Looking At Glasses --
Full, Empty and Falling
... When you turn on the TV and instead of people throwing chairs at each other on Jerry Springer, your local news team is reading off the list of Red Cross storm shelters.
Yep, five days into Hurricane Season 2001, we Gulf Coasters found a bad girl named Allison knocking at the front door. Like most unwanted visitors, she settled in for the long haul, and no amount of yawning and stretching and "my, my, just LOOK at the time"-ing on our part would make her realize that she was overstaying her welcome just a tad.
After dumping three feet of rain in and around Houston, Tropical Storm Allison has finally moved on, and we are left with one of those "half-a-glass" situations. The starry-eyed, "glass-is-half-full" optimists are saying, "whew, we got our storm for this year, now we can relax," while the dour "glass-is-half-empty" pessimists shake their heads and mutter darkly about how early the season started and this'll probably be the year the Big One roars through.
Actually, as much as we'd like to pitch our tents with those cheerful half-fullers, the half-empties make more realistic, if not enthusiastic, campmates: Wet little Allison may or may not be our single 2001 storm; if she is, fine -- for now.
On the other hand, even if we don't get The Big One this year, its a dead-bang guarantee that eventually, those gloomy half-empties will be right.
There's no "whether" to the question of a howling Category 4 -- or, God forbid it, a 5 -- hurricane drawing a bead on the Galveston County coastline, only a "when."
After all, the last major hurricane to hit here was Alicia in 1983, and she barely scored a 3 on the 5-point Saffir-Simpson scale, the "Richter Scale" for hurricanes. The last truly "Big One" -- a healthy 4 -- was Carla, 40 years ago. We are supposed to average one major storm a decade, so by any reckoning, we're long overdue.
One year, one day, Robbie the Robot or The Swedish Weatherman or whatever pet name you've given to the computer-generated voice on the NOAA weather radio, will blandly tell you to grab the kids and dogs and shag it inland NOW, unless you want to watch that "Baywatch" festival tonight under 20 feet of seawater.
This is where the half-fullers will crumple. Either they'll play along and leave, planning to come back in a day or two to the same Leave It To Beaver neighborhood they left, and be stunned into silent half-empty-ism when they realize that not only is their house gone, but they can't with any certainty find the street it was on.
Or they'll stay behind, cheerfully fill the lanterns, sit back in the Barca-Lounger to take in the spectacle of Nature at her rawest as though a 160-knot hurricane is just another sweeps week TV special -- and undergo a quick conversion to half-empty-ism (and several other religions in quick succession) as they spend the night dodging the whitecaps from halfway up a telephone pole.
The half-empties are already ahead of the game. Sure, their hearts may leap into their throats with every rumble of thunder between June and November, and they may Okie out every time one of those ominous "L's" pops up on the tropical weather map, but they'll never be caught off-guard when the Real Thing finally comes along.
They've already made their peace with life along the coast. They already have a mental checklist of what among their precious Stuff is important enough and portable enough to toss in the car, and accept that what's left behind will be but a memory when they return.
Ironically enough, when they do return, after the Big One has finally bulldozed its way inland, they will rejoice if so much as a stick of furniture remains recognizable, they'll carry on about How Much Worse It Could Have Been because the storm only carried away the roof and left Grandpa's rolltop desk perfectly intact right next to where the chimney fell in.
Ah, I see you're already ahead of me.
Yes, those ever-pessimistic half-emptiers will have had a conversion of their own -- and THEY:LL now be the ones talking about that proverbial glass being half-full.
