In the early 20th century, hurricanes were named after the saint of the day, so if the wind started blowing over 74 miles an hour on June 3, you had Hurricane Kevin. But in 1953, the World Meteorological Organization developed a convention by which they used women’s names only.
Which brings me to August 1966. Although we lived in South Ozone Park, N.Y., we spent that summer in a little town named Yaphank on Long Island. The nearest store was about a mile-and-a-half walk, and we had heard a report that Hurricane Faith was coming. My mother, Nurse Vivian, had not gotten her driver’s license yet, so we hiked to pick up kerosene lamps, Pop-Tarts and candles before battening the cabin down.
Honestly, I was looking forward to it. No lights! No television! Just me, a flashlight and a carton of comic books. It doesn’t get any cozier than that.
But Faith was … unfaithful. The day before it was supposed to hit, Hurricane Faith veered off into the Atlantic, weakening into a tropical storm near Scotland. And we bought all that kerosene!
Nurse Vivian, realizing I was upset just after dusk, turned out all the lights, sprayed us with the hose and said, “Who needs a cyclone when you can just make one?”
We lit a fire on the grill, toasted the Pop-Tarts with marshmallows and invented a new type of s’more.
The women’s liberation movement caught wind of the WMO’s policy in 1978 and persuaded the organization to start using men’s names again, so there would be equal opportunity “himmacanes.” There’s a six-year rotation, alternating male and female. If a storm is particularly horrible, like Katrina, its name is retired from the rotation.
I only miss a few things about the East Coast, like pignolia cookies from Star Bakery, bagels I'd buy from a place on East 75th Street and how they put a name to their disasters.
“Superstorm Sandy” had a comic book/opera feel to it. Yes, it was terrible and deadly, but New Yorkers weren’t afraid to look it in the eye and call it by its forename.
Not so much in the city of St. Francis. Someone named the fog Karl, but none of our other weather gets a hypocorism.
Who’s in charge of naming earthquakes and fires? Who thought of Camp? CZU Lightning Complex? It lacks poetry. A bunch of firefighters in Idaho named one the Not Creative Fire in 2015, but that was a one-off.
For that matter, why don’t we give a better nickname to the pandemic? COVID-19 reeks of scientific lack of imagination. I’m not talking bubonic plague or the black death. We’ve had those. But maybe I’d have a better attitude if the pandemic were named Hortense or Jethro.
Long before Crazy Mike became my Greek chorus, there was Tim Powers. Tim and my husband, Brian, became friends in Maine, then both moved to New York, then New Jersey. By the time Brian and I moved to California, we had grown close and invited him along. He was an adult, but in many ways, Tim was our first child. He moved back in with us when he was detoxing from heroin and for a while, he flourished. He earned a degree from the New School and started his very own gay coven. He moved back in again to the blue bungalow when complications from AIDS got worse.
His death, 16 years ago this month, wasn’t a typhoon or a volcanic eruption, but it was our own private disaster in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior.
Late one night at Davies Hospital, while we waited for the nurse with the morphine, Tim sat up, and said, “We ought to name this death.” When I asked why, he said that in Wicca one of the most powerful magics is to name.
Even when we face the horrible, we can define and limit its power. By bestowing a moniker, we push through our fear.
The fires still rage. The virus still kills, but Tim, and Nurse Vivian, taught me that even when the sky is falling, we can name that sky and we can find a way to smile.
Kevin Fisher-Paulson’s column appears Wednesdays in Datebook. Email: datebook@sfchronicle.com
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