Those are the two people I know here), I laughed it off. Sure, it’s coming, but it has a ways to go, and hurricanes often swerve, or stall, or weaken. The number of times they actually hit the places that the early projections predict is very low.
But tonight, just in case, I thought I would just venture out. We needed some milk, or at breakfast there would be weeping and gnashing of teeth, and I try to avoid those situations when I can. And then when I got in the car I noticed the gas gauge was on empty, but no problem, because there is a gas station a mile or so from my house. So I headed out.
And you guys, apparently I headed out into the apocalypse.
When I turned in to the station, I waited for ten minutes to get to a pump. Everyone was there, and everyone had brought both vehicles and their gas cans. They were carrying snacks out in bags. There was barely enough room for people to leave the station because of the cars waiting for pumps.
And when I got to the pump, it froze. I cleared, I inserted my card again, I inserted a different card. I was pushing the button again when the guy on the other side said in his Florida voice which I cannot yet imitate, “Yeah, guess they’re out of the 85 and 87! Only the 93 left!” Being a normal person that doesn’t distinguish gas kinds by their number, I checked the handles. Sure enough, there were the numbers, but the 93 was not for me or my car, and I moved on.
The next gas station was slightly less crowded, but the road in between was a steady stream of white headlights headed north. I wondered if people were evacuating already, but it seemed absurd, so I just waited while a family filled their car and their three gas cans, imagining the gas level below ground or wherever it is going lower and lower. But when it was my turn, there was still some left, and I got it filled and headed to Wal-Mart for my comfortable gallon of milk, and maybe, I now admitted, a few essentials.
The parking lot was packed. The carts were almost gone. There was a cop at the front of the store yelling, “IF IT’S NOT ON THE SHELVES WE DON’T HAVE IT, PEOPLE.”
The bread aisle was empty, there were no baked beans left. I was left with six packets of the expensive tuna, two jars of peanut butter, some nuts, and five cans of chili, some bread, and some Cheeze-its.
It wouldn’t be a problem, normally every house has enough food to last at least a month. But we did just move here, so we have no reserves. No questionable cans of things that are always in the back of pantries because they keep getting shoved back with each new purchase. Nope, threw that all out when we moved. No back up chip bags. No half boxes of crackers that you know you’ll eat sometime.
I have things I have bought in the last week and had the things in the cart in front of me, period.
I waited the ten minutes in line and watched while a manager went around explaining there was no water in the store, not anywhere. One cashier called her. “Can I still have a break?”, and the manager nodded. “But all the people”, the cashier said. “We only do what we can do”, the manager said, marking her clipboard and walking away.
I paid for my small food pile and promptly lost my car in the full parking lot.
And headed home to fill up water containers.
The hurricane will probably not hit exactly here, but we’ll wait until Thursday to decide if we should evacuate. We have gas now, after all.
And tuna.
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