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Hurricanes Are An Expected Part Of Our Lives

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: September 17, 2008

Week two of our vacation road trip took my wife, Rebekah, and me deep into Maine and all the way to the port of Bar Harbor. The long Tampa summer has been hot and oppressive, so we were more than ready for a good dose of refreshing September in New England.

Even though Florida was a long way in my rear-view mirror, Hurricane Hanna did its best to chase us down. After some drenching rains, the storm passed quickly, and when the sun broke through on the top of Cadillac Mountain on a Sunday afternoon, the temperature topped out around 60 degrees, and we could see clear into Nova Scotia.

The Maine shoreline is spectacular. The ocean, freshly churned by the passing storm, hurled itself against the granite cliffs, huge waves splashing with magnificent effect.

There's something compelling about the place where terra firma touches the sea: quantifiable earth rubbing against the unfathomable; time lapped by eternity; what we know coming up against what we can only imagine; solid ground teetering on the edge of the great deep.

The following day we went on a whale-watching expedition, up close and personal with a pair of showboating humpbacks 25 miles off the Maine coast.

On the Gulf of Mexico, we live and talk as if the waters are our enemy. We're shocked by each approaching hurricane as if tropical systems haven't been blowing through since well before people moved South and started building so close to the edge of reason.

They call them barrier islands because that's their job. Yet we still insist on stripping these natural breakwaters of vegetation, erecting homes and businesses and then sharing the insurance risk with those sane enough to live a few miles inland.

Like it or not, hurricanes are a natural and expected part of our lives. Why do we perpetuate the delusion that such phenomenon are beyond the pale of reason? Doesn't it make more sense to simply plan?

If we really want to get a handle on unreasonable insurance rates, shouldn't we stop building in all the wrong places? Shouldn't we leave the remaining wetlands alone and rebuild what we destroyed, so they can perform the function they were designed for?

If we don't shift our relationship to the environment from domination to cooperation, we're only going to run into increased problems down the road. We live in Florida; we don't have a granite coastline. Maybe we should deal with reality.

Columnist Derek Maul can be reached at derekmaul @gmail.com.

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