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From the Pastor: Hurricane Edition!
Monday afternoon my sister texted me a strange question. “Are you going to bring Dad back to your place on Tuesday?” What? Why? On Tuesdays, I go to visit my dad. We usually go out to lunch and then grocery shopping and perhaps to Home Depot or some other place to pick up anything he needs around the house. But I don’t bring him back home with me. So why the question? “Because of the storm coming on Wednesday.” What storm? I hadn’t heard of any storm. But, sure enough, there was one scheduled, almost as if the meteorologists could simply flip a switch and create one. Oops, that sounds like conspiracy theory talk! A weather system was strengthening into a possible hurricane and it was heading into the Gulf of Mexico. I got the details about it the next day from Dad. It was heading past us and up into the Big Bend area of the panhandle. Not aiming for us, so no need to evacuate. Whew, that’s a relief. If anything changes, let me know and I’ll come pick you up, I told him, and that was that. Until the next afternoon. He lives in a mobile home and Pinellas County issued a mandatory evacuation. So I went to get him. My sister was evacuating to mom’s house with her husband, daughter, and a niece. And a couple of dogs. And a cat. Dad was coming to my place. All was well. Until Aunt Irma showed up. Everybody with common sense was leaving Florida’s west coast if they were able to and here she was coming in. Just for the storm. Literally. It turns out that she has a new hobby: meteorology. She wanted to be in the midst of the storm so that she could try out all of her new equipment. I was praying the Mass prayers “To Avert Storms” and she was hoping that the storm would turn in and hit us directly. Hotels were already booked due to the evacuations so she needed a place to stay. Mom already had people sleeping on the floor, plus Aunt Irma didn’t want to have to deal with all of the animals. She couldn’t stay with Dad since his park was evacuated. So she arrived unannounced to stay at the rectory. She was as giddy as a schoolgirl. “Help me get everything set up,” she happily greeted me, “before the bands of rain get here.” She had boxes of things that were all shiny and new. Like so many people who get a new hobby, she spent a small fortune on things that she thought she might need “someday” but she had never had a chance to actually use most of them. She had thermometers to check temperature changes and barometers to measure the atmospheric pressure. Another box held various types of hygrometers so that she could measure the humidity of the air and ground. Anemometers, both handheld and with mounting contraptions so that she could measure wind speed, came out of the pile next. Of course, she had rain gauges to set up just about everywhere to ensure a good reading of the copious amount of rain that was sure to come. We unwrapped both a wind sock and a weathercock, which didn’t make any sense to me until she showed me how she was going to fly a drone in the storm and needed to have a measured airspeed and direction so that she could control it as well as possible. When I opened the next box, I was stumped, for I had neither seen nor heard of this weird contraption. It was a Present Weather/Precipitation Sensor. It consisted of a heavy pole with a u-shaped top piece upon each end of which a radar gun-like device pointed toward the other one. It was a measuring tool to determine what kind of precipitation was falling (rain, hail, etc.), how large the droplets were, and maybe a bunch of other stuff. She had a transmissometer to measure the visibility (how far you can see through the storm/fog/whatever, and even a ceilometer to measure how high/low the cloud ceiling is. If the local weatherman had something, so did Aunt Irma! Yes, she had it all and then some. We set everything up in about 3 hours and then waited. A small shower came by while we were doing all of this and didn’t yet have it set so that she could record it. But then nothing. Wind gusts of about 14 mph were the most exciting thing. Yawn. “But the TV weathergirls/guys insisted that this would all start Wednesday evening,” she cried. Sadly, we barely got a drizzle all night long. She stayed awake the whole time but Dad and I went to sleep. She was still manning the helm the next morning, buzzing on her third pot of coffee, when I went to celebrate the morning Masses. Sunshine and a slight breeze greeted me upon my return later that morning. She was frustrated and fuming and tired and cranky. But she persisted. All day we watched the wind blow but a strong breeze certainly wasn’t worth the trip to Florida. The TV was showing flooding and wind on Bayshore and other places nearby, yet Epiphany stayed dry. She climbed up on the roof to try to spot something—anything—but soon came back down dejected. No storm. Finally, late Thursday evening, it started to rain a little bit. But there was Aunt Irma, after being awake and excited for nearly two full days and nights, sound asleep. We carried her to bed and tucked her in without her even stirring. Maybe next time she’ll get to experience the storm... With prayers for your holiness, Rev. Fr. Edwin Palka Comments are closed.
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