Moving Daze

Well, the wind is blowin' harder now
Fifty knots or there abouts,
There's white caps on the ocean.
And I'm watching for water spouts
It's time to close the shutters
It's time to go inside.
--Jimmy Buffet; Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season


Ariel moved out last weekend to her own (shared) apartment in a not-too-dodgy section of Arlington. Of 52 Saturdays in the year, she picked the one with a hurricane in it. I’ve got to hand it to her, though, she carefully planned what was going, and how, and in whose car. The only hitch in the giddyup was Hanna. An uninvited guest, Tropical Storm Hanna was scheduled to come ashore somewhere in the Carolinas late Friday or early Saturday and move up the coast with wind gusts up to 50 mph and loads of rain, spreading terror, destruction, and damp in her wake. Thursday night. Ariel announced the schedule had been moved up a day.

Friday morning, I began loading my pickup with boxes. After two additional trips to the storage locker for furniture (bed and bed stead, dresser, couch, etc., etc.) left over from Grandma’s move 2 years ago, I was sore in places I’d forgotten I had. Ariel’s friends came by and took additional boxes, furniture, and her enormous shoe wheel; girl’s got more shoes than Imelda Marcos. Pat came home early and joined me at the storage locker to load "that frickin' mattress and box spring into the bed of the pickup. The box spring was not too heavy, but lacked handles and was like trying to wrestle a walrus, while the mattress had handles but was heavier than the average loaded supertanker. Plus they were 4 inches longer than the truck bed so they had to travel tilted against the bed edge. Tying them down was more of a psychological help than a real one. They caught enough wind on the road that I felt like I was tacking a small boat.

Hanna had begun as a Saharan dust storm, moved offshore and became a group of thunderheads off the Cape Verde Islands. Like so many Atlantic "tropical disturbances", the storms drew heat energy from the warm tropical waters, organized themselves into a loosely rotating mass (with help from the Coriolis Effect), and began drifting west. Somewhere east of the Leeward Islands, wind speed picked up to 40 and a Tropical Depression was hatched. Hanna sailed through Tropical Storm and kept growing to a respectable Category 1 strength with winds at 80 mph, and took aim for the east coast of the U.S. She kind of snuck up on everyone since most attention was diverted to the Gulf coast where Gustav was impacting. Once under the influence of a high pressure system, Hanna began tracking north.

Saturday dawned glowering and dark. Doom knocking at the door. One more load and on to the apartment to unpack and set up. Good friends from church showed up to help; Frank, an engineer, was put in charge of assembling a mismatched brass bed and a bathroom étagère (no tools needed… right, just a power drill, screwdriver, vice grips, and lots of muttered words). In my wisdom and my haste, I had forgotten the clamps to keep the bed from collapsing- stuck them in the truck without a second thought. Problem was, the truck was at home in Vienna, and I was with the Honda in Arlington. So, back to Vienna for the clamps and a dozen framed photos for the walls which were pretty empty (“Not everybody grows up in an art gallery, daddy.”) By this time the rain was pelting down sideways and traffic was throwing up rooster tails of spray wherever the storm drains were overflowing, which was pretty much everywhere.

Back to the apartment, where Frank figured out the clamps which looked like something Galileo had cobbled together on an off day. We assembled the bed and Ariel tested it by flopping down full length down the center. I cringed, but the contraption held together; good enough for jazz. The étagère (no tools required!) was up, needing only to be bolted into the drywall. The rain continued, and the area around the ground floor apartments, excavated and landscaped to allow in light, had turned into a moat with more water pouring down all the time. Ann was there, putting up curtain rods and threading the curtains, and Ariel’s friends were unpacking. The bed, assembled, pizza delivered for the masses, and curtains up, the place was looking lived-in and girly. Kathy from church arrived to help Ariel unpack the books, and unpack the books, and unpack the books…not everybody grows up in a library, daddy.

And Tropical Storm (formerly Hurricane) Hanna? She passed on through, leaving 10 inches of water in Vienna but not much wind. By Tuesday, she had recrossed the Atlantic and was flooding Northern Ireland. The RAF sent helicopters to evacuate isolated villages. Begorrah.