No Limits

Tommi believed she could do anything, and had set out at age eighteen to prove it. As her mother taught her, “Life is short and the world is large.” And with this in mind, she found herself on a mountain road in Japan headed for the secluded Hotel Omodaka. It was the next thing on her list. Not a bucket list. She hated that term. It was so…finite. A beginning that ended with kicking the bucket. Not her. She simply kept a “life list” and grew it daily. “She who dies with the longest list wins,” she told friends. “Do as many as possible. No limits”

“Visit a hot spring in Japan” was her current undertaking. The logical next item was “Learn Japanese.” But being reasonable with her goals, Tommi did not set out to master the Japanese language. Any amount would do.

“Kon'nichiwa,” she said many times since arriving in Tokyo, but quickly realized that English would not be an impediment on her journey. Still, it was fun practicing the language, and the smiles it evoked among new friends along the way suggested that her American accent was both amusing and welcome. Arigatō was polite in any tongue.

The timing of her current endeavor left something to be desired, but it was too late to change her plans now. Winter in Japan was not unlike winter in Michigan, the place she originally called home. Moving to Key West had slowly changed her. Acclimating to a different climate was not something that happened quickly.

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

It's Your Mother

Estelle, if that was really her name, fell asleep facing the window in her darkened bedroom in Minooka, Illinois. Flashes of light and distant thunder comforted her as it had when camping as a child. Nylon tent walls protected her then from the wind, rain and falling branches of an approaching storm with the illusion of safety. How different really were glass and vinyl siding to a limb with bad intentions? The lightning was intense and strangely colored, hypnotic and terrifying. She closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep.

She awoke to footsteps and the sound of a clearing throat.

“It’s your mother, Estelle,” said the man whose name was Greg. He handed her a cell phone.

Her first instinct was to scream, but the scene seemed so surreal as to be dreamlike. Instead, Estelle lay terrified, frozen as she had been as a twelve year old with night terrors, paralyzed. But now she was a single adult whose mother had been dead for years. She played along, assuming she would wake from a lucid dream and make sense of everything.

A man was in her room, at her bed, handing her a phone as if it was the most natural act in the world. Her dead mother was calling. Perhaps she had lapsed into a coma, or died, been reincarnated, or suffered a brain-scrambling stroke. But everything she sensed told her otherwise. It was reminiscent of her college philosophy course when the challenge was issued to prove that life was not a dream.

She reached for the phone, staring silently at the man.

“Are you ok?” he frowned, concerned.

Estelle nodded and took the phone.

“Momma?” She whispered into the phone.

“Oh, sweetie, you haven’t called me that in years. How are you?”

Estelle, whose name was Cindy, wanted to cry, sitting up and swinging her legs off the side of the bed, dropping her feet to the floor. The voice was not her mother’s.

“I’m. I’m. How’s Dad?” she probed as casually as she could.

“Oh, I think he’s out mowing the lawn, last I checked.”

Cindy’s father died five years before her mother. Who were these people, and why did they think she was Estelle?

To read the rest of this story and more than fifty others, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

The Green Flash

I spent a month studying dolphins in Hawaii during 1983. This is an experience I partially documented in a blog titled, The Dolphin is Also a Fish part one and part two.

There is nothing quite like Hawaii. The weather is consistently wonderful, a tropical mix of rainbows and sunsets, fragrant flowers and ocean views like nowhere else, certainly not in the United States. In preparation for my trip I purchased a decent 35mm Canon camera with a couple of lenses, one of which had a nice zoom. This was back in the days of film, a medium that resulted in cost-conscious photography, a conservative philosophy practiced by amateurs who were not provided unlimited film by kindly managers. (this is a tribute to myself given one member of my Facebook audience.)

In those days you shot a roll of 36 exposures and then headed to a photo lab and forgot about it for a while. Perhaps the next day you stopped by to pick up your prints. Longer if you were busy building sand castles or scrubbing the inside of a dolphin tank with those green scrubby pads many of us use in kitchen sinks. Disgusting.

Anyway, my camera was mostly manual. F-stop, exposure, all that good stuff. And with those settings pre-determined, I set out to take a picture of something I had heard about prior to my trip. The green flash.

