Sula vs. THE HURRICANE

I suppose that every now and again it does a person a bit of good to survive an act of craziness. As for me it has been a long time since I did anything crazy. And most of my brushes with bad craziness generally involved people wearing short skirts and high heels. But I'm not talking about that. And I'm not talking about other examples of forms of bad craziness such as reposing trust in e-mails from ersatz Ethiopian bankers asking for your bank account information or joining the Scientologists (or the Christian Scientists for that matter). No.

I'm talking about willingly doing something that could stand you a reasonable chance of getting yourself killed. Or worse. Like pumping gas while smoking a cigarette. Going up on the roof to mess with the satellite dish during an electrical storm. Standing between David Wells and an umpire. Stuff like that.

My friend Sula is an unlikely candidate for "Crazy Person of the Year" award. Sula on the one hand is the very model of the buttoned down kind of person that gravitates toward the practice of real estate law whose idea of an interesting day is to form condo associations and/or rifling through musty records in county courthouses. All the while racking up big honking fees for the title company where she works in Destin.

So you can understand my concern when Sula called to tell me that she was going to ride out the arrival of Hurricane Dennis instead of getting the hell out of Dodge, a course of action that I gently suggested a more prudent person might well be advised to take. Nope. She was bound and determined and could not be otherwise persuaded. After all, as she wrote in the blog (http://gulfbreezecourt.blogspot.com )that she maintained while the electricity stayed on during this adventure, "I'm...fairly adventurous, and am an able handy person who will take risks."

Well...just so long as she didn't have a stupid reason for taking on 150 mph winds.

But you know? If you think about it, this is not of unheard of down here in the South. History's immortal scroll is replete with instances where Southern women took on equally daunting tasks against insurmountable odds and prevailed. A couple of quick ones come to mind. It took fully six weeks of siege from his gunboats in the Mississippi before Ulysses S. Grant forced Vicksburg to surrender. This is in no small part due to the indomitable will of the women of Vicksburg who never gave in despite some of them being reduced to in caves and dugouts during the worst of it. Another example is the women of Little Rock during the integration crisis of the fifties who decided that keeping the public schools open was simply too important to be left up to the men. It is no exaggeration to say that probably 40%, if not more, of the social progress that has been achieved in these parts probably had its origins in the parlors of halfway dotty Episcopalian or Presbyterian broads who,when confronted with overwhelming crises, simply folded their hands in their laps and said, "Now this just won't do."

And perhaps the issue was similarly no more complicated for my dear Sula who, maybe looked around at her home and her stuff and said, "Now this just won't do."

Maybe Sula isn't crazy. She is, after all, an able handy Southern woman.

In retrospect, Dennis never had half a chance.