The answer to that question: very early on September 22, which means that on this day in 1989, I'd have been waking up nervous. In the afternoon, after grad school classes at USC, some of us went to The Fresh Market, where I allowed myself to buy all sorts of treats I wouldn't ordinarily afford, either in terms of costs or calories.
In the evening, after seeing footage on the local news about Charleston folks seeking refuge in the downtown USC arena, we took a spare blanket or two down to donate. We were sheltering some refugees ourselves: my undergraduate friend, Heather, her baby Sam, and her spouse, who had been at her mom's house in Charleston while her mom was away. We put masking tape on our windows.
And then we waited.
You might ask why we were worried, being so far inland. But Sumter was also similarly inland, and that town experienced major damage. But I don't think we even experienced much in the way of power outages in Columbia. Our refugees stayed with us a few more days before heading back to help her mom clean up.
We moved to the Lowcountry in 1992, and there was still damage everywhere, from tilted trees to stray wreckage here and there. Similarly, when we moved to South Florida in 1998, we still saw some leftover damage from Hurricane Andrew.
And here, in North Carolina, there's still lots of damage from Hurricane Helene, the remnants of which came here two years ago--the anniversary is later this week, but it's never far from my mind.
In 1989, Hurricane Hugo seemed like the kind of fearsome storm that would come just once in a lifetime. Now we get these strong storms much more frequently.
And at some point, we'll look back and see this time period differently--a time when strong storms came, but we had time in between to clean up and rebuild. Future generations will probably not have that luxury, if they are still living near the coast at all.
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