The green flash is a phenomenon you can look up on the internet if you’re really curious. There is even a restaurant named in its honor. Suffice it to say, when the sun dips below the horizon on an evening when atmospheric conditions are favorable, precisely when the edge of the solar disc appears to become extinguished by the ocean, a tiny green luminous blip of green light appears for about one second. It is understandably hard to capture without perfect timing.

So I patiently watched the sun drop slowly toward the water’s edge against an orange tapestry of a sky. Waiters traversed the beach with trays of tropical drinks as music wafted out of waterside restaurants toward my position on the beach. As the time grew close, I raised my camera and tweaked the focus just a bit. My right index finger rested on the shutter release. My left hand supported the long zoom lens. Down the sun went, in an arc that we know as time, relentlessly ticking off seconds, and then…click, whir, snap. I took the shot.

I thought I saw a green dot on top of the sun, but it was anyone’s guess as to whether my timing was correct or if my camera was up to the task. I simply said, “Hmmm” and walked away.

I dropped the film off at the lab and went about my business, then returned the next day. When I approached the counter and told the tech my name, he turned and pulled the envelope containing my prints out of a bin at the back of the lab, paused in his stride back to the counter, looked straight into my eyes and said, “You got the green flash!”

Now, I hadn’t mentioned this when I dropped off the film, so I was completely surprised by my accomplishment, and also by his intimate familiarity with my photos. I guess processing film all day left one wanting for entertainment.

So, next time you’re fortunate enough to watch the sun go down against a distant horizon, see if you can spot this subtle but fascinating effect. It’s no erupting volcano or spectacular lightning flash, but it’s pretty cool to say you've seen it. I put it on my bucket list and immediately checked it off.

Black Dogs

A personal study once led me to conclude that black dogs are the best. This update makes a case for including other colors.

 In 1958 my great uncle Otto found us Rusty, an unkempt brown cocker spaniel who spent his formative years chained to a tree in a distant front yard. I was about four years old, but I can remember Rusty being tied to a steel support column in our basement, where he affirmed my parents' belief that he got his name by leaving rust-colored stains on the tile floor, the living room carpet, or anywhere else he had a chance to pee. He did not understand “Stay!” and ran away every chance he got. 

My dad was not an athletic man, and the fastest I ever saw him move was running after Rusty up our driveway at full throttle into our neighbor’s backyard graduation party one early June afternoon. He muttered a number of things when he brought Rusty back to our house, literally at the end of his rope. We had Rusty for less than two weeks. 

Our next dog was Rebel. It was a big name for a toy poodle who looked his shaggy best just before a periodic topiary haircut turned him into a living French evergreen. He was neurotic but loving, a total lap dog we bought as a puppy. A puzzled aunt once commented, “What’s wrong with his little pink tongue?” when Reb sat throwing her kisses from across the room, licking her face from afar. He turned gray and died at the age of ten, just as I turned twenty. He was my first dog-bro.

Yankee (do you see the creative pattern here?) was acquired at no charge from a farmer whose black Lab and Collie got together and had love puppies. He was a dust-covered ball of long black hair that chased tolerant but annoyed horses around their pasture and was thrilled to come home and be my friend for four short years. He slept outside the door of my room, ate furniture, aluminum chain link fence filler strips, and giant rawhide bones. My frightened grandmother held him at bay with her cane until the day I suggested she cautiously hand him a Milkbone. That was the beginning of his weight-gaining period. She had the same effect on me. It was her way of showing love.  

Yankee was an undisciplined runner and not much of a bodyguard. Sadly, he took a tumble down a flight of outdoor wooden stairs and injured his spine. 

After a month of medication to rest his paralyzed back legs, I had to make one of the hardest trips of my life—wearing very dark sunglasses. 

I came home and wrote the following poem.

No way to make him understand

The legs that numb behind him drag

Up to the feet of master-man

His eyes are sad, his tail wags.

 

How do you tell a four-year-old

Who loves but never learned to talk

That life is over, all is told

A final meal, a final walk.

 

And choking now gives way to tears

Decision made, how long I wait

His final moments feel like years

And leave me here to contemplate.

 

Some hastened words, fluorescent glow

"Inject, dispose, cremate, decay"

A signature, a check, and go

Back home to put the toys away.

