A few days ago, the weather forecasters said the eastern side of Connecticut was gonna get hit today by Hurricane Earl, shortly after it wiped out the Carolinas at Category Five horsepower, and mere minutes after it had devastated New York City.\u00a0 The NYC papers told folks to brace themselves\u2026storm shelters were in place for the suddenly homeless\u2026and evacuations were put into effect in parts of the Atlantic Coast.<\/p>\n
Well, I spent yesterday and today in the middle of Earl.\u00a0 There was a sprinkle of rain yesterday. Today the sun shone from a blue sky with a few fluffy white clouds, there was a gentle breeze, and the storm had apparently turned the temperature down from Indian Summer Hell to Paradise setting. We were maybe half an hour inland from the north coast of Long Island Sound. Of the handful of hurricanes I\u2019ve experienced, Earl was by far the most pleasant.<\/p>\n
Yeah, you got it\u2026it blew out to sea. I can\u2019t even say \u201cWe dodged the bullet,\u201d because to be semantically correct, that would mean that we had wisely seen it coming and cleverly taken evasive action. Hell, I was stupid enough to drive TO the predicted hurricane. There was work I had made a commitment to do there. Nope, no tactical cleverness involved: the damn storm simply missed us, blowing out to sea and petering out to tropical storm level at that.<\/p>\n
A lot of folks cancelled Labor Day vacation plans, and a lot of taxpayer money was spent in emergency preparation. But was that all WASTED?\u00a0 Hell, no!\u00a0 It was a dry run for The System to deal with something that COULD have trashed the Eastern Seaboard population center, so it damn sure wasn\u2019t for nothing.<\/p>\n
It also reminded us of a few things. The Governor of North Carolina activated their proprietary and incredibly stupid law which forbids citizens with permits to carry their guns off their own property during time of declared emergencies.\u00a0 In short, NC criminalized an entire class of citizens.\u00a0 Including me and my companion, each carrying a gun as we passed through NC, and doing so legally as far as we knew. Of course, unless the traveler was tuned to the right radio station at the right moment, they could not have known they\u2019d just been criminalized, as we didn\u2019t until we\u2019d already passed through. This does not make me warm and fuzzy.<\/p>\n