Fair, 54°
Weather sponsored by:

Thanks Matthew


Posted

I spent the entirety of the Hurricane Weekend feeling like a shaken-up can of soda. Not because of the Hurricane, really, because I live a bit more inland within the vast concrete rivers and jungle canals of Jacksonville – but because for an entire weekend, I had to cram four people and six animals into my two-bedroom apartment.

My girlfriend’s parents live in Fernandina Beach, so, obviously, they were some of the first to evacuate for fear their home would soon become an aquarium. When her parents evacuated, so too did my girlfriend’s animals.

Right into my, again, two bedroom apartment.

So I spent the entirety of the Hurricane Weekend smoking cigarettes in basketball shorts bouncing one leg on the other with a crazed, frayed look on my face while dogs chased cats and cats chased each other. Nobody was friends.

I prepared for the hurricane at the supermarket by purchasing just the necessities – a jar of pickles and a can of vinaigrette. My lovely girlfriend perhaps didn’t share my proclivity for half-baked ideas and ill-prepared yeehaw-lets-ride-out-the-storm-with-willpower-and-prayer vision, so I came home Thursday to a food pantry on my kitchen table complete with cheap beer, canned foods, gas lamps and P-38 can openers laid out carefully in neat rows.

To make matters worse, my black lab, Juno, went into heat. My girlfriend’s poodle, Wilbur, paced in front of her crate for hours howling and crying to get in. Suddenly, my two-bedroom apartment had become a freaky red light district for the entire animal kingdom.

As someone who would buy insurance for her insurance, my girlfriend was jittery and jumpy the entire weekend from the storm and kept asking if we were going to be okay.

“We’re going to be just fine,” I repeated until it became a mantra.

“But what if we’re not?” She said.

“Well, then I guess we’ll have to eat the animals, yeah?”

So I spent the weekend fantasizing about how to escape my apartment like some wandering vagrant. Maybe I could move to California, maybe get a job as a barista, start a salsa company or something. I hadn’t thought it out very well. Everyone needs an escape plan after all, according to Governor Rick Scott.

When our power didn’t go out and the hurricane’s novelty wore off, we decided to pretend we lost power and lit our three Spanish candles depicting the sacred heart of Jesus, which were the only candles left at the dollar store. We didn’t have much of a choice in the matter.

We played board games in the half candlelight while the wind howled and trees splintered into Jenga pieces all around us. And Wilbur whined. And the cats hissed.

When on Saturday we woke up without a chunk of the apartment halfway to Bermuda, we decided to eat our stockpile of food for breakfast, lunch and dinner. After we stuffed our mouths, we found ourselves with hurricane cabin fever or animal Stockholm Syndrome and decided to smoke cigarettes while we watched the storm from our patio.

Our apartment sits more or less on stilts surrounded by bridges, so the rain collected in the canals under us and filled them all the way to the two-foot bulkheads.

She looked at me, obviously forgetting her frantic purchases the day prior, and suggested we play in the newly birthed river that encompassed our apartment.

I did what any sane person would do. I agreed to splash around in the hurricane. I threw her in the stygian water and she emerged, wiped the dirt and sticks from her face, and pulled me down below the waters.

Our shirts sucked at our skin while the storm poured water sideways. The trees swayed in a rhythmic dance, the ducks swam on the sidewalks. And, yeah, it was fun.

She spent all our meager savings preparing for a hurricane, which, fortunately, narrowly avoided us.

And, yeah, it got scary sometimes when we could feel the wind come through the living room. But in that moment, out there in the hurricane, with all of its oppressive wind, it didn’t seem so terrifying.

So I spent the entire hurricane weekend snuggled up with our animals, talking with neighbors I’d never met before and eating more pita chips than I ever thought I could.