Trying to Reason with Hurricane Season

When I called my mother to check in ahead of Hurricane Milton’s landfall last year, I wasn’t surprised to find her out to dinner in Crystal River, a coastal city near my parents’ home in Citrus County. Dismissing my concerns, she promised me she would contact her neighbours. She had no plans to leave despite the approaching danger. “We are above sea level anyway,” she said. “Nowhere near the surge.”

For anyone glued to satellite images of the “unprecedented” boundary-pushing storm churning toward Tampa, this posture might seem reckless. But for my mother, and for many Floridians, Milton was just another storm in a season that comes and goes. It didn’t matter that Hurricane Helene, equally unprecedented, had torn through Big Bend only weeks earlier, damaging the homes of family and friends as far south as St. Pete Beach and Safety Harbor before moving north to flood unsuspecting mountain towns in Appalachia. My family stayed then; they weren’t leaving for Milton. “Where would we even go with the dogs?” my mother asked.

In Florida, risk is embedded in everyday life, where it defines and reorganizes assumptions, symbolic gestures and rituals. We tape or board up windows to avoid shattering glass. We buy gallons of water and fill bathtubs “just in case” the taps stop running or the water is contaminated. We top up gas tanks in anticipation of evacuation orders, but we’d never go unless forced to. These acts of preparation reinforce a communal ethos, where we drink beers outside and chat with neighbours about long lines and squall lines and empty shelves one season after another. But we don’t leave—not by choice, and not for a storm.

Florida’s particular relationship with risk has been embedded over time, built up through exposure to increasingly destructive storms. This embedded risk is why throughout the 1980s and 1990s Publix grocery stores printed maps on their paper bags for storm tracking. Before the digital age really took hold, local news stations would provide updates and coordinates you could plot on the side of the bag, which in our house was dutifully unfolded on the kitchen table during hurricane season. While insurance companies and local newspapers like the Miami Herald have provided storm trackers since the 1950s, Publix continues to serve as both a de facto information hub and a cultural indicator of Florida’s embedded risk—not unlike Waffle House, another Southern institution. Through these crude indicators or through dots on a map connected by lines, meticulously recorded by people with no intention of leaving, embedded risk manifests in compulsory repetition—in tracking, in preparation, and in the compulsion to stay.