HARVEY: Hurricane Season

As I write this weekly blog, Hurricane Delta is, as they always say, “churning” towards the Gulf Coast. If the cone of uncertainty can be believed, Houston (and who would not believe in something so named) is out of danger; Gulf-watchers, professional and otherwise, await with varying degrees of expertise, experience, and confidence the predicted sharp turn to the Northwest that would take Delta to Vermillion Bay in Louisiana, to follow the track and the devastation of Hurricane Laura, that made landfall 41 days ago. Delta, named after the letter and not the triangle of land at the mouth  of the Mississippi or the woman in the song “Delta Dawn,” is a late hurricane in a turbulent hurricane season. Like the Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas “seasons”, but for different (perhaps linked) reasons, Hurricane season has seemingly expanded: we denizens of the Gulf Coast are told to be on alert from April to November. And many of us are.

The passage I just wrote is full of anniversaries, and is a product of what I call anniversary thinking. When we measure the distance from one event to another, we do so by invoking anniversaries. Although online calendars of Gulf hurricanes tell me that today is not, in the usual sense, the “anniversary” of any particular Gulf storm—I can’t find a storm that landed in Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana or Texas on this date--the combination of repetition and temporal distance makes anniversary thinking applicable here. All dates are anniversaries; when I say that Harvey came ashore in 2017, we all understand that 2017 is the 2017th anniversary of the birth of Christ, or, in secular terms, the beginning of the Common Era. Age is an anniversary, as we know from the use of “anniversaire” for birthday in French; similar patterns can be found in other romance languages.  When I say I was 58 when Hurricane Harvey flooded our home, I am signaling that 58 years of November 23rds have come and gone between the year of my birth and this other date—in this case 2017. When I say it has been four years since Harvey, and I count on my fingers to make sure I include the first year, I am calculating according to anniversary thinking. “Seasons” are, of course, also anniversaries; they accrue meaning for us as they repeat themselves, recalled other seasons, other patterns of light, wind, temperature, and rituals like decoration, attendance at religious services, or gift giving. My “weekly blog” makes it clear that every Thursday when I spend the day writing is the anniversary of a past Thursday. If I miss the window to write on Thursday and edit on Friday, I am, like that icon of popular culture, the man who rushes out to buy flowers at the last minute, missing an anniversary—and a commitment.

Psychologists have identified an “anniversary effect” where a date (or a season) brings reminders of a past, usually traumatic event.As an article in Psychology Todayputs it, “The ‘Anniversary Effect’, sometimes called Anniversary Reaction, is defined as a unique set of unsettling feelings, thoughts or memories that occur on the anniversary of a significant experience. Sometimes you can trace the reason why you're feeling sad, irritable or anxious. One look at the calendar and you connect the dots from your current emotional state to the traumatic event. For example, the birthday of someone who's no longer alive, the date of an accident, a natural disaster or misscaragejust to name a few.” Apparently, our minds and bodies react to the cyclical patterns of time, producing an internal calendar of memories and feelings. The Psychology Todayarticle recommends aligning that internal calendar with the literal one on the desk or on the phone or tablet: “one look at the calendar” will jolt us into an understanding of the anniversaries recorded in our psyches.

Some traumas come inscribed with dates—9/11 being the most famous in the contemporary U.S. This makes them easier to remember and to memorialize, although I don’t know if it helps with the healing. Hurricanes tend to have names, not dates. Although hurricane names repeat themselves (it seems to be a surprisingly short list) names of major hurricanes are “retired” so those of us impacted by them have a different relation to recurrence. I always have to look up the date of Harvey, despite my conviction that I feel something powerful on the anniversary of its arrival in Houston. I always forget the day of the month Harvey arrived in Houston (August 28) and sometimes even forger the year. As I write this, I have the Hurricane calendar open to remind me.  I do remember though, that it hit us on a Saturday, during a preseason Texans game, and that we never got to see the second half. Harvey got entangled for me in other (pre) seasonal calendars, in anniversaries expressed as weekdays. Conversations with friends impacted by hurricanes reveals a complex process of remembering and forgetting as anniversaries steal into our consciousness, or are announced by newspapers or ceremonies of remembrance. To give a name to a feeling is powerful and can be healing; when that name is a date it becomes visible on our mental calendar.

