By S.L. Weingart, Ph.D. ’64

In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
— T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

As prologues to hurricanes Frances and Jeanne in 2004, then, in 2005, Wilma, we learned how parlous to make decisions. It seemed as though the misery of the recovery transcended the impact of the hurricanes themselves, especially in terms of decisions upon which we continued to brood.

We returned to homes more like gravestones than residences, and we lived with no electricity for a week—only the generosity of the Red Cross, which provided us with hot meals and ice, kept us functional, and now I remember with pained clarity the icy shower I shivered under each morning. But the most extended difficulty stemmed from our earlier decisions. Our Deepfreeze sat on its head on the lawn, and the collective damage was extensive but not unexpected; we admitted we had not always made the best decision.

The hardest part of a mandated evacuation came through these decisions, made before each hurricane warning transformed into what poet Hart Crane defined in “The Hurricane,” so that,

Milk bright, Thy chisel wind
Rescindeth flesh from bone
To quivering whittlings thinned…

More worrisome than the state of our mobile home (which was, after all, insured) had been and remained the decisions about the texture of our lives. I am no materialist, but I recognize how important specific things are to each of us—for example, our CD collection, heavy with Mozart and John Coltrane, is an integral part of our existence.

Clearly, the worst part of the experience, the thing that drained us when preparing to leave home for refuge in a Kissimmee motel, was the ineluctable cleavage between pragmatism and sensitivity. How and what do you take away with you? What can be fit into an automobile that will be occupied by two bulky adults plus Jasmine, our miniature schnauzer? Is a rifle more necessary than a microwave oven?

Fortunately, we had been able to rent a storage bin from a nearby warehouse, and hurriedly we began to transport items to the bin. Tennis rackets and autographed books (including one with the spidery signature of W.B. Yeats) launched the parade of possessions. But still, what to save? Our silver flatware is stored in a wooden case that seems to take up little space, but we discovered that even that entity is hard to deal with when it is one of perhaps 15 entities of that approximate size and shape. Complicating decisions was that our time for evacuation was running low, so we could have fit more in the storage bin than we managed.

Our decisions offered neither template for the future nor for the edification of the reader. Our decisions before hurricane Jeanne included the eccentric and the thoughtful alike, and decisions saw much debate as to an object’s importance to our quality of life. Thus, either in the bin or in our motorcar, we stored the following:

• All our CDs, but not our stereo system. (A new stereo is less expensive to replace than an extensive CD collection.)

• Our PC, but not the monitor nor keyboard nor any other segment. (Some of the material on the PC was and remains irreplaceable.)

• Virtually no clothing, beyond what we took with us to the Howard Johnson Express, enough to last for four days. (Although we had warm Florida weather, my wife, Roberta, insisted on carrying her leather overcoat with us, rather than storing it in the bin, and I should like to think the ladies whoread this will understand even though I do not.)

• All our photograph albums and our few rare books, but the bulk of our library we left behind. (Perhaps a quarter of our books went into the bin, but there were far too many in our library to be salvaged.)

• We knew enough to take a can opener and a flashlight, both of which proved necessary. Our 30/30 carbine went hidden into the bin.

What drives one mad is the awareness that we leave behind things we ought to take with us, yet can’t fit in—framed paintings (too bulky, too much glass), contents of filing cabinets, such kitchen equipment as the food processor, our huge unabridged dictionary—the list is extensive and often eccentric, but we did it, we did it.

The most profound understanding we reached through the hurricanes was that our decisions would be fallible, but we could trust our knowledge that we were in God’s hands throughout—we saw in all its complexity and simplicity what Hart Crane saw: “Lo, Lord! Thou ridest….”