Written by I’ve told the story of the 2004 Florida hurricanes here before. But it’s relevant to what I want to talk about here today, so bear with me please.
A major hurricane landfall in Florida is a once-a-decade event. They usually either skirt up the east coast and hit the Carolinas, or they duck down around Cuba and spin off somewhere in the Gulf, but a direct landfall in Florida is pretty rare. By 2004, we’d been pretty lucky; the last real serious landfall was Andrew in 1992.
Hurricanes are evil things. They obliterate entire towns. They kill indiscriminately. They destroy property and ruin economies. And in the fall of 2004, Florida had five landfalls (counting one strong tropical storm) in a single month. One would hit, destroy the power grid, cause utter chaos, and after a week of Mad Max life, the lights would come in just in time for the next storm to come along and ruin everything again. After a month of this, many of us had become convinced that God just wanted to destroy us. That we’d never see electric light again.
Even when the lights came back on the last time, we didn’t trust them. Storm was the normal. Aftermath was the reality. We’d grown so accustomed to living in darkness and chaos, it took a while to readjust to things like light switches and televisions and air conditioning and pumping gas and buying ice. We didn’t really know what to do with daybreak, other than to distrust it.
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