Life Between Hurricanes

Life Between Hurricanes

When we arrived on Monday, Orange Beach had just reopened after the intense cleanup following Hurricane Sally. On Tuesday, the Alabama governor declared a mandatory tourist evacuation due to Hurricane Delta churning toward the coast.

I was too busy digging for shells and jumping waves to pay attention to the weather, so I didn’t know about the evacuation until Wednesday when our Airbnb host sent an email.

She concluded, “But I think it’s overkill.”

I was all too happy to agree.

The hurricane wouldn’t make landfall until Friday night, and we were checking out Friday morning. We decided to stay.

The weather was glorious—partly cloudy so the pristine sand didn’t blind us, and yet sunny enough to make my daughters look bronze, even with SPF 50. We spent our mornings at the beach and our afternoons eating a lazy lunch in our pajamas and then putting on our deck-dried swimsuits to jump from pool to pool.

Sixteen years of adult responsibility melt away when I am at the beach, and I will go down slides over and over, splashing into water so frigid the pool’s entirely empty except for me.

By Thursday morning, however, I started obsessively checking the weather. Orange Beach huddled outside of “the cone”—a phrase I learned from an OBA native—so I didn’t think we should leave. My husband said he didn’t think we should take unnecessary risks.

I gave him the side-eye. He was clearly beached out, and the hurricane gave us a valid excuse to leave.

Thursday afternoon, my husband said, “What if we leave by 3?”

I glanced at the clock; it was already 2. We had spent the morning and early afternoon at the beach, and I needed to make lunch. I hadn’t packed anything.

Our middle daughter asked, “Are we leaving?”

My husband said, “Ask your mother.”

I said, “You know it’s not up to me.”

He said, “Well, if it’s not up to you . . .” and started packing.

He started with the dry goods first and then the girls’ suitcases. I continued calmly making lunch. Neither of us communicated what we were feeling, but I could feel the pressure building inside my chest. Truth was, I was pretty beached out myself, and yet I still didn’t want to leave.

Leaving meant going back to building a house and juggling a business and writing in my spare time and the girls fighting because they were bored. Staying meant jumping from pool to pool until our fingers pruned, reading books out loud, and watching the sun set over the marina.

Quality time is my number one love language. Because my husband wanted to leave, I felt like he did not want to spend time with me. Or our girls. Of course, I did not realize that’s why the pressure was building inside my chest. I just kept doctoring stir-fry and making a mess in the kitchen.

Finally, I knew I had to start packing.

I went to the bathroom, so I could subtly check my phone. Every headline hawked the HISTORIC HURRICANE! heading toward the gulf. Gritting my teeth, I came out of the bathroom and took a load of laundry from the dryer.

I primly sat on the couch and started folding. “We can probably be out of here by four.”

He dug his hands through his hair. “Then I shouldn’t have been sitting here for thirty minutes!”

By 4 p.m., we closed the door to our condo. We had promised the girls ice-cream, so we drove toward our favorite ice-cream shop and saw that it was closed. The past four days we’d spent rotating between the beach, the condo, and the pools.

Now, we had a firsthand view of the desolation that had taken place just weeks before our arrival. Professional clean up trailers parked across ten spaces outside concrete hotels, and nearly every shingled roof had sustained damage. The wind had decimated jaunty florescence lights showboating ice-cream and seaside souvenirs.

Even Starbucks was closed.

We headed back toward Perdido Key and stopped and got ice-cream at—I kid you not—Sweet Cone Alabama. Our interstate 1-65 was closed, so we headed toward Florida. Sodden rolls of carpet, butchered palm trees, and sliced strips of drywall hemmed in the road as we moved slowly forward in the bumper to bumper traffic.

Our three-year-old, of course, chose that moment to declare she had to use the restroom. Her face grew red and eyes watered as my husband gunned the minivan toward the gas station. The gas station had a crock pot of boiled peanuts but no working bathrooms. I strapped her back into her car seat with my fingers crossed, and my husband drove like a bat toward another gas station.

The robotic voice on my husband’s phone declared that a wreck would delay our trip by 1.5 hours. Our ETA read 1:30 a.m. It started raining. Hubby flicked on the wipers. I clenched my jaw. My phone dinged. Our Airbnb host let me know that the governor had rescinded the evacuation.

This was—how shall we say? —not my best moment.

One of my greatest attributes, being present in the moment, can bite me like a shark whenever quality time does not work out. And woe to the man who threatens that quality time by making me leave my condo during a historic hurricane!

I sat in the passenger side, utterly fuming. I said, “We could be in the condo right now.”

He said, “Yes, we could.”

“I could be reading books to the children.”

“Yes, you could.”

“We could be sleeping in our beds.”

He shrugged. “You can fuss the whole way home. Makes no difference to me.”

Staring at the red taillights of the cars in front of us, I no longer felt angry, just sad. I hate, hate, hate feeling like I’ve missed an opportunity to make memories. I would like to say I became this way because of the grief I experienced in college, but I remember pounding a podium my senior year in high school and declaring that making memories should be our utmost goal.

Maybe due to an artistic temperament? I’m not sure . . .

But I do know I was thwarting any good memories that could have been made as my husband navigated our minivan down backroads clotted with debris. This was as grand an adventure as finding the seashell motherload or jumping ten foot waves, and yet my poor attitude blinded me to the fact that the people I love most in the world were safely cocooned with me as we outran a hurricane.

Around midnight, I touched my husband’s arm. “I’m sorry I wasn’t nice.”

He smiled but kept his eyes on the road. “No problem.”

Our van pulled into our lane at 1:12 a.m. All three girls were asleep. Seeing my orchids blooming in the kitchen window, I sighed.

I had to admit—it was good to be home.

Every family vacation seems to provide negative memories we laugh about later: sun poisoning, the stomach virus, colicky babies, and jellyfish stings. Do you have a favorite “worst” vacation memory?

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