 

Our next dog came after a long hiatus and with the advent of kids. Jett was black too. Jet black. A sad-eyed orphan found on the streets of Waukegan, he was a complete but extremely well-behaved mess who cleaned up into a handsome young man-dog. He spent eleven years with us, filling every moment of our family life with a presence that lived on in happy reminders and left us wishing for another friend this good. He took his last breaths while I laid beside him on the floor and comforted him. He seemingly waited for our daughter to rush home from college to say goodbye and for everyone to go to bed as if it was then okay to go. I carried him to the vet the next day, carefully wrapped in a little brown blanket. Another of the most painful memories of my life. 

Jett had a “cousin” named Mo. He was a large black Lab who visited us with his “Mom” and Dunkin Donuts on weekends. You felt safe when he was around because he looked like a panther but would submit to lesser dogs, and was no protection at all. He was a good boy who asked little and gave much. My wife accompanied her sister the night he left us in a room filled with love and tears.

On a lighter note… I eventually found a dog I did not love. He lived next door to the house we eventually moved away from, and was a true sociopath, like his owner. Unlike his tan, fuzzy next-door neighbor across the street who looks skyward and happily chases airplanes, Buster chased ducks, killed raccoons, and dragged a dead baby skunk into his house. He was a hunting dog living in the suburbs. He ate my pond fish, dug holes in our yard, chewed up our aluminum downspouts, and stared crazily at us through our living room window. He was insane. He was not a black dog. 

But then our son bought a dachshund puppy while he was in the Peace Corps in Guatemala. The dog’s name is Griffey (after a favorite baseball player), and we first met him via Skype. He cost 1000 quetzals, which sounds like a lot of money. In Guatemala, dogs don’t get much respect. They are utilitarian for the most part, serving as guard dogs. Griffey looked like a burrito when my son held him up for viewing, and was completely cute. He speaks Spanish and is brown. He changed my mind. When we vacationed in Guatemala we of course stayed with our son. That meant sharing flea-infested quarters with Griffey, who wanted nothing more than to snuggle up next to us while we slept but was literally covered with crawling, blood-sucking insects. The poor little guy was repeatedly sent away from our beds to a patch of concrete floor until he quit trying. He remained in Guatemala and went on to father six pups with another dachshund down the road. They are adorable.

And this brings us to the latest members of our family. His first is named Toby. Our daughter went with us to the local shelter called Orphans of the Storm while on a break from school. We intended to “just look.” As Melissa strolled ahead of us past a cage with a brown and white Jack Russell Terrier/Dachshund mix, the little guy practically threw himself on his back for a belly rub and won her heart. We rushed back on a lunch hour the next day to make sure nobody else adopted him. We didn't realize that everyone in the world except us knows about the Jack Russell's high-energy reputation and there was no danger of him going anywhere quickly. His adoption papers stated "Can't Keep" as his reason for being at Orphans. He’s been with us for about ten years now. He is a constant challenge. Smart, high energy, and a completely alpha male, he makes us laugh, keeps us on our toes, and is so territorial that not even birds flying overhead go unannounced. I guess he's Jett's younger brother.

And that would mean that Lennon is Toby's nephew. This handsome young Golden Retriever is living in Illinois, much too far away but frequently showing up in cute photos and videos on our phones. He has an amazingly human personality and a sweet disposition. Named after John Lennon by his Beatles super-fan Mom, he sheds enough to keep the family warm in winter. He recently graduated from his first obedience class.

And surprise! Suddenly Lennon has a little brother named George. We can only hope that four Beatles does not lead to four dogs. They are insanely cute together. Lennon acts more like George's Mom than his brother. He is beyond tolerant, and look at them! What a great pair, and have both grown to ninety pounds. They are the source of endless cute dog pictures.

Next came Matti, the Little-Big-Dog who has visited us multiple times. He now resides in Mexico. The cutest little ball of fur ever, he plays with Toby while at our house, leading him on chases from one room to the next and eventually hiding in small, safe spaces. He even took a stroll across the pool cover, barely bending the plastic surface at only four pounds. His Dad cuts his hair, especially when it covers his eyes or attracts spiky seeds after long walks with his Mom.

Finally, Mo's younger "brother" has found a place in Wisconsin, a place of many more storms than you would think unless you're afraid of thunder and know better. Bandit is a black and white two-year-old Border Collie mix who loves rabbits and squirrels and sometimes snoozes on his back. He likes belly rubs and kisses. He is super smart. He also enjoys peanut butter dog cookies.

