CARLTON FLETCHER: Self-preservation’s our focus as we wait out Dorian

The waiting is the hardest part.

— Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers

There’s a feeling of impotence, of helplessness in the air as southwest Georgians wait to see what Hurricane Dorian will do.

Yes, it’s probably selfish of us to worry about our own fate when it’s the people on the Atlantic Coast of Florida who are expected to feel the brunt of the storm. But still the worry persists, like an itch that you can’t quite reach to scratch away.

It’s human nature, of course, to make self-preservation such a top priority in the face of devastation that a powerful force of nature like a hurricane can exact. A great many of us went there often, so we shared Mexico Beach’s pain in the aftermath of Hurricane Michael. The quaint little Florida getaway was all but wiped off the map by the Category 5 storm in October of 2018. Yet we look around our own neighborhoods, see all the blue tarps that cover houses, all the businesses that either closed or were physically erased by a storm that was still at Category 3 strength when it made its way 120 miles inland, and we wonder what Dorian has in store for us.

We lost homes, infrastructure, utility usage, and thousands of tress in January 2017 storms, but more devastatingly, we lost lives. And we maybe lost our innocence and our sense of security as well. Then Michael left its calling card a little more than a year later, and there were those who said enough is enough and headed elsewhere.

Millions of dollars in federal and state disaster relief funds have poured into the region — after, of course, the politicians spent months playing out their stupid partisan one-upsmanship with the lives of people who trusted them to look out for their best interest hanging in the balance — but as Al Pacino’s character said in “Scent of a Woman,” “There’s no prosthetic for a wounded soul.”

So as Dorian churns in the Atlantic, bearing down on the Florida East Coast and then … well, there’s the rub. It’s the what comes next that has southwest Georgians — many of whom had laughed off such predictions of possible devastation in the past — buying up water at local stores, making plans to travel to areas in the north and west out of even the potential for harm’s way. It doesn’t help that the TV weather vultures who scream “RED ALERT! RED ALERT!” every time a clap of thunder sounds reiterate how vital it is that we listen to their forecasts if we want to have even a smidgen of hope for survival.

We hope, of course, that the weather gods will somehow see fit to turn Dorian back to the east, let it play itself out over the open waters of the Atlantic without touching the shores of Florida, Georgia or any other place occupied by our fellow Americans. But even as we know such hopes are baseless, we — perhaps selfishly — send up a prayer that those same weather gods will at least send Dorian off in another direction after it does its worst to Florida. We know that communities like ours can take only so many more hits before we just throw our hands up in defeat.

And so we wait. The people who are paid to prepare for and deal with such events are getting ready, filling sandbags, clearing up drainage infrastructure, getting a requisite storm plan in place. If Dorian does turn away and leaves us intact, instead of poo-pooing readiness efforts as we have in the past, most of us will instead let out a collective sigh of relief.

And we’ll get ready for the next storm.