I feel stupid and contagious

There's this massive hurricane coming in to eat the Big Easy for lunch. It sounds like a McDonald's commercial, but no. Many people will probably be killed, and up to a million could be homeless. I don't understand numbers like a million when it comes to people. It's too many. We're going to start understanding in a fractional way what the tsunami was like, or how it feels to live in a war zone.
The worst part of this situation is that we created much of the problem ourselves- the levees meant to keep the city dry have eroded the land by keeping valuable silt out of the marshes. In conjunction with this, a vast system of pipelines that is responsible for pumping oil out of the Gulf has robbed the coastline of over a million acres of land which would have acted as a buffer against the storm surges and headwinds. These might not have helped that much, but we will never know now- all that remains to be seen is how powerful this storm is really going to be when it hits land early tomorrow morning.



When I was a kid, shortly after moving to Charleston, South Carolina, a category 4 storm called Hurricane Hugo slammed the coastline of my new state. It had top winds of 160 miles per hour, and my family elected to stay in our home due to advice given to us by several Carolina lifers in the neighborhood. My parents, 34 and 31 at the time, and my brother and I, five and six respectively, barricaded ourselves in a windowless, interior hallway of our single-story house with a transistor radio, oil (hurricane! ha!) lamps, and blankets. I think we may have also had peanut butter sandwiches, and maybe some bananas.
I remember my parents arguing as the night wore on, long after we lost any kind of radio signal, about my father going outside. He wanted to go out of our big double front doors, he could swear he heard a woman screaming. My mom was pleading with him, saying it was only the wind, and everyone knew she was right, but he was going nuts. And then the wind stopped, and it was the eye, and we went across the street to our friends the Mackey's house, where several other families were gathering, and I remember my father carried me and there were already a couple of feet of standing water out in the yard and in the street.
The next day this kitten was out in the front yard of their house, walking in circles, meowing at nothing. It stayed crazy forever. We were out of school for two weeks, and I turned seven during that time, which was the best because I had a party in the middle of the day with all the neighbor kids when we should have been at school. Chainsaws cost 500 dollars, generators 2000. People tried to steal our coleman lanterns, and there were maggots on the garage floor because there was no garbage service for weeks. All in all, it was pretty cool, and there was lots of wood to play with everywhere, and dangerous diseases to catch in contaminated water.