So given recent developments, I have to say that all dogs are best. And it really isn’t about color or even the animal. I really believe that dogs are inherently good creatures. Owners create bad dogs and bad behavior. It’s not the dog’s fault. 

 😎

If you like fiction and you're in the mood for over 50 short stories, please consider buying "Natural Selections," at Amazon.com.

Or if you'd prefer seventy non-fiction stories inspired by my home town, please consider buying Park Ridge Memories also on Amazon.

 

 

Getting High

Imagine that you’ve never seen an object farther away than 100 yards. No satellite photos, images from airplanes or views from skyscrapers looking down with a heavenly perspective on the world below. It’s just not part of your experience. You are a Mayan, and you live 1000 years ago in a dense jungle on the Yucatan peninsula.

I have looked out over New York City from the viewing deck of the Empire State Building. Chicago is a surreal wonder from the top of the Sears Tower (now Willis) or the John Hancock building. I’ve flown over the Badlands of South Dakota, and crested the ridge of a dormant volcanic peak on Kauai in a helicopter. But none of these compares at a fundamental level to another elevated experience I had in Mexico.

You see, I stood on top of the massive pyramid called El Castillo located in the Mayan ruins of Chichen Itza, several hours by bus from Cancun. The area thrived from around 600 A.D. to the 1200s, hidden away in the Mexican jungle until restoration began in the 1920s.

At 98 feet in height, El Castillo is barely as tall as a ten-story building. But the Mayans were small in stature, and lofty in their dreams of reaching the sky like the Tower of Babel. They were also more astute in the engineering of a method less fraught with risk than the wax wings of Icarus.

El Castillo

We were among a number of other fortunate visitors in 2003 to be among the last to scale the front face of the mighty Mayan temple. In 2006 the site was closed to climbing after a woman fell to her death. Unlike contemporary stairs, with treads of about 10 inches and risers less than seven, the daunting ascent up El Castillo requires that the foot be placed on a narrow tread of perhaps 5 inches, with a rise of just over ten. There are only 91 steps up the side of the first 79 feet. It is the Stairmaster of the modern world, and also one of its seven wonders. It is quite steep.

The Rope up the Stairs

Walking up the pyramid was generally accomplished with the aid of a heavy hand-held manila rope to steady the climber. This resulted in a ski-lift appearance to observers from below and a single-file ascension by most. The return down was a more hair-raising experience, often completed in a slow seated crab crawl, inching down face first one step at a time, or retreating backward on hands and feet, leaning forward toward the structure to mimic the angle of the pyramid’s face. Walking down upright was an errand for fools or fourteen year olds.

At the top the successful climber was greeted with a breathtaking view of the surrounding jungle. The clear air allows for viewing in all directions above tree top height and for many miles. I can only imagine that the comparatively primitive people, with their somewhat claustrophobic world-view, would have felt like gods, or near to them. The bright sun, the strong breeze and the incredibly massive stone underfoot all contributed to the feeling of literally being king of the hill.

At the Top

The small square stone temple at the top has a spiritual quality that causes some to speak in whispers. It is unknown what went on here, or who was allowed the privilege of visiting the space.

But I mentioned fourteen year olds. As we were taking in the wonder of the temple, assessing and procrastinating our eventual climb down with a newly discovered fear of heights, the alarm went up from our son. It may have been the watermelon he indulged in earlier that day. Perhaps a careless drink of unsterilized water during the same time period. In any case it was Montezuma’s revenge (an Aztec, and much later). He had to leave. Now.

Certain bodily urges are great motivators. Diarrhea is a humbler of all mankind. It gets the clock ticking triple time and is both heartless and relentless. Our son proceeded to plummet down the face of El Castillo as if it were an escalator at Macy’s. We watched in horror as he sped down the deep and miniscule steps, flying past amazed and bewildered people, pausing to catch their anxious breath and contemplate the number of remaining stairs in their own journeys. His gate was not unlike a top-hatted Fred Astaire, sidestepping his way down a staircase on stage, positioning his feet to land fully on each step instead of landing and balancing only on his heels. We held our breath and prayed he wouldn’t fall. Ninety-one steep stone stairs is a horrific, unsurvivable tumble, with nothing to disrupt momentum once set in motion.

