The Eye of the Storm

The Eye of the Storm

In Latin, it goes that Omne trium perfectum, which means either that good things come in threes or that things that come in threes are more likely to be perfect. So, I’ve decided to release a third story in the series of my hilltop’s history of coping with Hurricane Hilary. It’s Sunday and I have had occasion to hear from and communicate with countless family and friends who are using our placement in the eye of this storm as the context to update themselves about what we are up to and that they are “thinking of us” during this freakish weather moment. It’s not yet noon here on Sunday and the hurricane (actually now downgraded to tropical storm status) is still a few hours south of San Diego. To begin with, please remember that naming convention matters since insurance contracts often specify certain types of coverage depending on the National Weather Service’s storm designation. That’s a lesson I learned from Super-Storm Sandy in New York in 2012. Since the storm seems to be traveling at 25 miles per hour now, that means that we should expect the eye of the storm to be over us at about 4pm. After a hurricane comes off the water and starts grappling with the hard and immovable surfaces of the landscape, that whole eye of the storm thing starts to lose its structure and shape. Nevertheless, the body of the storm remains intact and the track it follows can and does shift directions based on all sorts of factors ranging from landscape to temperature to atmospheric layers, on all sides of the thing. What I know as I sit here is that we used to be to the left side of the path last night and early this morning, but that has now shifted slightly westward. Meteorologists say that Hurricane Hilary has stayed very consistent and kept to projections, but for a guy sitting on one particular hilltop, a little storm track bending looks significant. The westward shift has moved my hilltop to the extreme center point of the beast, so whatever it has to throw at someone at 1630 feet of elevation, twelve miles inland, it will throw at us later this afternoon.

I have a text thread with my three half-sisters, who stay in touch occasionally. This morning brought a check-in text from the one (Marissa) from Santa Cruz to Diane (Santa Monica), Sondra (Tustin, Orange County) and me (North County, San Diego). We went back and forth and then realized that we, the children from three different mothers of the infamous Andre, have created a sort of California coastal watch with on-the-scene coverage from San Diego, Orange and LA counties, covering the bulk of the storm-exposed part of Southern California. I then spoke with both of my full sisters, Kathy, who lives at the bottom of a local hill in Poway, halfway from here to San Diego and Barbara, who lives in Las Vegas, which is the northernmost at-risk area of storm coverage, but which is getting flash-flooding concerns thrown towards it. I have also heard from a friend (Joe) who recently visited and is now in Santa Barbara. He had that $84,000 insurance premium property on a hillside, so he’s keeping track of the storm. My friend Jason, who is visiting San Diego and who went from meeting us tonight at a coastal restaurant to coming up here for dinner, texted to cancel altogether given that he would be driving (contrary to emergency services recommendations) during the worst of it, following the exact route of the storm heading north. I also heard from my friend Steven, who owns a new home in the Palm Springs area and is stuck with parental care obligations in southeast Florida. Funny that a guy sitting in hurricane-central now has to wonder how his desert home might be affected (especially flash-flooded)…by a hurricane. Other inquiries are your basic “How ya doin’” outreaches, with the exception of the calls to both me and Kim by my daughter Carolyn, who wants a video of me straddling the roof as the house gets washed away, so she can submit it to America’s Funniest Home Videos, hosted by Tom Bergeron.

So far, it remains a free and overcast day without bagels. Of all the things that have gotten disrupted by Hurricane Hilary, it seems appropriate that it should be the storm-induced closure of the local bagel store. After all, this is an east coast phenomenon shutting down an east coast staple food product. The rain has been light but steady all morning. If I were guessing I would say we have gotten 0.5 inches so far, enough to give a decent drink to the gardens, but not so much as to overflow the hot tub or run down the driveway in a torrent. I will pause this report here and leave the rest to update you after 4pm, when the world on this hillside will end if that is to be from Hurricane Hilary.

Well, it’s 6:30pm now and while I think we’re through the worst of this thing, its still raining and the trees are getting tossed around a bit. I’m guessing that will continue on a lessening basis through morning from the look of the radar, but this beast is now up between Los Angeles and Las Vegas for the most part. It was funny how it unfolded. The rain was light and the wind light and then all of a sudden it was like someone turned on a spigot and the downpour thundered down for perhaps fifteen minutes. When it started I looked at my watch and noted that it was 4:03pm, pretty much the exact time I predicted that this thing would peak. Since that little surge ended, we are just back to the pea soup and rain with a bit higher than normal wind, but nothing that seems too out of the ordinary. It certainly doesn’t qualify as worthy of the national news coverage that it has gotten for the last 48 hours. Speaking of the news, I have scanned the online stories and see that things east of here are getting thumped like they have predicted (or maybe its just a self-fulfilling prophecy because the weather people have to prove that their concerns were worth listening to). It seems there was a rock and mud slide in the Imperial Valley that might well cause the closure of Rt. 8, which is a major east/west highway. And then there is the start of some major flooding going on in the Anza-Borego Desert. So maybe all that warning about flash flooding and mudslides was warranted.

Tomorrow morning I will walk the property and figure out if there has been any wind or water damage, but I suspect there won’t be. What I think we are all wondering about almost everywhere this year is whether the weather pattern we are living through is a one-year fluke or a new reality. I’m inclined to think that we are going to find local weather patterns less reliable and more changeable in the new normal. So, I don’t think this means we are going to get hurricane and tropical storms like this regularly like places like Florida do, but I suspect that we all have to get used to the fact that when it comes to weather, anything goes. Don’t move anywhere just for the weather is the message in that. Or perhaps, just be ready for anything. You never know when you might find yourself in the eye of the storm.