Wednesday, May 28, 2008

Why Summer in the Mountains?

Here's one reason.

And it was only a cat 1. We made it through Andrew with the walls shaking and floors sinking and all the avocado trees and mangoes and the Indian rosewood coming down. An acre and a half of shade gone overnight. Our neighbor's second story was blown away. All around us was devastation that took more than a year to fix. A month without power. Six years without shade. We've paid our dues in south Florida summers.

And then there's this:

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

What, you didn't know about hurricanes when you settled in South Florida? Or you figured it was worth the crapshoot?
Your fellow FIU professor sure wrote vividly about one of the more intense storms in his LAST TRAIN TO PARADISE!
Don't those Carolina mountains you live and worship now represent some violent geologic shiftings of the Earth in times past? Could similar events occur in the future?

Anonymous said...

"Those Carolina mountains" are one of the oldest mountain ranges on Earth. The reason they have no sharp edges is because they've been weathering away for two or three hundred million years. While no area is completely stable geologically, the Appalachian chain is about as close as you're likely to get in the Eastern US.