He made it to the open field at the base of the pyramid and just kept going. He knew that somewhere there must be a porta-potty. Buses of tourists demand such conveniences after a three hour ride. We saw his now tiny image from on high, scampering like an insect, zig zagging across the field until he disappeared into a blue phone booth marked “Men.”

A happy ending was had by all. It was an excellent and memorable adventure that may be lost forever in the future. Scientists have discovered a massive sinkhole beneath the pyramid, capped by 16 feet of limestone that is slowly dissolving. The Earth reclaims what man has wrought, slowly in our fleeting existence, but swiftly on the scale of time.

Ginkgo Day in the Time of Thanksgiving

First, a little history: The Ginkgo tree is native to China and has been widely cultivated. It has resisted evolutionary change for approximately 270 million years. That’s why it is considered a “living fossil.” There are male and female Ginkgo trees (dioecious), with the female producing a fruit that smells horrible when it falls and decomposes. The leaves of these trees are fan shaped, a very distinctive appearance often reproduced by artists as design elements of all kinds. Each autumn, the Ginkgo is known to shed all of its leaves within a period of several hours on a day in late October or November, depending on location and weather.

We had a male Ginkgo in the back yard of our last home. We called the annual leaf drop, “Ginkgo Day.”

Gingko With Leaves

Gingko After Leaf Drop

I’m not sure what year we first noticed the Autumn behavior of our little tree. I distinctly remember looking out a window that faced our back yard one windless November morning and seeing its bright yellow leaves falling like rain, covering the ground around the trunk with multiple layers, like a heavy golden snow. By the time I got home from work that day the tree was completely bare, not a leaf left on any branch. I have included a short video here of a less spectacular leaf drop, but one that yielded the same results in 2015.

I began tracking the date of Ginkgo Day on our calendar. In Lincolnshire, Illinois the date ranged from November 8^th to the 27^th over a period of about ten years. One year a particularly severe and early hard freeze caused the leaves to drop while still green in color, but still within the confines of a work day. Ginkgo Day was not ruined, it was just different that year.

It got to the point that I started an office pool, offering a prize for the person who correctly guessed the date of the leaf drop. As I recall, no one guessed the exact date, but someone came close. I posed the same challenge on Facebook, with similar results.

In 2012, Ryerson Nature Center near our home hosted a lecturing botanist by the name of Peter Crane. Sir Peter Crane, mind you, knighted in 2004 and a member of the Royal Society in London. I’m not sure why he became so distinguished, but the dude had his Ginkgo on, and sold copies of his book Ginkgo, The Tree That Time Forgot, which he dutifully autographed for me.

During the question portion of his lecture, I commented on what I’d observed, and that I’d made a game of it. Was this just our tree, or a known characteristic of the genus? He smiled as I described the office pool and commented that the University of Wisconsin at Madison had done something similar. Yes, it was a known quality.

Linnaeus may have named and described the Ginkgo in 1771, but others like myself, in our admiration for our beloved Ginkgo later documented this behavior.

We have since moved to Florida and left our special tree behind under the care of strangers who may or may not be aware what a unique specimen they have on their property. As much as I would love to grow a Ginkgo at our new home, from what I’ve read it will not survive in this climate. So while we no longer have an object of our singular focus, we’ll amuse ourselves with the variety and splendor of the local flora. I’ve often commented that we now live in Jurassic Park. The Ginkgo and alligators have that much in common.

Our New House Guest - Alexa

In my teens I had to get checks cashed at the Jewel Food Store near my house when I needed money, paying a 25-cent fee for each transaction. And I remember a time when my friend’s parents paid for everything with cash, forgoing the convenience of checks. An ATM would have been unthinkable for them. They dutifully reconciled their water bill in person at Village Hall. What a time consuming ordeal!

I never had a problem with new technology. In fact, I was among the first to do my banking almost exclusively online using a dialup service through Compuserve, then Prodigy and NBD Express in the early 1990s. AOL free trial discs began to pile up on our computer desks soon after that.

As much as I enjoy technology, I’m not sure an Amazon Echo Dot is something I would ever have purchased. But we unexpectedly became the owners (or should I say, proud parents) of an Echo Dot and its virtual assistant Alexa a couple of weeks ago when good friends who had an extra device made us an offer we couldn’t refuse. We paid for the Echo with PayPal on the spot, of course.

