The Hurricane Kit, Revisited
A few days with Francine
Today I’m re-visiting my piece on building out a hurricane kit, now that we’ve had a chance to dip into ours.
But first:
I want you to read this piece my friend Keia wrote about muscadines (more on those below). Her newsletter, Pleasant Living, chronicles her life working a farm and bakery in rural North Carolina.
Did you know that the public has access to the audio of all the transmissions from the Apollo space program? A civilian named Eric Jones has compiled both the audio clips and annotated the transcripts themselves to provide context. Have a listen to astronaut David Scott attempt to give a grand speech to a television audience while standing on the surface of the moon fifty-three years ago (that particular audio is at the 1:59 mark). He gets distracted when he realizes he did a crappy job landing the lunar module. I really love it when a civilian passion project is so thorough that even NASA links to it/ references it in official documents.
There’s still room in my upcoming class with 177 Milk Street- I’m jointly teaching it with farmer Megan Bayha, and it’s all about growing and using edible flowers. I don’t wan’t to create a scarcity mindset around signing up for these sorts of things - I think we have about five slots left, which is understandable since this one is a little bit spendy compared to some of my other offerings. It’s also a full two hours, which is a lot for an evening on a weekday! I will say Megan has packed an astonishing amount of information into this, and I also really love the recipe you’ll get as part of the cake decorating segment. Sign up here and use code GROWING15 for 15% off.
The Hurricane Kit, revisited
New Orleans was hit by a glancing blow from Hurricane Francine, who rather rapidly heated up to a Category 2 before downgrading to a tropical storm upon her arrival in Louisiana. I shrugged off going shopping in advance. We had plenty of leftovers that needed using up in case the power went out, and anything else I might want was tucked in the hurricane kit under our bed (toilet paper, water, batteries, and cat food included). My wife had to duck out on a business trip just ahead of the storm, so I spent Wednesday and Thursday feeding my father-in-law and I a weird amalgam of overripe stone fruit stewed down into oatmeal, leftover orzo with butternut squash, frozen pizza, cornbread, ice cream, and canned vegetarian chili I fished out from under the bed when I couldn’t stomach a second frozen pizza.
I did not post this picture to Instagram.
I spent the storm either taking bad videos of the wind and rain, or using two middling romcoms as background noise while scrolling aimlessly on my phone, watching other people’s bad videos of wind and rain. I know that I’m lucky: it could have been so much worse.
Some of you may have read Alicia Kennedy’s recent piece Writing the Weather. In it, she chronicles the dizzying dissonance of communicating with people for whom disastrous weather isn’t yet omnipresent:
“We can’t predict the future, I read, while I’m without power, waiting for a storm to hit and maybe become a hurricane because the ocean temperature is so hot that it might whip the system into a frenzy. Am I not in a real place? Am I not on this earth? To whom are the increasing number and severity of weather-related disasters simply possible and not imminent?”.
1,580 miles away across the length of the Caribbean from Kennedy, here I sit writing my own weather. The New Orleans government hasn’t exactly made a formal announcement of this, but their approach to municipal safety has been quietly shifting since Hurricane Ida. The storms get too strong, too fast. The massive humanitarian crisis of the Superdome during Katrina, which was of course, bitterly, a massive PR crisis for the city’s leaders, had long caused them to shy away from offering public property as shelter. No longer: there might not be enough time to evacuate. And yet, too many poor, elderly people died of the heat during Ida while waiting for the power to come back (the same poor, elderly people who rely on city assistance to escape in the first place).
My phone pings, again, and again, and again. At 12:51 pm on Wednesday, shortly after the storm made landfall, the city helpfully reminded me to have non-perishable food for three days. At 8:54 pm, we are asked to conserve water, as the pump stations are overwhelmed and the drains are backing up. At 9:28 pm, we learned that AT&T customers may not be able to call 911, and to use the provided back up number. In time, as the storm wanes and the sun rises, the pings will continue with offers of civic shelters and charging stations, if you are able-bodied enough to get to them, and you have a phone to sign up for the text alerts in the first place. No longer centralized, like the dome was, the emergency resource centers are spread out across the city - simply click the link (if you have internet). Infrastructure is a dry topic, until it isn’t.
Our house never lost power during this more recent storm, but many others in New Orleans did. Some remain without electricity as I write this at 2:58 pm on Friday afternoon. We now have several small electric and solar generators to power the various machines that keep my father-in-law comfortable: the CPAP, the electric wheelchair, the cough assist machine. We are saving up for the prohibitively expensive whole-house generator. I think a lot about my friends who still work in restaurants, sorting through spoiled food, the crushing blow of simultaneous lost income and lost ingredients.
Before you ask: why do we stay? Here’s another question instead: have you wrapped your mind around the sheer numbers of people who will soon be forced to leave their homes because of the weather, a tidal wave of climate change-forced migration? I’ve been to Isle de Jean Charles, have you? We are resourceful and prepared, until we no longer are, but we’ll cross that (poorly maintained) bridge when we come to it.
A final observation
Someone (me, probably) should write about how many Gulf South residents turn to baking when a hurricane is on the way. My decidedly unscientific poll in my Instagram stories showed 85% of respondents have baked in advance of bad weather. I myself made cornbread and winged a batch of muscadine jam. The cornbread was perfect and the jam so thick with pectin I can stand a spoon upright in it. I’m thinking of melting it down and turning it into something akin to damson cheese or perhaps a fruit jelly layer on top of a panna cotta or set cheesecake.
Others in my orbit made: blueberry muffins, more cornbread, a birthday cake complete with sprinkles and maraschino cherries, cornflake bars, yorkshire puddings, two pies, two brioche loaves, brownies, and many, many cookies.
I made grape jam like that years ago. My kids dubbed it “grape glue” 🤭 However, it was very tasty in spite of being too thick.
Can I ask for your Francine cornbread recipe?