Your dirty laundry hanging from a stoplight

This past July I had the priviledge of being a hurricane evacuee when Hurricane Dennis hit Pensacola. I call it a priviledge for two reasons. The first is because I now recognize it as a priviledge-- my husband and I own a car that we can afford to keep gassed up and which can reasonably be expected to carry us, the dog, and the kitten across vast portions of the Southeast. The second reason is that the experience of evacuating served as a much needed reordering of priorities, a kind of cosmic bitch-slap, since I had previously been spending way too much time angsting about our upcoming move back to Texas and the logistics involved in moving all of our stuff from one location to the next. When Nature offers to do it for you in the span of a few short, chaotic hours, the burden of moving suddenly doesn't seem so heavy.

To say that it's a terrifying feeling to pace around your apartment envisioning its contents strewn over a quarter of a mile, your dirty laundry hanging from a stoplight and your sheets twisted in the trees, might seem obvious. But for me, it was not the idea of losing it all that was frightening. It was the realization that my allegiance to my collective shit, with a few exceptions, was far weaker than I had imagined. This was scary in much the same way that parasailing is scary when you look down and can't find a boat towing you. If my stuff wasn't tethering me to this earth, then what was?

The answer, it turned out, came stomping through the door in uniform asking the very good question, "Why the hell are you putting your dictionary in the dryer?" (my logic: a dryer will be easy to find in rubble and will protect this awesome two-volume dictionary my uncle got me for graduation.) In the end, we just shoved all the furniture against the back wall of the apartment, grabbed a few photos, the pets, and a change of clothes, and split.

Within two hours, we were headed east on I-10, progressing at a crawl as part of an exodus of Gulf Coast residents. We passed and were in turn passed by the same set of ten vehicles all the way to Mobile, so I got to know them pretty well. We exchanged the same panicked looks at first, but then gave over to studying the contents of each other's escape vehicles. One car was packed full of nervous bird dogs, its windows already smudged opaque; another was stuffed solidly with clothes still on their hangers; several large pick-ups carried grills, hunting and camping gear, and pallets of water.

For the first two states, we had no idea where we going and were simply fleeing the projected storm path, but by about Biloxi, Mississippi, we realized that finding an unbooked hotel west of Louisiana was a joke. So we crossed into Texas and stayed the night in a hotel in Beaumont watching what amounted to weather-porn-- the almost bloodthirsty glee with which forecasters seemed to will the hurricane, and the public's sense of panic, into something truly newsworthy.

The next morning we decided, "Fuck it-- we already in Texas, let's keep going," and pushed on to Houston where we had friends, a couple, gracious enough to put us up for the night, even though one of them was recovering from a near-fatal car accident in which she broke her neck in multiple places a week before their wedding. That was yet another counterpoint to the drama of evacuating-- sitting in this young, newlywed couple's living room among the medical equipment and unopened wedding gifts (they exchanged vows in the hospital chapel), and watching a storm of red pixels engulf your city on TV. Of those two opposing realities vying for your emotional attention, how can you worry about an apartment?

So, feeling increasingly displaced, but still somehow oddly OK with it, we pushed on further into Texas the next day to see our families and wait for word from the military that it was OK to head back to Florida. And this was where I finally caught a glimpse of the boat I was parasailing from-- in a chain restaurant in San Antonio, gathered around a noisy table with my husband and our in-laws, his brother and sister-in-law, and their angry teething two-year-old, three different conversations going on at once, and me answering my cell phone with my mother on the line, my dad and brother eavesdropping in the background, and everybody knowing that everybody else is OK-- that finally felt like a solid, anchoring tug.