Hurry Up, Fay!

This morning the tracking diagrams on Weather Underground show Fay -- now a strong tropical storm near Cuba but with possibilities of promoting itself to a hurricane -- is on an unusual course of steadily due north instead of a long meander right to left before only then taking a gentle swing upward. It is projected to slide up along Florida's west coast, where my wife is now, and then continuing straight north through the American South, weakening due to the effects of uninterrupted land but still a tropical storm when in five days it is expected to arrive here in Virginia and even farther upward.

And I am sure that everyone here is saying that it can't come soon enough.

That's because for about six weeks we've been at the mercy of yet another drought, and, without watering, only the trees and the more established shrubs are still looking okay, though they're dragging a little. So far, all parts of my creek are still running, instead of drying up and turning black, as all but one short stretch of it fed by an underground spring did once, eight or nine years ago. And I think that, should the drought continue, the creek will still keep easing along at least into September.

But a hurricane is much to be preferred.

I don't know which I would pick if I was faced with only the two choices of dying of thirst or drowning in an ocean, a la the end of "The Perfect Storm." Drowning would have the advantage of being much quicker, and I've heard that in the last moments you stop struggling and give in to an intense but short-lived euphoria. But it seems to me that the terror instead of knowing for sure what is about to happen in the North Atlantic must be much more fearful than what you must sense during the slowly increasing grogginess while drying up to nothing in the Gobi Desert.

I would say that, drowning aside, generally speaking, having too much water is better than getting too little. Storms, and especially hurricanes, for all the damage they do, are always exciting events, sometimes intensely so. There is nothing whatsoever exciting about a drought, except to the cicadas.

Actually, in Fay's case, I am still not all that hopeful. The Caribbean usually reserves all its gifts for its own, one of which is the statement that some of the places there, and maybe all, would profit greatly from having a lot fewer people and a lot more trees. But an idea like that leads inevitably to the conclusion that, on a planetary scale, trees are a lot more beneficial than humans -- an entirely unacceptable idea that therefore is ignored with a vengeance, and so it's hello to, on the human scale, usual disasters.

Meanwhile the Gulf of Mexico, that churning stewpot of hurricanes, is much more generous to us up here with its storms.