The Storm

The Storm

“It’s worse when they come at night.”

It sounds like a line from a horror movie, but the woman who says those words to me wasn’t trying to be ominous or cryptic.

If anything, she was very matter-of-fact, talking about the destructive forces that have, over the past few decades, maimed and murdered, stolen and smashed, the same way someone might tell a visitor not to try to turn left at that one light, or that the Walmart one town over is actually better.

Natural disasters are like that, claiming lives in the aftermath, one final jump scare.

A monster that never really dies.

Inside Mrs. Bailey’s shop, the air-conditioning is blasting, and Jimmy Buffett plays over the speakers.

The smell of cheap plastic from the stack of inflated floats and inner tubes that sit in the front window is almost overwhelming, and I watch a family of four flip through a rack of T-shirts, the sunburned dad guffawing as he holds up one that reads ST. MEDARD’S BAY BLEW ME AWAY!

and features a cartoon of a big-busted blond trying to hold on to her bikini top, her eyes wide, her hair horizontal in imagined winds.

Hurricanes have claimed the lives of nearly a hundred people in this town, so the joke seems pitch-black to me, and that must show on my face because Mrs. Bailey shrugs and says, “Is what it is.”

The tourists don’t buy the shirt in the end, leaving the store with some colorful towels, a few beach toys, and a bright green bottle of aloe vera gel, and once they’re gone, I ask Mrs. Bailey again about the storms, the ones that come at night.

“Is it worse because it’s dark?” I ask. “You can’t see what’s going on?”

That makes her laugh. “Baby, trust me, noon, midnight, don’t matter.

I’ve been in both. When one of those things hits, you can’t see shit no matter the time of day.

No, it’s worse because of the waiting. All day, you’re boarding up windows, and you’re filling bathtubs with water, and you’re checking to make sure you have enough gas for the generator, and it’s almost like …

it’s like you’re getting ready for company, you know?

Like when your family is coming down for Thanksgiving or Christmas and you gotta get things shipshape. ”

She pauses, her green eyes far away for a second, and I know she must be thinking of all the times she’s made those preparations.

“And it’s worse because you start hoping, you know?

‘Maybe it’ll turn, maybe I can just go to bed, and when I wake up, I’ll see the whole dang thing decided it wanted to check out Mississippi instead.

Or went right back out into the ocean where it belongs. ’”

Mrs. Bailey shakes her head, sighing as she adjusts a perfectly straight display of postcards showing off St. Medard’s Bay’s sugar-white sands and clear green water. Looking at the picture, I find it hard to believe water that beautiful, that calm, can wreak so much horror.

“Tornadoes are nasty,” she says. “And I ain’t never been in one, but I reckon earthquakes are just as bad. But those just happen. Oh, I know they got warnings and scientists for those things, but hurricanes? They’re different. They make you wait. They make you…”

“Dread?” I supply, and she nods.

“That’s it. They play with you. And they take this thing you love—the water you swim in, take your babies to play in, drink beer looking out at.

The wind that you smell and go, ‘Shoot, how’d I get so lucky to live at the beach?

’ Wind that feels so good in your hair when you’re driving with the windows down.

Hurricanes turn all that into the thing that blows off your roof, sucks away your photo albums and your wedding dress and your grandmamma’s china and sometimes your grandmamma herself.

Killing you with the things you love? The things that made you feel so blessed to live here in the first place? Tell me that don’t feel evil.”

The obvious question arises, so I ask it.

“Why not leave, then?”

Beth-Anne Bailey does not suffer fools, and the look she gives me now tells me she definitely thinks I am one.

“Because this is home, honey. St. Medard’s Bay is home.”

—“Sun, Fun, and a Thirty Percent Chance of Death: A Small Town on Alabama’s Gulf Coast and Its Uneasy Truce with Mother Nature” (GQ magazine, April 1996)