It’s not here yet, but already memorable

Though Hurricane Irma is days away from making its expected landfall in South Florida, many of us have already made up our minds about the storm, assigning it traits we typically reserve for our political opposites, childhood math teachers and fast-food burritos: “monster,” “ferocious,” “destructive.” The president, in his special fashion, appears to regard the hurricane with slackjawed wonder, as if gazing upon a new skyscraper or a shiny fire truck, tweeting: “Hurricane looks like largest ever recorded in Atlantic!”

We do this with hurricanes, lard them with superlatives, ascribe them with personalities and, because we must, trivialize them with hashtags. Oh, you haven’t seen #irmageddon on Twitter and Facebook? Lucky you.

How we will remember Hurricane Irma, of course, remains to be seen. But even if by some mysterious quirk of science the storm were to stop dead in its tracks and fade into nothingness, the hurricane, whose winds have surpassed 180 mph and created untold horrors in the Caribbean, has already implanted itself in our collective psyche. We’re not going to forget this one. But then, in South Florida, we never do.

Irma formed in the Atlantic just as we were coming off the 25th anniversary of Hurricane Andrew, which on Aug. 24, 1992, destroyed a good portion of

South Florida and whatever sense of security we once might have enjoyed. We look back at Andrew less with wonder over its size and strength and more with sorrow over how much we lost and fear of what we know we can lose again.

For South Florida baby boomers, Andrew may have felt like a descendant of Donna, a Category 4 hurricane that hit Marathon on Sept. 10, 1960, and proceeded to march north through the Everglades, Homestead and much of Dade County. On Tuesday, one Florida newspaper headlined a story, “Hurricane Irma is being compared to Donna, which slammed Florida back in 1960.”

Pundits and wags like to talk about the “hurricane fatigue” that occurs after we endure a series of near-miss storms that cause us to panic long enough to relieve grocery stores of their stocks of water, batteries and Baked Cheetos only to turn away from us and unleash their wrath on less fortunate souls. But live in South Florida long enough, and you’ll know that we don’t experience fatigue so much as resignation. Storms that only graze our area (2016’s Matthew, for example) often still bring hell elsewhere, and if we’re not theorizing about where a hurricane might land, we’re empathizing with those people on whom it’s landed. It’s hard to be complacent when you can hardly sleep.

The hurricane that ripped through Palm Beach County on Sept. 26, 1928, didn’t have a name, as meteorologists didn’t start officially naming storms until 1953. It got one, anyway. As the Sun Sentinel reported in 2003, the storm killed nearly 3,000 people, many of them in the Lake Okeechobee-area towns of South Bay, Pahokee and Belle Glade. The hurricane came to be known as the Forgotten Storm, “because politicians at the time downplayed the storm’s severity … because officials failed to adequately document the destruction for future generations … because the vast majority of those who died were black migrant workers, segregated in life and abandoned in death.”

The novelist Zora Neale Hurston didn’t live in Florida at the time of that hurricane, but she didn’t forget it. The storm plays a significant role in her 1937 novel “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and her imagined account of its destructive force, its monstrous nature, its ferocious personality could have been written yesterday:

“And the lake … Under its multiplied roar could be heard a mighty sound of grinding rock and timber and a wail. … The monstropolous beast had left his bed. The two hundred miles an hour wind had loosed its chains. He seized hold of his dikes and ran forward until he met the quarters; uprooted them like grass and rushed on after his supposed-to-be conquerors, rolling the dikes, rolling the houses, rolling the people in the houses along with other timbers. The sea was walking the earth with a heavy hell.”

Let’s hope the monster in the Hurricane Irma story will be a merciful one.