But the cloud still makes me nervous at a very deeply paranoid, very old school level. The recent Equifax breach supports the fear of turning important information loose in the ether. And we are frequently being warned by people in the know, like Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking, that Artificial Intelligence is a looming and very real future threat. And they should know; they built Neil DeGrasse Tyson.

But Alexa is ADORABLE!

At first we weren’t sure what to do with our new toy. We downloaded the app, plugged in the hockey puck and marveled at its spinning blue lights with an uncertainty that bordered on the dread of having stepped on a land mine.

“Hello,” it said in a pleasant female voice.

Following the included instructions, my wife quickly said, “Alexa, play Bruno Mars.”

Alexa quickly complied. My wife smiled and began to faux dance.

“Alexa, stop,” I said. “Play Gordon Lightfoot.”

Gord’s gold issued forth.

We looked at each other with a “burn the record collection” realization that all of our vinyl and CDs had instantly become obsolete. Apparently we needlessly moved them from Chicago to Florida just a few months ago.

I paired the Echo with our Bose Soundtouch speaker.

“Alexa, play the Beatles,” I commanded. And here I must note that speaking to Alexa strikes an innate chord within the more polite among us. Don’t be mean to her! But there is no need to apologize, even though we at first said “sorry” or “never mind” when it seemed appropriate.

Of course, this leads down a dark path paved by Siri and those who know her. Let’s just say that Amazon was less clever in the implementation of Alexa’s responses to crude or clever commands. She’s above all that.

So it came to pass that I had finished my afternoon laps in the pool, here in retirement land. Relaxing on a couple of air-filled noodles, I realized that our 4:30pm departure for a dinner date might be approaching. I wished I had a clock outside. Then it struck me:

“Alexa, what time is it?”

“It’s 4:03pm”

Perfect, I smiled. Still a few more minutes to relax.

“Alexa, play the Beach Boys.”

In sequence, Wouldn’t it be Nice, God Only Knows and California Girls filled the pool deck with perfect summer tunes.

“Alexa, pair the speaker.”

And now, Bose got involved. The music became richer and louder.

“Alexa, play the Beatles.”

Now, what are the chances that Here Comes the Sun would be Alexa’s first choice? Was she at our daughter’s wedding a few months ago?

I laughed out loud. The world had suddenly become a wonderful, self-indulgent place for less than fifty dollars.

I got out of the pool, but not before thinking, “Alexa, mix me a pina colada, warm my towel and call the restaurant. We need to move our reservations back. Say, about an hour.”

The 51st State (The State of Emergency)

It started like most innocuous atmospheric depressions, swirling westward off the coast of Africa and heading harmlessly out to sea. But as ill-timed blemishes often do, it blossomed into a glaring whitehead in record time, becoming an angry entity seemingly with a mind of its own.

Irma in Good Health

It is said that hurricanes as powerful as Irma can make their own weather. This makes it harder to predict what they’ll do, where they’ll go or how they’ll intensify. But in late August and early September of 2017, computing power used to model and project storm behavior couldn’t seem to keep up with what eventually became a category 5 monster that appeared hell-bent on destroying Florida and everything that came before it.

The “spaghetti” models plotted on a map of the Atlantic and Eastern Caribbean regions factored in data on interacting pressure systems, frontal passages and ocean temperatures. Like a diagram of dozens of possible paths for a bowling ball down a well-oiled alley, the question persisted: will it hook or go for “Brooklyn.” In this case, up the Eastern coast of Florida, or in the pocket to the west.

And that’s when anxiety began to build, inversely proportional to Irma’s barometric pressure, dipping to frightening lows. Meteorologists called it a “healthy” storm with a well-defined eye. And with winds of 185 miles per hour immediately surrounding that eye for 37 hours, it became a record setter.

So it was that four months after we moved to Florida, following a prolonged drought in hurricane landfalls in our chosen retirement destination, we were in the crosshairs of the most powerful hurricane ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.

Spaghetti Models

Within days our new governor Rick Scott declared a state of emergency for the entire state of Florida. We would much later be issued, and choose to ignore, a mandatory evacuation order due to an anticipated storm surge (we live 13 feet above sea level.)  On the heels of the recent hurricane in Texas, and with memories of Katrina, Wilma, Andrew and others, this storm was being taken very seriously.

