Monday late afternoon, a glorious thunderstorm rolled through - big black clouds, lightning, thunder and heavy winds. Without giving it a second thought, I started filling big pots with water, and leaving them on the counter top. It's almost a reflex action with me - I see black storm clouds in the sky and I start looking for flashlights and stockpiling containers of fresh water.
If you are from southwest Louisiana, hurricane country, you will not think my actions unusual at all.
As a kid, I remember when a storm started brewing in the gulf, my mom and dad would put us all on hurricane duty - my brothers' job was to scrub out the metal garbage cans (yuck!) with bleach, rinse them well, then use the hose to fill them with fresh water - this would be our source for flushing toilets and the like. My mom would get out the hurricane lamps - glass oil lamp contraptions that look kinda like a hurricane glass from Pat O'Briens (for all you Mardi Gras tourists) trim the wicks, fill the reservoirs with oil and set them on the dining room table and kitchen counters.
Next would come the sandbags - don't remember where they came from - probably Guidry's Hardware - but we'd stack them near the doors, so that if the Vermillion River overflowed, we might be able to keep the floodwaters at bay for awhile in the unlikely event that the river would invade as far out as our part of town.
Then there was the ritual of getting out the portable radio and checking to see if it worked and locating the extra batteries. It was an all important item, since this was long before the days of the weather channel or even personal computers that allowed for minute by minute updates on everything you wanted to know about the approaching storm and then some.
A hasty, last-minute trip to the store to buy extra canned goods and food that would keep fresh for a week or two, and we were set. Mom would send us outside to play, with admonitions to come home when the skies looked nasty enough.
Once you were hurricane prepared, you went back to life as usual. Because of their capricious nature, you never knew too much beforehand if your town would get hit full force with a hurricane or if the storm would turn and head another direction, and wreak havoc on some other poor bastards instead of you. You'd keep one eye on the sky, one ear tuned in to the radio, and return to business as usual. If it was determined that the hurricane was definitely headed your way, you would most probably take the added precaution of boarding up your windows to try and keep the storm from depositing the tree from your front yard into your living room. Didn't always work, but you at least had to try.
So, even though there hasn't been a hurricane in Montana in any recorded history that I know of, I still resort to water storage and flashlight checking rituals. We do get storms here - hailstorms, thunderstorms and the like - when that happens, we often lose power. Big deal, you say - it's summertime in Montana where there is still light in the sky till 11:00 pm. Well, where I live, our water comes from our own personal well. When the power goes out, the pump doesn't work. No flushing of toilets, no drinking water, and, God forbid, if you haven't been thoughtful enough to stockpile gallon jugs of water afore time and happen to have just soaped yourself from head to toe in the shower when the power goes off, you are SOL, let me tell you!
Hmmmm, maybe old cajun habits are so bad after all.....
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