The Heart of Danger

My family heads into hurricanes. They pinpoint the spot of landing – why, it’s almost a hundred miles from our beach! – and pile into the car. Hurry, they say, we need to arrive before they close the bridge. The governor has declared a state of emergency. The authorities have warned 150,00 people to retreat inland, and we are going to the beach.

At the island grocery, I ask the bagboy, “What’s it look like?” Well, he says, the 5:00 report upgraded our status to Hurricane Warning. (In case you don’t remember, Watch is watch out, Warning is it’s been spotted.) The island, the bagboy says, is under voluntary evacuation. One beach over, evacuation is mandatory. In the car, Jim Morrison sings on the radio: “Riders on the Storm.”

My family is not a band of nuts. My father is conservative by nature, my husband a defense attorney. Mother, well, she would like to “ride out a hurricane,” to see the crashing waves come ashore. I am the only one of our group who thinks this decision to head into the heart of danger might not be a good idea.

Once before, we evacuated the beach for a hurricane. With Hugo bearing down on the North Carolina shore, we left for Charlotte, where Hugo hit with full gale force toppling trees and all around the house. Meanwhile, back at Ocean Isle, sunshine poured forth. “We evacuated into the hurricane!” my mother says, using it as an excuse to for us to now face down Isabel. Outside our window, sea oats bow in the wind.

News on Isabel has taken over the Weather Channel. The hot pink hurricane spins like an embryo trying to form. The announcer says the storm is trying to wrap around an eye wall. Soon, he says, things will really start to go downhill. In the computer graphics, our beach lies in the orange danger zone. Outside, on the real beach, people crowd the pier, watching the surfers ride the high waves. A puppy grabs his leash in his mouth, tugs to go home. Two doors down from us, the owners have sheathed the doors and windows in plywood.

Inside our cottage, we’ve stacked the porch furniture in the living room. The television shakes with the wind. We are going to get pummeled. We go to bed. My husband says we’re snug as two bugs in a rug. “Like ducks on a pond,” I reply. “Fish in a barrel,” he says.

What, you ask, has put us in this situation, what caused normal people to obstinately travel to the heart of danger? The answer: Family. The weekend of Isabel is the weekend of my father’s family reunion. The reunion is at the same beach every year, on the same weekend in September. More than once in its thirty-year history, the get-together has been threatened by a hurricane. If we canceled the weekend every time a Fran or an Isabel came calling, we’d have no reunion. And that is unacceptable.

Where there were once four brothers in the family, there are now two. The two are now the grandfathers. Both have had heart operations. The cousins have become the moms and dads. Some of their children are threatening to have children of their own. The family is a changing, mutable unit – divorces have excised some of its members, weddings added new ones. But a unit it remains. The reunions – at the beach, at Christmas – are what keeps it a unit, what keeps it a family. To not have the reunion – that is the heart of danger.

At its height, Isabel shook our Ocean Isle house. The sofa thumped against the floor, the pictures banged against the walls. By the evening, the first arrivals for the reunion began straggling in. The next morning, blue skies streamed above the sand. The children and grandchildren and mothers and dads played in the surf. For one more year, the family was safe.

(I can’t seem to compose a new blog post so I’m sharing this radio commentary from years ago.)