My wife and I have a combined 11 years of higher education and nearly 70 years in our professional careers, her as a lawyer and me as a journalist.
Somehow, though, we decided to drive more than 800 miles to Virginia to avoid Hurricane Dorian, only to find ourselves rolling through the storm’s outer bands on our way back to Vero Beach.
“Mother Nature doesn’t care how educated you are or what profession you’re in,” my wife said. “She’s unpredictable.”
Certainly, Dorian was.
That’s why, for the first time in my 30 years in Florida, I bugged out for a hurricane. I stayed for Frances and Jeanne in 2004. I stayed for Wilma in 2005. I stayed for Matthew and Irma, too.
But Dorian was different.
At about dinner time on Aug. 29, she – or he, if you prefer – had strengthened to a Category 4 hurricane and, according to the celebrated “cone of uncertainty,” was headed directly for Vero Beach.
Not long afterward, the Weather Channel’s forecasters began speculating that Dorian could grow into a Cat 5 and become the worst storm ever to hit Florida – yes, worse than Andrew, which was so destructive that it changed the state’s building code.
That’s when my wife, a lifelong Floridian, suffered an anxiety attack that left me with two choices: Take her away from the storm or take her to the hospital.
We went with Option A.
I phoned my sister, who lives outside of Richmond, and told her to expect us the next day. We then packed a week’s worth of clothes, loaded our Jack Russell terrier into the back seat of my car and, at 8 p.m., headed for I-95.
It was only Thursday, but, at that point, Dorian was predicted to hit Florida’s east coast in the wee hours of Sunday morning and we wanted to beat the rush, which we did.
Because there was no rush.
As fate and good fortune would have it, there was no hurricane, either – not here, not really.
But who knew?
Nobody knew which track Dorian would take, or whether the storm would strengthen or weaken on its way to Florida, or when it would make landfall.
Even as we watched Dorian morph into the Cat 5 monster some hurricane experts had predicted – even as she pummeled the Bahamas with wind gusts in excess of 200 mph, slowing to a crawl over Grand Bahama and destroying almost everything in its path – nobody knew where the storm was going.
Everyone was saying that Dorian, which seemed to spend a week in the now-devastated islands, was eventually going to turn to the north, but no one knew when or for sure.
In fact, as I embarked on my trek up I-95, there was a real chance Vero Beach was going to be hit by a Cat 4 hurricane, and a Cat 5 was possible. For those who don’t know: Both would be catastrophic.
Anyone remember the damage done by Hurricane Frances 15 years ago? The extended loss of power? All those blue tarps on roofs? That was a Cat 2. Three weeks later came Hurricane Jeanne, which was a Cat 3 that produced only Cat 2 winds in Vero Beach.
Those 2004 hurricanes were, quite literally, a breeze when compared to Dorian as she spun mercilessly through the Bahamas.
So I have no regrets.
Given what we knew at the time – with the near certainty that a major hurricane would knock out power for days, possibly weeks – leaving town was the wise thing to do.
We were out of danger. We were comfortable. We were enjoying my sister’s hospitality.
We were also worried.
It’s always nerve-wracking to watch on TV as a major hurricane threatens your hometown. It’s surreal to do so from afar, where there’s nothing you can do to help the family members, friends and neighbors you’ve left behind.
You’re glad you evacuated, but you feel guilty because you’re not there – as if you’ve deserted your community in its time of need. You can’t wait for the storm to pass. You want to come home as soon as possible.
And we did.
Dorian had moved north of Vero Beach when we began our return trip home last Wednesday, but it still hadn’t made landfall. So we chose to avoid the East Coast and travel through the Blue Ridge Mountains, turning south through Charlotte, N.C., and to Columbia, S.C.
From there, though, I-26 was being used as a hurricane evacuation route and was closed to eastbound traffic, forcing us to take a rural, mostly two-lane highway through several episodes of “In the Heat of the Night.”
Five miles from the Georgia state line, we finally picked up I-95, where the winds began to gust and the rain started to fall. Dorian was swirling off the coast of Savannah. We were driving through the outer bands of the hurricane we went to Virginia to avoid.
Not for long, thankfully.
As we crossed into Florida, the winds calmed and the rain stopped. Exhausted after 16 hours on the road, we arrived in Vero Beach shortly after 2 a.m. Thursday. It felt good to be home, where we found no damage and the power on, but I’ll always believe bugging out for Dorian was the smart thing to do.
My wife doesn’t know this, but the prospect of riding out a Cat 4 or 5 made me nervous, too.
