The weather reports steadily became worse throughout the day. There was a king hell hurricane headed toward the Panhandle of Florida that was so fast and so mean that Dan Rather himself had to fly down and stand in it. Because of Dan a lot of people started pulling for Hurricane Opal, but that's another story.

It was a regular day with the usual stuff at work and a shopping list from my wife to be completed before returning home. I kept one eye on The Weather Channel while I plowed through the afternoon paperwork. I work at a cable TV office and that means everyone gets to watch TV. We call it monitoring the signal -- sucking down tabloid TV in the name of making sure the Cable TV still works.

The Weather Channel hiccupped early in the afternoon and started beeping with warnings of fast winds, tornadoes, and torrential rain. Looking closely, I figured out that this was the emergency feed for Tallahassee, about 90 miles south east. Someone far away decided that we were close enough to Tallahassee to deserve dire warnings of doom.

All of the weather maps convinced me that the most we would see was some wind. Heavy weather rolling off the Gulf of Mexico usually pastes Albany over near the Alabama line and leaves Valdosta pretty much alone. This looked like one of those times; but, you couldn't tell that to the ladies on the front desk. About 3 o'clock they decided it was time to pick up the kids from school, head home, and put everyone under a mattress in the bathroom -- just like they tell you to do on The Weather Channel.

The experts say that you should also fill up your tub with water so you can have drinking water if the water tower is blown away. I always wondered what it would be like to sit in a bathtub full of water with a mattress over my head while the roof was being ripped off my house. I doubt anyone would want to drink that water after I got out.

So, they closed the cable office. Three o'clock in the afternoon and the place goes dark. I figured it was time to get that shopping list covered.

It was another world down there at the Winn Dixie.

As I walked up, a woman was pushing two buggies out the door. One was loaded with bottled water and the other with bags of ice. When I walked into the store there weren't that many carts left and there were long, long lines at the checkout counter. Everybody was obviously watching the Weather Channel, including the guys on the radio.

I had a normal shopping list. Diapers, bananas, milk, bread, some chops, and M&M's. If you have a good marriage, you eat lots of M&M's. The first thing I noticed was that all of the diapers were gone and so were all the canned meals to eat just down the aisle. Everyone I could see was grabbing stuff, tossing it into their buggies, and rushing off to find more stuff.

Scientists have always told us that humans are social animals because we started out as large groups of monkeys in trees. Somewhere in my body, a primal primate switch was being thrown. I could feel the hormones as they rushed out the gates to inform the rest of my body that it was time for a shopping frenzy. Not wanting to appear to be a slave to genetics, I began to rationalize.

"Valdosta doesn't take wind well," I tell myself, " a little wind two years ago blew out power on my whole block for a day". I began making a serious, rational effort to buy everything I would need if indeed we had one day without power.

Batteries, some lunch meat, and yes I know that Vienna sausages aren't that good but this was a situation and the Sloppy Joe's were long gone. And still, there were no diapers. I did the check out line thing and headed to Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart always has diapers on sale.

Wal-Mart was going crazy.

I got diapers with no problem. As I was strolling back, I passed by the electronics section. Truth be told, I always stroll by the electronics section. Genetics again. Anyway, the stock boys had a large mountain of empty battery boxes and a couple of buggies full of fresh ones. My memory was jogged. The old portable radio had its insides eaten out by corroded batteries. I had been meaning to replace it and all, so what the heck.

There were no radios. The salesperson told me that all of the department heads in the store had checked them out to keep track of the weather situation. She said that people were coming in saying that their offices are closing and that she wished Wal-Mart would close so that she could go home and put her kids under a mattress in the bathroom.

I had already decided I was going to have a new radio so I left Wal-Mart and headed across the street to Radio Shack. They had weather radios -- lots of them, thank goodness. Another guy and I justified our purchases to each other while the sales clerk rang us up.

As I headed home, I started rehearsing what I was going to say to my wife. The original six items on the list had grown to about twenty, there was a new radio, and I was sixty bucks lighter than when I started. Walking into the house, I heard my wife fretting to the phone.

"I don't know why we ever got a water bed!", she wailed, "do you have an extra mattress we could borrow?".

That was my cue. I moved to fill up the tub.

PROLOGUE: The storm completely missed Valdosta, GA leaving most everyone embarrassed.

© Copyright 1998, Merrill Guice, All Rights Reserved