Hurricane Chloe

June 1 marked the official beginning of hurricane season. Four have visited my neighborhood since 2004—Frances, Katrina, Rita, and Wilma. With the exception of Wilma, all of their barks proved worse than their bites (at least while they stopped here).

Stormwise, the fall of 2005 did not relent. Patrick and I were not prepared to go without power for so long. It took us two hours to boil water for morning coffee. We first lit a tin of Sterno for heat, which worked about as well as rubbing two sticks together. We switched to a candle. Sable ashes spilled onto the floor.

Not surprisingly, next Christmas we gave each other a propane grill and an outdoor fireplace. We also purchased the Black & Decker StormStation: a small rechargeable generator with a radio and a lamp. But the 2006 season passed quietly. Nature abhors a plan.

Last week, Patrick encountered a six-month old golden retriever in need of a home. Her face reminds me of a dolphin’s—this is likely because of her long nose. She moves about the house like an ebullient baby cyclone. We named her Chloe.

We used to talk about a dog the way we talk about a baby: it was a “some other day” project, infinitely postpone-able and conceptual. But Chloe’s here now; she engenders a profound sense of nowness. She buries her head deep in the sofa cushions, and she mauls my purple socks (ugly, anyway). She tries desperately to befriend Sybil, our cat. Via strong hissing, Sybil has made it clear that she isn’t interested.

Some Atlantic hurricanes begin as minor disturbances in the “Intertropical Convergence Zone,” a band of low pressure that circles the equator. This explains why Florida and the Caribbean are such popular landing spots. When a storm gets “organized,” as forecasters describe it, I scan the website of the National Hurricane Center for information. In addition to the Saffir-Simpson scale, it measures hurricanes in terms of millibars, or units of air pressure. I’m always temporarily mollified when I hear the word “millibar.” Anything that sounds like a piece of candy can’t be harmful, right? The lower the number of millibars, the more powerful the storm is, but before I have the chance to remember that principle, I automatically assume that a shrinking number is a good sign. I’m never correct in this assumption. I await the NHC’s advisories (issued every three hours) and avidly monitor the column of strike probability percentages.

These are all the things that I do. The cane comes if/when it comes.

Similarly, Sybil seems to think that if she watches Chloe closely enough, she can prevent the unruly intruder from disrupting her well-ordered kitty life. Sadly, this is not true. She climbs the three-quarter wall in our kitchen anyway and stares balefully down at us and at the dog. Her lemur eyes track every canine movement.

Chloe was the name of an Atlantic hurricane in 1967. She was born in mid-September off of the coast of Africa. She was headed towards North America, but she bumped into Hurricane Doria and retreated east, eventually hitting Spain. She reached a minimum pressure of 958 millibars and achieved a wind speed of 95 miles per hour. She was a Category 2.

Hurricane Wilma snapped one of our palm trees in half when she arrived. Yesterday, in the backyard, I showed Chloe how to play Tug the Frond. She gripped the palm leaf tightly between her little jaws and pulled.