Opinion | I’ve Lived With Hurricanes for Years. The Decisions Keep Getting Harder.

As the tropical disturbance that became Hurricane Helene moved north toward Florida’s Gulf Coast on Tuesday, I had an argument with myself about evacuating from Tallahassee: If I ran from the storm, would I get caught up in it anyway? I was thinking of Charlize Theron’s character in the movie “Prometheus,” crushed by a spaceship that crashed while she ran in a straight line away from it.

Stricken by the thought of being trapped (or worse) in my house by falling trees, I decided to drive to Greenville, S.C., with my elderly cat, but not without extreme anxiety. Many Floridians like me who were not under mandatory evacuation orders remember Hurricane Michael in 2018 and other recent unpredictable, dangerous hurricanes. For us, decisions about whether to stay or leave and where to go have become more tortuous in ways that may be difficult to understand for those who don’t experience hurricanes regularly.

Many don’t have the resources to flee monstrous storms such as Helene. But for those who can evacuate, there is a sense of not being able to outrun them or that the destinations may become just as perilous. Every possibility feels both right and wrong and also like disaster deferred for only days — while dithering only shrinks the window for escape.

This time, many of my Tallahassee friends who previously hunkered down left the city, driven as much by the cumulative effect of anxiety and exhaustion as by the particular threats of Helene.

But more than the sheer repetition of extreme weather, the stakes have grown — for our homes, our communities and our lives. These storms, increasingly supercharged by climate change and hotter water in the Gulf of Mexico, get bigger faster and are more likely to ravage and flood the interior than storms past.

It may seem irrational to see some people stay with their homes to defend them, but consider coming home to a damaged house that an insurance company may never compensate you for. One Tallahassee friend posted on Facebook that he was staying and had a “chainsaw ready to go” in case trees fell on his house. Another said, “We’ve always left before. This time — the fatigue, the frequency, the cost of going has started to weigh,” adding, “If we stay we can care for our home easier faster.”

Meanwhile, a disconnect seems to have occurred in our daily lives in Florida. The weekly forecasts, the hourly detail have seemingly become less accurate as the weather patterns have become more erratic.

We miss the gentle 3 p.m. rain of prior summers because it was part of our schedule, our routine, our understanding of and comfort with the rhythms of the seasons. Now, with mini-droughts punctuated by torrential downpours, we prepare for flooding, overflowing sewers, loss of electricity and erosion. So we are already adrift as a result of climate change, unmoored without realizing it, when a hurricane looms large.

Encountering, then, meteorologists’ spaghetti models of a hurricane’s possible track, with their different futures, both help us make decisions and deepen a sense of anxiety. In one reality, the roof of our house blows off, and we are exposed to the elements. In another, just a hair’s breadth different, we’re standing, relieved in the yard, sun shining, just a day later.

My escape to South Carolina reflects this mind-set. I chose this place for good reasons at the time, while seeking familiarity and comfort in a place I know well. But in all my preparations, I failed to see that the city was recently struck by unrelated storms that weakened the power grid, caused floods and knocked over trees that closed roads.

Apparently, my mind could not hold more than one extreme weather event at a time. So I write this from a hotel that could experience loss of electricity, high winds and flooding when Helene arrives. But to drive further would be dangerous, so I’m hunkering down, the window for decision making closed. I wonder sometimes if I should go back to Florida at all, which may feel like betrayal but also a relief.

That’s because the situation has fundamentally changed. This is not so much like a proverbial frog in a hot pot as a more insidious effect, in which we come to experience the stress of hurricane season more viscerally. Perhaps all of us will be hunkering down at some point, too exhausted to do anything else, whether we want to or not.

Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the Borne and Southern Reach novels; the most recent is “Absolution.”

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