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UPDATE: This was written before Hurricane Ike hit Galveston head-on. The waves were nowhere as calm as the photo above but the statue shown below survived.  

I have lived in quite a few states, all of which had their resident natural disasters. I have experienced earthquakes, floods, and – from a distance – tornados. But there is something different about hurricanes: the element of guilt.  

One does not wish that an earthquake shake somewhere else; that is not in the nature of earthquakes. If you’re on or near a fault, you will be shaken. A flood belongs to a particular river or river system. You cannot say to yourself, “I hope the flood hits another river instead of mine.” All you can do is fill sandbags or flee to higher ground. You can wish away a tornado without wishing it on someone else. You can just hope that it jumps your house or swallows itself back into the clouds, leaving everything and everybody intact.  

But with a hurricane, the wish that your town be spared automatically means that you are hoping someone else’s town is hit. The pain of watching a Katrina or a Rita or a Gustav veer away from Galveston means that someone in Brownsville, or along the Mexican coast, or in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida will be swept by wind, rain, and the deadly tidal surge that you have just avoided.    

The top photo is of the Gulf of Mexico in Galveston. It was taken the day that Gustav hit the central and eastern Gulf coast. The photo below is of a Seawall monument to the 6,000 or more who perished in Galveston’s 1900 storm, a storm that most certainly would have been wished away if anyone had seen it coming.