Lowcountry enjoying storm-related luck

My dad's house is nestled on the edge of a picturesque little lake these days, which is unusual, since three days ago it sat on the edge of a busy two-lane road and just down the street from a CVS. This is because he lives in Valparaiso, Ind. (Official motto: "Everything is just down the street from a CVS!"), and there are no bodies of water near Valparaiso, Ind., that you can swim in without the fear of waking up to find that you have spot-evolved a dorsal fin, or have started popping off Mogwai. Northwest Indiana borders Lake Michigan, and for many centuries the steel plants that dot the edge of the lake like so many charred, rusty, pimples have discharged their wares into the water, making swimming there about as wise an idea as leaping headfirst into an oversized Crock Pot full of very old beef stew.

Anyway, in Northwest Indiana, there is Lake Michigan, and then there is the lake that's where my dad's front lawn used to be. Because in Chicago and Northwest Indiana it rained for ... well, I don't really know how long it rained, but it was long enough that it became reasonable to wonder if Moses was coming, and if he was angry or not.

It rained in Chicago because of Hurricane Ike, which danced its evil two-step over the Gulf Coast and Houston before apparently turning north to winter in the Midwest, resulting in rains on the plains and price gouging everywhere else. Ike and its remnants apparently submerged portions of the Midwest for the better part of the last weekend, according to phone calls I'm continually fielding from my family, during most of which you could hear a game of Marco Polo going on in the background.

A Bible-style dose of lawn-sopping rain isn't something we're used to dealing with up in the Region, which is the comically nondescript name given to the miles upon miles upon miles of steel mills, former steel mills and hockey-puck shaped oil containers that make up Northwest Indiana. Up in the Region we're more used to the brown snow-slush that begins falling in October and continues for the next nine months.

Rain, by contrast, is something we deal with often here in the Lowcountry, which is low and swampy and coated in fiddler crabs, and the sort of place you would expect a massive storm to swing through every now and again, except that apparently doesn't happen. I don't want to be the guy crying wolf about crying wolf, the guy people point to when they fail to evacuate ahead of a Category 4 barn-burner saying, "But the gray-haired pinhead in the paper said storms never come here!" They do. I'm told. They just, uh, haven't recently, or ever.

I'm not sure why this is; I was here in 1999 for the evacuation for Hurricane Floyd,which was a low point for me, as it was the only time in recorded history I've ever admitted to being afraid of a Floyd, except for the cover of "Wish You Were Here" -- THAT MAN IS ON FIRE, SOMEBODY HELP HIM! Floyd missed us, as did Hanna, as did most other storms in recent memory, thanks to what I'm told is some sort of geological coastline-based Invisible Force Field that repels storms like someone produced a Patronus in the Tiki Hut. (This Patronus would take the shape of Jimmy Buffett.)

So while friends in Indianapolis and the Chicago suburbs wade through the life-sized koi ponds developing in their basements and wonder when the power will get back on, and people in Texas start sweeping up whatever they can sweep up, I'm down here in 85 degrees of lovely, the last quote-fingers tropical storm seeming like nothing but a breeze, and feeling unusually lucky to be able to write about it this way, at least this time.