I drove over to Charlie’s Truck Stop this past week to pick up a few things I needed around the house. I’ve passed a couple days recently replacing a window that has had some water damage as a result of improper fitting. I had not noticed the leak because of a window fan that was in place. When I took the fan out to do some cleaning, I saw the window behind the fan was not coming all the way down to fit properly and was allowing rain to blow in when the wind is out of the south. I am not much good at fixing up woodwork, but the commercial jobs have been a little slow recently and I decided to try fixing this myself. Hermann Spencer came over on Saturday afternoon to help me and, with his assistance, the job was finished in no time. All that remains is to buy some stain for the replaced wood and the window is good as new.

I parked to the side of the store and spoke to Jake as I came through the front door. He was helping an older lady I have seen around Soagie several times, but I don’t know her name. She lives East of town in an old farm house at a sharp curve in the road as you go toward Corinth. I wandered on back toward the back of the store where Jake has the hardware supplies and looked to see if there was anything I could use. Jake keeps an amazing supply of most anything you are likely to need for routine home fix up. I found a shelf of small cans of varnish and one that looked to be the color I needed. I picked up a small paint brush and, on the bottom of the display, found a half gallon of paint thinner. It was the last paint thinner Jake had in stock.

I started back toward the front of the store when I saw the Reverend Johnson sitting over by the pot belly stove with Hurshel Ledbedder. Hurshel waved me over and asked if it had rained any out toward my place. I returned that it was a little cloudy, but I was planning on having to water my tomato plants when I got back home. The Reverend chuckled and said I had best see to watering them before it began to get dark so I could find if they had been washed away in the left over rain from the hurricane. We all grinned at our exchange of weather jokes. While I don’t normally keep up with the weather all that much, my take on weather reporting is the predictions normally get it wrong about as often as they get it right, the reports on Hurricane Dennis had caught my attention as Hermann and I had been working on my window Saturday afternoon. When I turned on the radio to catch the national news update Sunday morning, reports of the advance of Dennis were all that was to be had on Mississippi Public Radio. I left the radio on most of the day as I worked at my computer and only switched off when I decided to hit the bed late Sunday evening.

The Reverend said Hermann had been in earlier and insisted, if not for his help, I would have an indoor pool from the rain we took most of the night Sunday and all day Monday. I thought Hermann was playing up his part a little. It was not like I could not have finished up repairing the window without assistance, but I was certainly grateful Hermann had decided to drop by. He had transformed a two day job into work that took up most of a Saturday afternoon.

The Reverend said he had been down on the Mississippi Coast in 1969 when Camille came ashore, though he had not been in the direct path. The difference in technology with reporting on the two storms brings a stark contrast he said. With Dennis, news reports were giving the exact location every few minutes as the storm moved up along the eastern offshore of Florida. We had a measure of the wind velocity and knew every jog the storm took on its path toward land. Back when Camille hit, we knew it was coming but a lot of people did not know how much damage it was going to do. The technology just did not exist to provide all the information we might need. The Reverend was listening to the news reports as he put the finishing touches on a sermon he was preparing for the Sunday morning service. He said he had decided to deliver a sermon on Noah and the Flood. As the reports came in around nine o’clock in the morning, the Reverend remembers hearing Dennis had sustained winds of one hundred twenty-five miles per hour. It was only an hour later, as he was preparing to walk out the door, he heard reports the wind was up to one hundred forty-five. The Reverend remembers thinking that was a considerable increase in wind over the span of an hour. On the other hand, it could just have been a case of information coming from two different sources and a discrepancy in the measuring of the wind. Whatever the case, the Reverend is certainly thankful he was in the northern extremity of Mississippi on Sunday rather than on the southern coastline. A big storm like that is nothing to mess with.

Hurshel chimed in that he was happy to be making jokes about having his tomato plants washed away by the remains of a hurricane rather than worrying about having his house blown away by one hundred twenty-five mile per hour winds. Hurshel thinks it might be nice to live down near the ocean, but the downside of having the threat of several hurricanes bearing down on you in a season takes some of the romance out of the idea. All things considered, Hurshel is content to live far enough from the ocean that a few inches of rain is all you need worry about from a hurricane.

I can see Hurshel’s point, but I heard a man who was directly in the path of Dennis asked the same question and he said there is no place on Earth you can live where you are completely safe from Mother Nature. No matter where you are there is the threat of tornados or earthquakes or mud slides or blizzards and generally some combination of the above. The advantage of a hurricane is you have several days warning to make preparations. Given that, the man said he prefers to live on the coast and enjoy life near the ocean.

END