In reality, you don’t ever change the hurricane. You just learn how to stay out of its path.
A brief jaunt this morning, knowing in all likelihood I'll end up skipping tomorrow's post because I'm flying back to Florida for work.
Flying toward the storm. What a good idea.
I once had more sense than that, once flew the other direction when a storm approached, then as now for work.
A quick survey of a map reveals that the Air Force has long situated its fighter assets mostly along the coast, an artifact of the days when our training bases were clustered there, and we faced seaward toward threats to the nation. All those expensive airplanes gathered in vulnerable coastal communities meant we always had to be ready for a hurricane evacuation, or "hurrevac", when we'd fly the jets somewhere safely nestled in the country's interior until the trouble passed.
The first hurrevac for me came in 1989, as Hurricane Hugo barreled toward the southern Atlantic coast. The First Tactical Fighter Wing, my unit, was based just outside of Norfolk, Virginia, probably out of harm's way but close enough that our cautious leadership cancelled all training flights one morning and gathered us in the main briefing room to plan a mission taking all of our flyable planes to Wright-Patterson AFB, in Dayton, Ohio. I mention "flyable" jets because the F-15 was a bit of a maintenance hog, and we ended up leaving a few behind that were too broken to move.
The flight to Ohio was uneventful, eighteen or so Eagles leaving in groups of six, if memory serves. When we arrived at Wright-Pat, the ramp was jammed with fighters that had arrived before us--Vipers, A-4s, Tomcats. Maybe a half-billion dollars worth of hardware crowded the tarmac. We were marshaled onto a stretch of repurposed taxiway that already hosted a squadron of F-14s from Oceana NAS, and they parked us in the slots between their wingtips like teeth on a zipper.
One advantage of arriving last became apparent when the nice troops at the counter of the VOQ announced they were completely full, and we were given vouchers to go stay in town at the Daytonian Hilton. Our lodging was conveniently located a couple blocks from the Oregon District, Dayton's revived and refurbished old commercial strip with bars, restaurants, and more bars situated in red brick storefronts from Dayton's heyday as a rail and industrial center.
We checked into our rooms around 10 a.m., with absolutely nothing to do while we waited for Hugo to select a community to flatten. How to pass the time?
Fighter pilots are a predictable lot, and by 10:30 we found a bar that had opened early, and soon I was watching Buck Tucker demonstrate the finer points of mixing an upside down margarita as the guys cheered and howled.
What? You've never had an upside down margarita?
It's a pretty simple drink to prepare. Have one of the brethren standing by with cold margarita mix, another with a bottle of tequila. Situate the victim in a chair, and have him lean back as far as he can, mouth open and pointing skyward (as an aside, a metal plate in my neck renders this drink quite impossible for your author). Each of our two "bartenders" then pours enough mixer and tequila in the victim's mouth to fill it, at which point one slaps his jaw shut and the two of them shake his head violently, making the person partaking essentially his own blender.
So, that's how we spent the morning, eventually finding ourselves so deeply in our cups that we staggered back to the hotel for an afternoon nap. This, in turn, allowed a 5:30 rally among the troops, who all returned to the Oregon District to do it all again. Ah, youth.
The Viper pilots from Shaw AFB in Sumter weren't having such a good time, eschewing the bar scene for trips to Home Depot in search of chain saws and generators small enough to fit into their travel pods. The news from home for them wasn't so good. Sumter was mostly destroyed that day, along with much of South Carolina.
The next morning we figured on sleeping it off and then a late breakfast, but the command post at Langley insisted we get out of bed, brief up, and fly home. It was a painful trip, made worse when we encountered the remnants of Hugo over the Shenandoah and got knocked around pretty rudely while flying formation in the soup.
Three years and one war later, I was an instructor pilot at the F-15 schoolhouse at Tyndall, when Hurricane Andrew flattened Homestead and then meandered into the Gulf in search of its next target. The Air Force lost a lot of expensive stuff when Homestead AFB was destroyed that week, and taking no chances our bosses decided to hurrevac us up to . . . you guessed it . . . Wright Pat.
A challenge faced as a scheduler in a training squadron (which I was at the time) flows from basic math--we had eighteen jets to clear out of the panhandle, and only maybe fourteen full-time, assigned instructor pilots. Which meant a handful of students who'd barely made it past their solo flights would fly on our wing for the two hour trip to Ohio.
I took off with another instructor, Reb Byrne, on my wing, while the four studentos were tucked into other four-ships. We landed to much the same crowded chaos at WP I'd encountered three years before, but this time with a TV crew standing on the ramp to interview the refugees from the Sunshine State. Striding past the paunchy, bespectacled, balding combat veterans who'd led the formation, the reporters glommed onto our most photogenic student, Lieutenant Benjamin. Picture a six-foot-three male model type with a chiseled jaw and a thick mop of curly blonde hair carefully trimmed to meet 35-10.
Of course, Lieutenant Benjamin (I think we ended up naming him "Goldie", like Goldie Hawn in Private Benjamin, but that was a long time ago) didn't know a damned thing about the F-15 or cross-country deployments and all the planning they entailed. But that was fine--neither did his audience, so no one seemed to notice the vacuousness of the interview. We saved the videotape for later tauntings.
In a moment of deja-vu, the billeting office had no vacancies, and we were trundled in blue Air Force vans out to the Ramada Inn in Fairborn, Ohio, a low-rise motor court straight out of the mid-60s. With nothing to do, we piled back into the vans after check-in and wandered the neighborhood until we found a watering hold full of working class day drinkers with a dart board and a passable selection on the jukebox. An afternoon turned into an evening turned into a blur.
Meanwhile, Andrew proved aimless and fickle, snaking around the Gulf, one day menacing Panama City, the next Galveston, the next Lake Charles. So of course, we were precluded from returning home.
For the next several days, we hung around next to the pool by day, sipping Captain Morgan and Diet Coke. At night we returned to our neighborhood pub, where the locals adopted us and weary, sweet old waitresses watched us fawningly as we ate chicken wings and sang raunchy songs. Or at least that's how I choose to remember that lost week.
Finally the storm settled on New Orleans, always the default favorite of severe weather in the coastal South, and we were allowed to return home. Two years later, almost to the day, I was sitting at law school orientation, and that season of life was over.
Later I experienced different hurricane evacuations, dragging kids and dogs and cats out of the cone of uncertainty to hunker down in a cheesy hotel room until the storm passed. Then there was the utter destruction of Michael, when it all got a hell of a lot less funny. And now, today, I think about friends and colleagues in Tampa, feeling guilty at my relief that Wyldswood may be spared, but at the cost of what's shaping up to be an absolute catastrophe along Florida' west coast.
But here in Corning it's beautiful, as usual. Or at least it's beautiful to me, gray skies and all. I took down the Vols flag yesterday and replaced it with Peg's new "Read Banned Books" banner, reveling in being able to publicly articulate progressive ideas in the same way a gay man probably feels leaving the South to just be himself in a place like Provincetown. Hang that flag in Bay County, and you're putting your property at risk.
I have piles of writing ahead today, and need to carve out a few minutes to drive over to Guthrie and have them pull this heart monitor off my chest. If it records anything today, most likely it'll be a certain heaviness at the thought of leaving P and heading south as the sun rises tomorrow.
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