At Random for September 5, 2008

• By DANNY HEITMAN
• Advocate columnist
• Published: Sep 5, 2008 - Page: 1E - UPDATED: 12:05 a.m.

• Print
• Email
• Save
• Reprints
• Twitter
• Share

• Del.icio.us
• Digg
• Facebook
• Reddit
• 

The day before Hurricane Gustav arrived, as I combed the yard for things that might fly through the wind, I noticed that a big banana spider had managed to snare a butterfly in his web near our door.

The butterfly hadn’t been devoured just yet, but the spider clearly had him in his sights, and there was nothing for the pitiful prey to do but wait for the inevitable.

Who hasn’t felt like that poor butterfly when the National Hurricane Center announces that a storm is heading right for your door? The prospect of destruction is sharpened by the weary wait for the enemy to strike.

Thanks to the miracle of technology, we know about hurricane threats a week before they make landfall. That’s an improvement over those days, not too long ago, when major storms caught residents completely unprepared.

A hurricane’s long prelude is a lifesaver, but it’s tough emotionally. Part of the challenge is that weather forecasting, though dramatically improved, is still an inexact science. What we get, in the days before landfall, is a lot of guessing about where the storm might go and how strong it will be, but few hard certainties.

As if nursing a fevered patient, you begin to keep vigil over the storm and hope for improvement, nervously checking the computer models and wanting to believe the ones that steer the storm elsewhere.

Weather is a democratic force, touching citizens of every stripe, and like politics,  it inspires each person to declare himself an expert.

Practicing meteorology without a license, friends and neighbors begin to offer elaborate theories about the hurricane’s prospective track, citing the solemn precedents of Katrina and Rita, Andrew and Betsy.

But Gustav, like other storms, reminded us how  much we still don’t know about nature. That reality is particularly hard to swallow in a culture conditioned to assume that all things are knowable even before they happen.

The Internet and the 24-hour-news cycle have made a national pastime of prophecy, but storms such as Gustav underscore the limits of our ability to see the future.

As Gustav approached,  we shuttered our houses, stocked our cupboards and learned once more what the world had made us forget — that sometimes, real wisdom must come from waiting.

Both spider and prey vanished from our yard in the gusts of Gustav, as did so much else in our neighborhood.

The day before the hurricane, our neighbor filmed his house and lawn — a little historical document to compare the landscape with how it might be altered within hours.