Here on Emerald Isle, we just went though (sort of) Hurricane Earl. That was a weird experience, mostly because of what it made me think about how we get information these days.
I got rid of my television some years ago. I still watch TeeVee, of course, but now I watch it over the internet. I like this arrangement better, because I don’t really trust myself. Like most everybody, if I have a television I am prone to come home at the end of the day, turn it on, and then do absolutely nothing except sit on the couch and flip through channels. I have watched some damned stupid stuff just because I cannot fight off the inertia that takes over when I have a remote in my hand.
At least if I am watching TeeVee over the internet I have to make an effort to see a show. I have to actually search out and hit "Play" to watch something. Which has the effect of keeping me from watching stupid stuff that I don’t really want to see, but would see otherwise simply because "it is on."
Anyway . . . I had been aware, in a vague way, that Earl was churning up the Eastern Seaboard. And, every once in a while, I would log on and find out what Earl was up to. On Thursday morning, the day Earl was supposed to pose the most danger to us here in Emerald Isle, I turned on the radio and checked out NPR or, locally, "Public Radio East." They told me that we could expect rains and strong winds Thursday night, with gusts of up to 50 mph.
Hhhhmmmmm . . . . Okay. Well that’s not ideal, but it doesn’t sound too bad. I logged in and checked Earl’s position and forecasted track, and it looked just like it had looked 12 hours earlier – the center was going to pass about 100 miles to the east of Cape Hatteras. Which meant that the center would be passing more than 200 miles to the east of me. Great!
So, I spent the morning getting some work done and out the door. Around one in the afternoon, with the sky looking more and more foreboding, I decided to drive over to the mainland. I needed a new printer cartridge, and I also thought it would be a good idea to lay in some supplies in case the storm knocked power out at Emerald Isle. I figured I’d get some water, some batteries, and some soup – something to eat that could be heated up on my gas stove, something that I wouldn’t need the microwave for. Also, I was hungry, and I figured I’d grab a quick bite at MacDaddy’s.
But when I got to MacDaddy’s, they were in the process of closing up. "The storm is coming," they told me, "we’ve got to go!"
"But," I said, "the storm is a coupla hundred miles off from where we are. It’s not gonna be a big deal."
They proceeded to show me the local news, which they had running on the TeeVee above the bar. It was amazing! First, the local news is not supposed to be on at one in the afternoon. This was a Very Special Broadcast. Also, everybody on the news channel looked very, very serious. No one was wearing a jacket, all the men had their ties askew and their shirtsleeves rolled up – as if they had just come from installing plywood over their windows.
The strange thing was, they only spent a few seconds discussing what Hurricane Earl was actually doing. Most of the airtime was devoted to showing the audience terrible, terrible pictures of havoc that had been wrought by hurricanes in the past.
I got my lunch, by the way, but I also started to get a little freaked out. Maybe I had been a little too casual about Hurricane Earl. Then I learned that Emerald Isle was under a "mandatory" evacuation. "Really?" I said to Jonni, my friend and waitress, "I hadn’t heard that."
"Oh yeah, they’re saying everybody has to leave."
Well, that sounds bad.
After lunch, I went to the grocery store to get the supplies I thought I might need and the contact anxiety high I already had experienced just intensified. The place was packed with people doing exactly what I was doing: buying water and ice and batteries and laying in supplies for what might be the Apocalypse. By the time I left I was feeling kinda stressed out. I had heard that they were closing the bridge back to the island, and I had started to worry that I would not be allowed to get back home to the dogs and that they might be stuck to ride out the storm alone.
I was wrong about that, of course. They did close the bridge later, but that early in the afternoon I was still okay to get home. But now that I had been mingling with other humans, and I knew how stressed out these other humans were, driving back to Emerald Isle was a little eerie. The Food Lion was shuttered, almost all the rest of the stores were closed down, and there was almost no traffic – and this, right before the last big weekend of the summer! Clearly, everyone had left the island already. I should probably have packed up the dogs and done the same thing.
