Irene Updates From An Island Mom

I’m still trying to find out details about our oceanside house, but so far, it sounds like it’s holding up a little better than expected. I am hearing somewhat conflicting reports, and there may be some damage. However, the house is still standing, and more importantly, I have yet to hear of anyone being injured on our island.

Home on the marsh, where we were, things were calm. Relatively speaking, of course. I wouldn’t have used the word “calm” to describe it 10 years ago, but moving to the ocean has changed my definition of “calm” when it comes to describing weather. The water level was a little higher than normal, but not much, and it didn’t reach the house. We did have some gusts intermittently, but nothing epic by hurricane standards. For all intensive purposes, it just felt like your average run-of-the-mill storm that was peppered with a few bursts of “What the heck was that?” and so forth.

One such moment occurred while I was in a big box store, for instance. During the day yesterday, I headed out to grab a few supplies (not for the storm, for life). For reasons unknown, some lady kept following me around the store, talking on her cell about how they were probably going to need to evacuate to Charleston, South Carolina because of the hurricane. I don’t know, maybe I’m really off here, but Charleston, being right by the coast, just doesn’t really strike me as the bastion of hurricane safety. I was under the impression that inland many, many, many miles is the desired direction in which to move, and not simply up or down the coast. Anyway, three different times, I moved to another section of the store, and all of a sudden there she’d be, coming around the corner, still on her phone, saying things about how the phones could be cut off any minute or about how maybe they could use their points toward a free hotel room for that night. I now feel I know far, far too many details about some stranger’s life. And, the whole time, a man who I certainly hope was her husband followed her, walking in a zigzag pattern a few feet behind her. Once, I feel sure he flashed me a furtive apologetic glance.

Toward the end of all this, a “What was that?” moment suddenly happened when the building started to shake, and then you could just hear the heavens open up and pour massive amounts of rain down on us. When I got to the front of the store, it looked like a wall of rain was pouring down outside the front doors.

Then, just to up the drama a little, while I was checking out and loading the first bags in my cart, I heard a loud crashing sound and then a pop, and felt liquid spraying my legs. To my credit, I didn’t scream. I may possibly have jumped a little. But I’m pretty sure I didn’t scream. I think. I turned around, and a 2-liter of Diet Coke that I had placed on the conveyor belt but was clearly not destined to consume had somehow apparently shot across from my check-out lane into candy shelves the next aisle over. Several cashiers came running, and really, I think everyone was just happy to see it was just an exploded Diet Coke 2-liter and not a hole being blown in the ceiling or something, with how hard the rain was coming at this point. As my cashier appeared to be the friendly but taciturn type and my back had been turned during the Diet Coke’s “first in flight” moment, I never really figured out how it managed to go flying across the aisle.

Later that night, we ran over to the beach to see how that part of the island had fared. Many other people had the same idea, so the crossover (the walkway to the beach) was filled with people running over to take a peek. I think we showed up at the point where the tide was coming in but not at its highest point. All day, I kept getting the tide times mixed up for the two islands. Sadly, retaining four numbers in my head simultaneously (the high and low tide times for each island) proved to be a challenge at times.

I was only there for about a minute or two, but here are a couple of shots of the beach. The large piece of wood in the water that looks like a table but may have been from a deck was the only large piece I saw there during my short stay. Sometimes, in a really bad hurricane, the beach will be littered with wood as far as the eye can see, but this was not one of those cases. In fact, I remember a hurricane back in 2005 where there was lumber scattered up and down the beach in front of my house for weeks afterward. Likely, there will be more of that the farther north you travel up the Carolina coast and beyond after Irene is finished.

Overall, at this point I’m very gratefully that so much I’ve heard about and seen has held up as well as it has, although there’s obviously still more to come from Irene. As I write this, my prayers are for the Outer Banks, where the waters are still high and the winds still strong.