I ask myself, this long hurricane season, if I am feeling the anniversary effect. It is hard to say, in part because Harvey arrived at the beginning of the Rice semester, a powerful structuring element in the rhythm of my life. It certainly helps that we have moved into both a new house and a new neighborhood. But this late August and early September, I started feeling more afraid of Covid, as if one disaster were translating itself into the emotional language of the other. When I asked myself why the grocery store—mostly a site of pleasure and relief this summer—start to feel dangerous, I could only answer with the name and calendar of another calamity.

Like many others, I also fear storms. I wage war against that fear with a panoply of tools: the FWS bayou app, the bookmark on my computer for Space City Weather, the Centerpoint power tracker that traces outages, dark humor.  Sometimes, for comfort, I take myself up the stairs of my new house, point out to myself as I look out the window that we have a second story, that we are high off the ground in a higher neighborhood. I look out at sunset, when the sky is carnation, fuchsia, or pink, and acknowledge that in some sense I am, will be, high and dry. But fears remain. That very view from the window shows me a horizontal tree branch that crosses three windows. On good days, we think of it as an animal highway; we have seen birds of course, but also squirrels and possums of all sizes scampering across it. The branch is pure theatre to the dogs, who participate by barking wildly, miming viciousness through the glass of the window.  Sometimes in the night, with the dogs snoring like teenagers, it is only my husband and I who catch a glimpse of a tail or a pair of glowing eyes. The tree is a world, a pleasure, but also, sometimes, a menace. I imagine it battering our house in high winds, crashing through the window, falling on the garage, crushing my husband’s bonsai collection that made it through Harvey on a purpose-built contraption that raised them to the porch ceiling. 

 Although, when the trees in my backyard bend in the wind, I sometimes think in numbers: “We have been here for three years. Nothing has happened yet,” sometimes the magic of numeracy gives way to something beyond arithmetic. Many Victorians believed that people in a particular state—drunkenness or illness say—live a parallel life in that state. Thus, as the plot of Willkie Collins’s The Moonstone tells us (sorry!), a person high on opium will repeat or continue what he was doing the last time he took the drug. Sometimes, I see storms, and my life within them, as a continuous state—a time out of regular time that connects back in a chain of temporal landmarks from Harvey to Ike, from the Tax Day Flood to the Memorial Day Flood, back to Tropical Storm Allison. It takes only an especially hard rain to thrust

me onto this timeline and to the accompanying feelings of dread and panic. This is why, I believe, two years ago, when an unnamed and small but powerful tropical storm came rolling in, I left the safety of campus to drive North and “save” my pets. After almost stalling my car many times; after holing up in a Becks Prime and being unable to eat my hamburger; after walking through waist-high waves that had turned a reliably dry intersection of the Heights into an ocean; after struggling, halfway home, to a friend’s house to dry off and moving on again; after literally swimming the half block to the park behind my house, I arrived, wet to the skin, to find my street merely damp and my neighbors complaining about puddles. The dogs and cats (well, perhaps only the dogs) were happy to see me home from work so early, but had obviously been napping through it all. My husband and several colleagues stayed on campus for two hours until the waters went down and came home for dinner. I was able to cook an elaborate one that weekday. One way of explaining my decision to drive home, in the fact of all common sense, was to say something like: the storm did something to my bodily state. Adrenaline, cortisol, heart rate. I was certainly reminded of the toll on my body, when, while I was swimming through the deepest part of the journey, my apple watch went off, asking if I were doing a workout. But I think of it slightly differently: my body shifted to another timeline, another calendar, where the time between storms disappeared. An anniversary reaction.