September averages the busiest month for hurricanes. This year, however, for the second year in a row, the news is the lack of the huge and often deadly storms.
You can detect the note of disappointment as weathermen and weather journalists watch those low pressure “waves” coming off the west coast of Africa, encountering hostile atmospheric forces and, failing, one after another, to provide the titillating drama of watching them ride the trade winds west to play bull-in-a-china-closet with the islands and, if conditions are right, the mainland US, possibly even the Cape.
You can hear the underdog sympathy in reports such as the following “AccuWeather” update on Arthur, one of the few hurricanes from earlier in this season: “The storm battled dry air and wind shear on Monday east of Florida and north of the Bahamas but was beginning to overcome the obstacles to development.” You go, Arthur!
Alas, Arthur, more 90 pound weakling than Charles Atlas, was a disappointment. As have been all other underdogs this season. (So far; it only takes one to make for a memorable season.)
There’s a curious emotional disconnect in this identification more with the storms battling the odds than with ourselves as potential victims. We seem to have something in common with Robinson Jeffers, the early 20th century misanthrope poet, who longed in his poetry for a great storm to cleanse the earth of the plague of his wasteful, trashy fellow humans.
You have to wonder what this not-so-secret sympathy with storms means about our feelings about climate change. Ironically, global warming, the result of the destructive and thoughtless human civilization that Jeffers deplored, may with its predicted rising sea levels and killer storms produce the very solution to the problem the poet envisioned.
Maybe there’s a part of us that also wants our business-as-usual to be disrupted.
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