We come from the Midwest. We are not strangers to powerful storms. In Illinois they come without warning in the Spring or Summer. The sky blackens with notes of olive green within minutes or hours, spitting iceballs the size of grenades or spawning demonic Cuisinarts with an appetite for high schools and trailer parks. The most you can hope to prepare is a trail of tears to the corner of a basement in hopes that the roof and floor above you get in the way of your being sucked out and thrown like a bean bag in a drunken game of corn-hole.

No, hurricanes grant you days or weeks to prepare for a beating. They broadcast their punches, but carry a toolkit that also includes uppercuts, fakes to the right and left, and a callous disregard for all things human. This leaves us disregarded as we decide to stay or go, putting up storm shutters lost for a decade under piles of crap in garages and sheds, and coming disconcertingly close to the point of competitive near-riots at local stores, seeking water, food and gasoline. The amount of preparatory work and the unpredictable nature of the beast carries with it an almost necessary element of procrastination. Why do all that work if it’s not absolutely necessary?

Steel Hurricane Shutters

We began to button up with a growing sense of dread as the spaghetti shifted in our direction. We sought out water, filled tanks with gas and installed steel window shutters that lay outside our shed in the backyard for nine years. We identified an interior closet where we would hide, with a twin mattress at the ready and bicycle helmets to protect our skulls while our limbs were crushed. This same closet has an attic access panel that seemed loose to me, so I tightened it up with eight screws, because one inch wood screws are known to resist the sucking force of 160 mile per hour wind in the absence of a roof. Yeah, right.

Submerged Kayaks

By the morning the storm hit, Port Charlotte was along a line on the west coast of Florida directly in Irma’s crosshairs. Many of our neighbors had survived hurricane Charlie in 2004 in their current homes. They were gracious beyond belief, offering us lodging, generators, food and last rights. We even went to a hurricane party the afternoon before Irma’s arrival. It was cloudy and a bit cooler than usual, the wind beginning to whip the palm trees along the canal between our house and theirs. I glanced with concern at our screened pool cage, our flimsy looking shed and the umbrella-like canvas covers over many boat-lifts. There were our two 12 foot kayaks, poised like bright red ICBMs on their launch platform, the back wall of our shed. I could only think to sink them in our pool. I wondered if WE could hide in the pool, but quickly dismissed the idea. Shrapnel-like debris is a problem.

Have you ever tried to hit a baseball at Major League speed in a batting cage? The first time I tried I heard a hissing noise and wondered when the ball would come. Now imagine objects becoming projectiles at twice that speed! Eventually we retired for the night with profound apprehension over what the morning would bring.

I was up at 6am. Irma’s predicted path had not changed. In almost total darkness I went out onto the pool deck with a box cutter, took a couple of deep breaths, and began cutting the largest row of screens out of our pool cage in hopes of preventing loss of the entire structure. I can only compare this to what it might feel like to take a sledge hammer to your living room walls in order to save the underlying wooden studs. It was a calculated risk based in part on hearsay, and also on the knowledge that our hurricane insurance covers only $10,000 for the cage on what might be a $20,000 repair. Factor in a $5000 deductible and no coverage for the screens – cut away.

To say it would be unfair for Port Charlotte and Punta Gorda to take another hit like the one Hurricane Charlie delivered in 2004 is a poor choice of word. But it would have been doubly tragic for the area and its long time residents. And there is no “fair” in wishing the tragedy elsewhere. But the unfortunate souls who live in Key West, Marco Island, Naples and Bonita Springs eventually took the brunt of the storm, serving to shred the eye wall in such a way that the storm quickly diminished by the time it reached us. We lost power for a week. In Florida. In the summer. So we were uncomfortable, but suffered little else beyond the loss of our refrigerated food. I compare it to a bad camping trip. But we got to stay in the otherwise familiar comfort of our own home with running water and flush toilets. Not that bad.

Our attention immediately turned from our own survival to that of our daughter and son-in-law, who had moved to Jacksonville two months after our move. Early preparations had us considering evacuating to a hotel near them. We searched hotels in Tallahassee, Gainesville and Valdosta to no avail. Similar to our search for water, we waited a little too long and had fallen behind the tidal wave of other evacuees, seven million of them. We eventually canceled the Jacksonville reservation and subsequently heard that its location on a river prompted evacuation of the hotel as well. We would have been evacuated from our evacuation. That left us anticipating a tidal surge that drained our canal and virtually emptied Charlotte Harbor and Tampa Bay as the storm approached, pulling the tide away similar to the effect a tsunami has on oceans.

