Good Night, Irene

As it turned out, it was a good night here in Arlington, and a relatively peaceful passing of the first hurricane here since Isabel roared through on September 6th, 2003.

I was in unit 515 at Big Pink then, on the south face of the massive building and took the winds head on from the balcony with my Discman and vodka, no ice, no power.

It was a strange and ominous day yesterday, waiting on the winds and rain. Is there a correlation between barometric pressure- the glass dropping rapidly- and mood? Is there some primordial trigger that relates to the flight-or-fight instinct?

I don’t know. I could not dredge up much interest in the wider world yesterday, even with the news that the #2 commander of al Qaida was nailed by a Predator drone strike last week in Waziristan. RIP,Atiyah Abd al Rahman, you dirt-bag.

If we can kill another four or five of the senior leadership, that will change the prediction for the future lethality of the organization.

That is the prediction from SECDEF Leon Panetta, anyway, and I like his track record. Naturally, I was contemplating other, more intimate predictions as they relate to my life and property, which appear less and less related to al Qaida and more to nature.

There is a guy named Joe Bastardi who makes his living as a weather forecaster. Joe is a body-builder out of Penn State University when he is not a weatherman, and his predictions for storm activity have been remarkably accurate as compared to those of NOAA. From Joe’s Weatherbell publication there is this about what is coming at us on the Eastern Seaboard for 2011:

“My hurricane forecast has this years total impact and power rating close to 1999… with 2008 the strongest most recent analog. I have a pendulum impact theory based on the swings between the el Nino and la Nina, but folks, there are some big ticket items at work here… most notably the backdrop of a cooling troposphere globally…”

Of course, he also said that Irene would be one of the top three recorded hurricanes to strike the East Coast, and someone besides me must have been listening to him. Maybe that accounted for the mood of anticipation, or maybe it was something deep in the cerebral cortex.

I had made my preparations. I missed the President’s bunker address as he staged his response to Irene. I was unable to walk or swim, since the pool was closed and the rain too daunting. I probably should have gone to the Fitness Center, or put the fancy bike on the trainer and peddled in lace for an hour, but instead, I napped.

The fall in the barometer was marked when I got up around cocktail hour, and decided to check the television for portents. The first vodka of the storm came with dense sheets of rain. There was no wind to speak of until the storm-enhanced dusk of evening came on. The sudden rustling of the maples announced the arrival of the first edge of the intense cyclonic breeze, and that in turn kicked in my storm checklist.

The light gear had been removed from the balcony hours before: cushions on the chairs, the snack table between the heavy Adirondack chairs, the butt kit, so it would not be overturned and shower the properties below with the remnants of my tobacco vice.

I had the balcony door open with a pair of Vice Grip pliers clamped hard on the guide rail so the heavy slab would not oscillate wildly and rip itself from its hinges as it has before.

Another couple bands of wind and rain passed through, rising in intensity. I stirred the pot of pulled brisket-cum-chili that I made to have some comfort food pre-cooked in advance of the power failure. I heard the grenade-pop of the first transformer to go, and looked with concern at the reading light to see the first flicker of the power outage. It did not come.

The candles were staged on the dining-room table along with the spare batteries, and the phones and the iPad and iPod were connected to the wall so as to be at max charge when the power quit. I watched some stand-up photo ops of brave reporters standing in the worst possible places, sea foam covered, or heavily-slickered in front of traffic and people who seemed to be going about their business as usual.

I buttoned up the place around nine and went to bed. I know that was going to mean me rising in the night, along with the wind, but I wanted to gauge the strength of the storm as it occurred.

I got up the first time around one-thirty to the roar of the wind through the thick foliage that resisted the passing of the gale, branches waving wildly but the trunks appeared to stay put in the soaked earth. The rain was sideways, and the balcony, as I leaned on the door to keep it closed from the outside. The feeling of the storm’s strength was palpable, but seemed manageable. Power was holding, and the eye of the storm was abeam the capital.

This moment on the balcony was as bad as it was going to get, and I went back to recline under the comforter in the bedroom, rising again about four to listen again to the roar.

The power held. The eye had moved another four miles in stately procession toward Philly and New York, and I was buoyed by the idea that we were going to dodge the bullet.

I got up again at five, and things were calming noticeably. I turned on the television, and the people at the anchor desk seemed punchy. “Too many facts in my brain,” said one anchor, and another shook her head in agreement.

The Doppler radar showed that there are still bands of rain to come, but the crisis was over. It was not that big a deal in Arlington.

I don’t know about trees down at the farm in Culpeper. I will have to check out the earthquake and hurricane consequences- maybe today, if things clear up fast. They are talking about sunshine this afternoon. Could they open the pool?

Before I turned off the television, I looked at the satellite image they showed of the waters off West Africa. Tropical Storm “Jose” is next on the alphabetical list for this year, and here it comes. They give it a 30% chance of intensifying.

Joe Bastardi is claiming six or seven storms will come ashore this season. If he is right, I don’t mind if the preparations for Irene were in vain. There will be more opportunities to exercise the system this season.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com