Watching the news and hearing about Katrina takes me back to Hurricane Hugo, which totally ass-pounded South Carolina 16 years ago. I was 11 years old and was shuffled off along with my brother to a neigbors house to wait out the storm. (Their house was brick, ours: masonite)
When mom and dad said "Wait out the storm" I didn't know that entailed "camping out" under the neighbors kitchen table with their two kids and fleabag dog. They kept telling me "Just try to get some sleep", but excuse me, have you ever heard trees either snapping like twigs or being ripped from the ground? It's one scary fucking sound. Imagine a number of gunshots worthy of Scarface, only like, 100 times louder. Thats the sound of every pine tree in your neigborhood snapping and falling. The pines weren't as bad as the Oak trees though. Our street was lined with them, I had been climbing them for years. The sound of a massive oak tree being slowly pulled out of the ground is...unlike anything you can imagine. There's this huge pulling sound, that's almost alive, muscular in it's own way. It starts off low, like a creaking "rrrrrrrrrrr" sound, then you can hear the roots snapping, limbs crashing down, then the whole thing falls over in this gigantic "FWOMP" sound. You never forget those things. The next day after the storm had passed we all came outside, bone-tired because...who could sleep through that? And we walked out into...a third-world country. No power, cars broken and bent under the weight of fallen trees, chain link fencing strewn everywhere, roofs ripped, and tree limbs everywhere. I think it was the saddest moment in my life at that point, walking down our street and being able to count on one hand the number of trees that survived. What followed was two weeks of canned water, candlelight, cooking on the coleman stove and lots and lots of tedious yardwork. Probably why to this day I loathe and detest yardwork.

Damn Hurricaine.

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