New reality TV takes America by storm: Hurricane watching
By Beth Teitell
Thursday, September 9, 2004
One of my friends has been watching waaaay too much TV. I'd been trying to reach her for three days, and when she still didn't pick up yesterday, I actually considered going over, until her number showed up on my Caller ID.
It turns out she's been holed up because of the hurricane. Yes, hunkering down . . . in Boston. ``I can't stop watching,'' she said. ``It's like our own very small horror movie. We're kind of in it even though we're the neighbors down the street from the boogeyman and we know he's not coming to our house. We're tropical voyeurs.''
I tried to convince her to focus on something else, like, ahem, her own life. But she couldn't stop talking about a weather system hundreds of miles away. ``I have no freaking clue what they mean by 105-mile-an-hour winds,'' she admitted, ``but I throw out the number all the time. It sounds better than a Category 3 because then you think it's out of a scale of 10 and that's not so bad.''
Whatever.
``Of course, the plum is if you know someone from down there, so you can relate the story.'' Needless to say, she had one. It involved a baby alligator who'd been plunked atop a shed by Hurricane Hugo (I think) and then dropped down on her brother's neighbor's griping mother-in-law. ``It's true,'' she insisted.
I tried to change the subject - even to the soaking we were getting, but she wasn't interested. ``The hurricane names never match the horror,'' she began. ``Camille (1969) was horrible, but it sounds like an herbal tea. You expect a Camille to have a light mist. I want Hurricane Saddam or Hurricane Osama-something that says you're in for trouble. You'd be afraid of Hurricane Genghis, wouldn't you? That would make you evacuate. But who's going to grab their stuff and run from Frances?'' She lisped the name: ``Frances.''
I thought about giving her some actual information about hurricane names: that they're chosen years in advance by a Geneva-based organization called the World Meteorological Organization, and that hurricanes that do a lot of damage see their names retired.
But she wasn't in a place where she could hear me: she'd gotten wind of Ivan, and was already tracking his path. When she started muttering about ``Bermuda'' and ``hoarding bottled water,'' I knew it would be days before she'd come up for air.