By the time Irma hit Jacksonville, it was downgraded to a tropical storm. The dreaded surge never materialized, though our canal filled almost to the top of seawalls by the next morning. The worst damage had occurred elsewhere. We were among the lucky ones.

The islands that were so badly pounded by Irma prior to her arrival in Florida have been ravaged again. Puerto Rico, the Leeward Islands and the Dominican Republic among others may never fully recover. We are reluctant to consider ourselves veterans of a hurricane at this point, but we did have a really effective drill. We’ll know better next time. If the generator we buy is never used, it will be an effective insurance policy. Hopefully, we will be in the position of offering our home and help to others, as others so kindly did with us.

There are those who asked us why we were moving to Florida just in time for summer and hurricane season. On this first day of Autumn, I just shrug and smile and look out over a sparkling pool at a boat gliding toward the Gulf of Mexico. I take a sip from my drink and realize that, all things considered, I wouldn’t trade this experience for even a single blizzard. After a hurricane, the ground is still warm, the sun shines and the pool is inviting. In a few months it will be cold enough to freeze engine oil back home. We’re good.

Catching

My new friend and neighbor in Florida has been threatening to take me out for a ride on his boat for about three years. Last month we finally headed out twelve miles into the Gulf of Mexico for a day of fishing. The cloudless sky was as blue as the nearly flat water on an ideal February day. As we ventured further into open water we eventually lost sight of land, but it didn’t make me nervous. I was in clearly capable hands.

But I was mistaken. I was informed that we weren’t going fishing. We were going catching. I was about to learn the difference, and I swear that this story is true.

Now, I’ve never caught anything bigger than a Bluegill or Sunfish in a local retention pond. Even on fishing charters, I stand with my empty pole, examining the horizon and enduring some kind of sea-curse while others gleefully pull a variety of fish into the boat.

“You’ll be frustrated with me,” I said, “when you find out how bad at this I am.”

My captain tweaked the settings on his astoundingly sophisticated navigational Garmin and just smiled as he throttled up and headed to a favorite spot, pinpointed on a digital chart full of other such locations.

If any idiot can catch a fish, I was the perfect candidate to test the theory.

A clear plastic baggy full of shrimp emerged from a cooler. I pulled the head and tail off of one slimy, gray creature, it’s cold body chilling my fingers as I embedded a hook from one end of the body to the other.

I was taught to hang my pole over the side of the boat and let the line play out until I felt it stop, at a depth of about 50 feet.

“Jig it up a little,” I was instructed. On the Garmin, a colorful sonar profile of the rocky bottom showed peaks and valleys – perfect for fish. I guess I was moving the bait in order to simulate live food.

I prepared for a long wait, settling back in my chair and trying to just enjoy the sound of the water gently lapping at the hull of our boat, rocking gently with a hypnotic rhythm that….BAM!

My line pulled tight, the slender fiberglass rod bending nearly in half from the weight and struggle of a snagged fish. I reeled like crazy, winding fifty feet of line back onto the pole and lifting skyward until a large red snapper broke the water’s surface.

 

The entire sequence of events had taken only a couple of minutes. We unhooked the fish, tossed it into a live well and repeated the process. And repeated, and repeated. Every time I put a line in the water, another snapper struck. We were both catching, often two at the same time, off of both sides of the boat, in a seemingly choreographed sportsman’s fishing highlights video.

As I lifted a particularly large specimen out of the water, my phone rang. Yes, twelve miles out in the Gulf, I had a signal, and I had to answer. I was on a more difficult fishing expedition back in Chicago. And catching back home was of paramount importance. On land, the bait was a house, and the call was to tell me we had caught a buyer. We had sold!

“This is the best day EVER!” I yelled, as I continued hauling in my fish. And indeed, we continued to load the live well until we’d reached the limit for the day.

So it turns out that there are those who fish, and those who catch. I have joined the ranks of the catching. And I keep in mind the need to be truthful about the adventure I’ve related, because in the words of Mark Twain, "Do not tell fish stories where the people know you. Particularly, don't tell them where they know the fish." And my captain surely knows his fish!