But . . . when I got home I started thinking about it. I hadn’t been in a panic before I went over to the mainland. Had I been missing something? I logged back onto the Web and checked out Earl’s progress and forecasted track. Nothing had changed. Nothing. Hhmmmmm . . . . . maybe this was panicking over nothing. Now that I was away from everybody else, this seemed to be much ado about nothing.
I decided I’d wait it out on the island and ignore the "mandatory" evacuation. And y’know what happened?
Nothing.
Emerald Isle’s electrical system isn’t exactly what I would call "top notch." Pretty much any Spring Squall or Summer Shower, you can count on the power going out for at least a little while. So I fully anticipated that I would lose power at some point Thursday night. I plugged the iPad, the laptop, and my phone into the wall outlet so that they would be fully powered when the electricity went out; that way, I was sure, I would still be able to get online and I would still be able to call people when the storm hit. Then I settled in on the couch to watch some DVDs I had rented from Blockbuster.
The afternoon passed into late afternoon, into evening, into night . . . and there was – at most – a slight rain. A few gusts. That was it. By about half-past midnight I was tired and decided to go to bed, and we still hadn’t even lost power. In fact, we never did have a power outage during "Hurricane Earl." In hindsight, it was very cool. The island was basically deserted, I felt like I was the only guy left in town . . . and I got to have that feeling without ever actually being in any real danger.
(It was like when I ran the bulls in Pamplona; when the run started I hauled ass, and never looked behind me, and was pretty scared. But when I got to the stadium and turned around, finally, I discovered that the bulls were actually about 100 yards behind me and I never had been in any danger. Still, I count that as a real running of the bulls because I didn’t know that I wasn’t in any danger. So, y’know . . . that counts.)
Now, people who know me know that I’m not some kind of "macho" idiot. I’m not the kind of guy who decides "I’m gonna stay at home and ride out the hurricane," if I think there is any kind of serious danger involved. I’m the kind of guy who thinks that it is seriously very, very cool to learn, for example, how to scuba dive correctly, how to check the tanks, how to plot your dive beforehand, and how to know when it is time to surface; there is absolutely nothing stupider than dying because you are, y’know, stupid. (Pamplona notwithstanding.)
But while everyone else was losing their minds, I was looking at the facts that I could glean from my computer, and I didn’t really see any danger. Oh sure, I thought it would be much worse than it was – I expected to sit through a real storm, and not even that materialized. But I didn’t think it would be dangerous. And this is probably because, unlike everybody else, I wasn’t getting my so-called information from the TeeVee.
I know this is a stretch of an analogy but, in hindsight, what this experience reminded me of was the run-up to the Iraq War. I never believed that Iraq was a threat to us, and I always believed that this would be a stupid, stupid waste of lives and money. But that probably is because I knew (i) we had crippled Iraq as a military force about 12 years before, (ii) we had crippled Iraq economically with a decade’s worth of sanctions after that, and (iii) if you wanted to convince me that Iraq was now a huge threat, you’d have to show me something pretty concrete.
But even back then I was getting most of my information from the internet, which is – when all is said and done – still pretty much a print medium. Print media may not be the most viscerally accessible, but they do have the redeeming virtue of being fixed. A sentence has to be put down, and it remains put down. People reading that sentence can go back and re-read it, and think about it. Which means – unlike the visual and auditory things that flash out of the TeeVee and then are lost – the person putting that sentence down always knows that it has to at least make some kind of sense.
Nothing that I was reading about the upcoming Iraq War ever came close to convincing me that it made any sense. But I may have thought differently if I spent my time getting "information" from the TeeVee.
After my experience with Hurricane Earl, I can sympathize a bit more with all those millions of Americans who got swept up in the crusade for that stupid, stupid war so many years ago. It only took about two hours on the mainland, being infected by a bunch of other idiots who had been watching local news, to half-way convince me that Hurricane Earl was a threat. I was nearly about to pack up the beasts and spend the night away from home before I thought to check the Web, learn the actual facts, and think for myself.
More than ever, I am convinced that there is no longer any "news" on the TeeVee. There is entertainment, and there is story, but mostly there is emotional impact. Which is fine if you want to know about the latest celebrity scandal, but kind of sucks if you want to make real-life decisions about what our country should be doing.