Near Miss 

By TAD BARTIMUS

Author Peter Matthiessen says "never phone home" because there's always some crisis that will either solve itself while you're gone or wait for you to get back, so why spoil your trip when you're too far away to fix it?

Every time I travel I remember Matthiessen's words but I seldom heed them; curiosity always overcomes common sense.

My long-distance conversation with my neighbor had touched on the dog's ticks, aphids in the garden and a friend's tragic accident when I asked:

"Anything else happening?"

"Nothing," she replied, "except the hurricane."

We were driving along an interstate 1,300 miles from the nearest ocean. It was 101 degrees and hadn't rained in that state for seven weeks. I replied with the obvious: "You're kidding, right?"

"No," she said cheerfully. "It's due tomorrow. It's all over CNN and The Weather Channel. Supposed to hit us head-on."

They say that right before an accident your life flashes before your eyes. At that moment I saw a dog and two cats asleep on the back porch, the antique table my grandfather had made for my grandmother in the living room, my wedding pictures in cardboard boxes in the garage and my unfinished novel in a desk drawer.

I comprehended that one minute my house could be there, the next it could be gone in a maelstrom of rain and wind. I saw, in my head, the faces of shell-shocked survivors of Hurricanes Andrew and Hugo, flood victims in North Carolina and North Dakota, earthquake damage in California. I knew that at that moment homes were going up in flames in the worst western wildfire season on record.

No matter how much TV you watch, you're still emotionally separated from somebody else's troubles until they become yours. I grew up in "tornado alley" and always carry with me the helpless feeling of running for the basement just ahead of a twister threatening to destroy my world as I'd always known it. Even my childhood dog blew into our lives in the midst of a tornado that killed dozens of people. We never found his previous owners and named him RIP for Rest in Peace.

I realized we were on the cusp of big trouble and there was hardly anything we could do about it. From a table at a fast-food joint we used a cell phone to organize damage control through good Samaritans:

"There's plywood in the crawl space to board up the windows; take as many photo albums as you can grab to your basement; lock the animals on the back porch, at least they'll know where they live if the roof blows off."

Then we waited, trying to come to grips with the possibility of no house, no furniture, no mementos. No past, just a difficult future.

We reminded ourselves we needed to look at the glass half full, not half empty. We were safe. Hopefully, our friends would be, too. The animals should survive. There was plenty of warning. We were insured.

No problem. We never liked those dining room chairs anyway. The novel isn't that good. Wedding guests probably still have a few photographs. We'll rebuild with a bigger shower stall.

It's amazing how fast humans can rationalize and sort out what's really important and what's not when they have no choice in the matter. Mother Nature's immutable forces bearing down on our tiny lives forces us to face our own insignificance and the paltry value of material possessions in the great scheme of the cosmos. 

Just as we'd gotten comfortable with the idea of disaster, the storm swung north and blew harmlessly out to sea.

Driving into our yard a week later we feasted our eyes on a tidy green house with gleaming white trim, flower pots overflowing with blooms, a tail wagging a grinning dog, two cats loudly meowing their displeasure at our absence and a hand-lettered "Welcome Home" sign.

Neighbors regaled us with pre-hurricane stories of toilet paper hoarding, empty grocery shelves and a pretentious woman who'd spent 24 hours shouting orders to harried carpenters gamely trying to protect her house full of chotchkas. 

It was fun to sit on our intact porch, sip from our intact glasses, pet our intact dog and listen to funny stories about what might have been.

There are 90 days left in hurricane season.

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