On the Hurriquake
You know, it sure seems like the weather has gotten pretty insane in the last few years, right? In southern California we’ve had years-long droughts, the hottest month in the history of the earth, the wettest and longest winter I can ever remember, and now, to top it all off, not only my very first hurricane (because that would be too normal for LA) we had a HURRIQUAKE!
I happened to be house/dog-sitting during this particular instance of extreme weather…because of course I was. It would be much too easy to ride out a storm in the comfort of your own home. For me, I had to do it in someone else’s home…with their elderly dog who is afraid of everything… and all the leaks and problems and stress that come with owning a house without any of the benefits of actually owning a home!
I first heard about our incoming hurricane on Friday, which kinda sucks because on Thursday I packed up my clothes and thought that all I’d need was t-shirts and shorts… boy was I wrong! The next two days were a lot of watching the weather channel and looking outside while saying “I don’t know, man. It looks pretty nice out.” Well, Sunday rolls around and it starts raining at 5 a.m. and basically never stops. That’s about the time I realized I didn’t do any panic buying of unnecessary groceries, which according to every newscast I’ve ever watched of the East Coast, is an absolutely vital part of hurricane season. So, I went to the nearest CVS and bought a big jug of water, some cereal, a yellow Gatorade, a reasonable amount of chocolate, and the most important thing I could think of: a rack of diet cokes. If there’s one thing I know about humanity it’s that if shit really goes down and we end up in the end times, you could get a king’s ransom for a diet coke.
I then spent the next ten hours or so just kinda waiting for things to get worse. We had periods of harder rain but for a while, everything was pretty normal (except for the fact it was really hot out and raining, that’s a new one for an LA kid). The biggest bummer was that the sweet old dog I was watching absolutely hates the rain and had to be dragged outside to pee even though I told him it was DEFINITELY going to be worse later on! Somewhere in the middle of all that rain and waiting, though, we had a goddamn earthquake! Not a bad one where I was, but still! One thing at a time Mother Nature, please!
It was around 11:30 pm when things got oddly calm for a while. I took the dog out, got him to do his business, and was about to head in when we both spotted a pack of roving coyotes. Normally our local coyotes don’t boldly strut their stuff down the middle of the street. That should have been my second clue, after the calm (before the storm…I finally understand!), that things would get weird.
About a half hour later, the skies opened up, the wind started kicking ass and the house started leaking. This specific house has the unfortunate defect of a fucked up gutter that dumps water directly on the back door whenever it rains. So, even with garbage bags and roof tiles barricading the door, it still leaked… in fact, it leaked enough that I spent the next 6 hours sleeping in one-hour shifts and waking up to swap out towels at the base of the door like a guy trying to bail out the titanic with a coffee cup.
When the sun came up though, the house was saved, the dog was calm, and the hurricane was actually just a tropical storm, and the earthquake didn’t knock anything over.
My final rating of Hurriquake Hillary: 2/10 would not do again, was very annoying.
Great timing! Just finished putting up shutters for Hurricane Idalia (cousin must have been an onion). Hurricane Idalia will be tropical storm Idalia or maybe just “wind and rain” when it gets here, but there is always a newsman on a double dose of adderal warning not to take it for granted, so after several of these hurricanes or hurricane warnings over the years I have come up with a compromise that, shy of an evacuation order, allows me to prepare the least amount the insurance company will accept to avoid denying any claim I might have to make but then just ride it out! BTW on a slightly forested path to the beach today before the rain I saw the remains of a small deer that had been shredded to the bone by some coyotes (of which we suddenly have a sizable number on the island)—connection???
When they live up to the hype they’re a nightmare, and when they don’t at least you may get a good story out of one. And this succeeds wonderfully. So glad you and Mack the dog survived!