Jeff Whitten, Contributor.
There’ll be no Pembroke Mafia Football League this week, given that some of the membership was still without power as of this writing while others are mourning the Bulldogs loss to Alabama. Instead, a rumination on where we’re at from a perspective that may or may not matter much, and in that regard here goes nothing: Hurricanes and, as it turns out, certain tropical storms, are at best either a nuisance or a mess and at worst the worst of disasters.
Anyone with eyes can see that.
But they tend to bring out the best in people, and, unfortunately, at the worst, and in between just a whole lot of us trying to get from point A to point B without losing our marbles.
The best is found in people reaching out to help their neighbors, clearing roads, removing trees and doing what they can to provide comfort to others, and there’s been ample evidence of this in recent days.
It’s also, I think, found in the self-reliance of folks who weather the storm and take care of their own without trying to find someone to blame.
The worst are those who profiteer, who price gouge, or who see a storm coming and look only after themselves by buying up all the essentials they can manage, like food and gas, leaving less for the rest of us.
The worst can also be found online, where the social media warriors spread nonsense and grind axes and worse. The less said about them the better, and since I gave up social media several years back I have mostly been spared the idiocy and venom that festers there among a handful of the hateful, particularly and especially in times of trouble.
In that regard, I would recommend for those tired of the bickering, which sometimes brings to mind the sort of pettiness one might find in high school cliques, that there is a remedy.
Unplug it. Don’t look at it. And if you can’t do that, consider the sources and take it with a large grain of salt.
Old Grady Whitten, my late grandfather up in South Carolina, used to say of such folks or such issues, “it’s not worth the gunpowder it would take to blow it up.” It really isn’t.
To put it another way, as a high school baseball coach told me a long time ago, “the dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on.”
Moving on to this particular storm, Helene, which is on track to be among the deadliest and costliest in history, it’s going to take a while to get back to normal, sure.
But we got off light.
I know my wife and I did, all things considered. Our back porch was demolished by a 70 foot oak and we’re waiting with bated breath on an estimate so we’ll know if we should call our insurance company or just figure something else out, because any more it seems like insurance isn’t there to help, but to be used only as a last resort, but I digress.
Our yard looks like a hurricane hit it, with trees down and limbs and debris everywhere. And we didn’t have power until Saturday night, but we’d bought a generator after Irma and, loud as it was, it kept the fans turning and the refrigerator and lights on.
But, again, we’re lucky.
We we dodged another bullet, just as we did in August when Debby dumped about 12 inches of rain on our house and flooded parts of it, again.
The first time the house was flooded was during Irma in 2017, and luckily we have FEMA flood insurance, which helped pay for repairs in early 2018 (it took a few months) but after Debbie we stayed up most of the night with sandbags and towels and managed to keep the water to one room and afterward paid for someone to remedy the problem (which we thought we’d remedied after Irma), so there you go.
I have been through more storms now than I can remember, and in that respect I’m like most folks who’ve been here awhile – some storms hit us, and one didn’t but caused a major evacuation. Holler if you remember Hurricane Floyd, which in 1999 looked like it was headed straight at Savannah and caused the biggest traffic jam on I-16 anybody had ever seen.
It took some folks I know 14 hours to get from Midway to Statesboro on backroads, and those tales were common. People ran out of gas left and right because people started buying up all the gas and people left without having much of an idea where they would end up.
What’s more, at one point it seemed like the whole east side of Georgia was jammed up because of people from two states (Florida was also evacuating) trying to get out of Dodge.
I was already evacuated to Macon, covering a murder trial that had been moved from Liberty County, so I was in good shape though most of the time outside the courtroom we folks from the coast were in a hotel barroom watching CNN covering Floyd’s path and worrying over beer or bourbon about the folks back on the coast.
And then Floyd turned at the last minute, and after that at some point somebody figured out if you shut down the eastbound lanes of westbound interstates like 16 and contraflow the traffic it helps a little bit. But that was then, and there’s a million more people living here now, and more coming, and more to come after they get here. That’s progress for you.
As I write this, I can here chainsaws and generators as neighbors clean up debris. That’s been going on since Saturday morning, really, and not once have I heard anyone complain, or consider themselves a victim or even a survivor, since this wasn’t the Bataan Death march or the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, or a sunken ship or the remains of Hiroshima after we dropped the Atom bomb on Japan.
That’s because even if something is bad, it can be worse. And we’ll likely see worse weather ahead and storms that will get bigger and more powerful and more deadly.
A look at Helene’s visit to North Carolina should tell you that.
One last thing. The best people in the world, apart from those who live and let live, are those who serve others – and in this instance, it’s the linemen who restore power who deserve our thanks.
While it sometimes weirds me out a bit to realize just how much I’m reliant on electricity, I’m in awe of these young men who do a dangerous job and do it well. The word hero gets tossed around a lot more than it probably should, but in truth, the task of restoring power following a storm of this magnitude – at one point, a million customers in Georgia alone were said to be without power – and doing it so quickly, is heroic.
Maybe that’s one thing we can all agree on.
Now retired, Jeff Whitten was previosuly the managing editor of the Bryan County News. Whitten’s taste in music is very eclectic; he has cited The Cure as his favorite band from the 1990s, which is not surprising at all because “Friday I’m in Love” is an absolute bop. The current BCN editor is partial to The Cure’s sixth studio album, “The Head on the Door”, released in August 1985 by Fiction Records.