Well, Hurricane Henri was a bit of a bust. It was very humid and we got a bunch of rain, and that was about it. I didn't even close my window all the way. To compensate for all the nothing that happened, the National Weather Service is posting "weather history" tweets about Irene ten years ago, because whoever runs their social media has great enthusiasm for their job.
Irene was my very first hurricane. For context, I had just moved here from Arizona, where the very concept of getting catastrophic amounts of liquid water from the sky was terrifying and alien. I'd grown up in Phoenix, where "monsoon season" brought brief, violent thunderstorms that flooded out low-lying roads for about six hours before all the moisture vanished into the porous sandstone. I was by myself in a sublet up near Electric Ave in Somerville, barren but for a futon, my suitcases, and an internet connection. My sister had just sent me a charmingly abusive email, which became the last message I ever read from any of my relatives after I forwarded it to a friend from high school, who pointed out that it sounded exactly like something my mother would have said. I had no job, no rats, and no roommates to surreptitiously observe for a reality check.
So I was already not having the best summer of my life, AND THEN the NWS started sending out their customary big long list of Hurricane Preparedness Tips, which scared me half to death.
What I didn't realize at the time was that 90% of the stuff on those lists didn't apply to me. Every place I've lived in the past decade has been several miles too far inland for coastal flooding to be a problem, and too densely built-up for the wind to get a good unobstructed shot at anything. I've seen tree branches come down inconveniently into the road, and of course the catenary wires out in Belmont/Watertown throw themselves on the ground like a lightly-injured footballer if you look at them wrong, but that's less an emergency than an annoying wait while the public works people scramble a truck. Unlike out west, storm drains are a thing here, and they work.
None of the apartments I've lived in out here have been where they are for less than a hundred years, and left to their own devices, they will be there for at least a hundred more. Hurricane preparedness, in Greater Boston, boils down to "shut the windows, put the patio furniture in the garage, and keep your widgets charged so you don't get bored if the power goes out." Which it doesn't, at least not where I live.
All my friends out here were flummoxed by the idea that too much rain -- or at least, listening to the news talk about too much rain -- could send me into a panic. They all thought I'd freak out in winter, when everything froze over. Which I didn't, because I'd spent the last ten years of my time in Arizona up in Flagstaff, where snow is very much a thing, but snow removal is more of an afterthought. I hiked into campus to take my finals in knee-deep drifts one year, because the university refused to reschedule anything and told us all 'show up or flunk'. We didn't have any coherent policy or a plan or even a harbor to dump excess snow into, so they plowed it all into 10' piles in the parking lot and left it there.
The one thing winter in Boston has over winter in Flagstaff is, again, huge amounts of liquid water. I still find it way too funny when the Charles starts to freeze over, and you get Jesus ducks waddling around on the sub-surface ice.
The humidity in the summer is still less than enjoyable, but I don't know that it's any worse than constant spontaneous nosebleeds in the desert. I flew back to Las Vegas for a convention once, and the second I got off the plane at McCarran, I remembered exactly why I left. Anyone who says 'but it's a dry heat' like that makes things any better has clearly never spent an entire summer face-down on the tile floor, slowly turning into human jerky. When I was a teenager, I took to doing my swimming at 2 am, and our backyard pool was still bathwater-warm. I had no idea why anyone ever went barefoot outside until I moved out here. Turns out that real, non-Bermuda grass has a texture like leaves, and not like tiny unripe punji stakes.
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