Don’t go there

I don’t watch many horror movies.

There are enough real things that scare me, thank you very much. So when my husband and kids start talking about the annual late-night screening of “Halloween” in our living room, I take myself to bed with a cup of herbal tea and a cozy mystery.

But I’ve seen enough horror movies in my time to know that there’s always a point where the characters, the soon-to-be-victims, make an incredibly bad choice. Sometimes multiple points, with multiple bad choices. The point where people in movie theaters start yelling at the screen, “Don’t go in the basement!” or “Stay out of the woods!” or just, “Why would anyone do that?”

It’s like the split second in a car accident where you can see the other vehicle, inches away, almost in slow motion, and you know there’s nothing you can do to stop the impending crash.

The feeling of impending doom.

That’s how it felt this month as first Hurricane Helene and then Hurricane Milton struck the southeastern United States.

We could see them coming for days, knew that they would be bad, but had no way of being sure exactly how bad, or exactly where the worst of the damage would be. Seriously, western North Carolina? I wasn’t expecting that.

And sitting here in Chicago, it didn’t feel like there was a lot we could do. Hurricanes really haven’t been an issue for us; if any weather from a hurricane or tropical storm makes it this far inland from the East Coast, it’s just a day or two of rain. Usually rain that we need.

People love to complain about the weather here. It can be brutally cold in the winter, with snow and ice and wind that make it a misery to step outside, although the incidence of bad winter weather seems to be declining. It can be meltingly hot and humid in the summer, too, and that seems to be increasing.

But mostly, we haven’t had the kind of weather where we are advised that the best thing to do is leave, the situations where we have to decide whether to abandon our homes and hope they are there when we return, or stay and hope we survive unscathed. Where we have to figure out whether we can even afford to flee, or whether there is a place we can go.

So we watch and we worry and we pray for those who are more directly affected. We watch the Weather Channel and shake our heads at the destruction when the sun comes up the morning after a storm. We look out for fundraisers and supply drives, whether at our parishes or, in my neighborhood, at the local pub.

Maybe that’s all we can do, watch and pray and donate, maybe go on a service trip to help if we have the kind of skills that are needed. What we have to do, though, is remember that we are all one. This is not something that is happening just to those people over there; it’s happening to all of us.