When hurricanes come we always intend to evacuate, but for an operation like ours, moving house is no small feat. The house itself is vaulted up on nine-foot pylon stilts—the highest allowable by city ordinances, the highest by far on our street, or any other street this far from the water—so flooding isn’t a fear, but winds are. Andy, our stepdad, pares easily-snapped branches off the sycamore out front and burns the trimmings to harmless ash; he hauls out the tall silver ladder from the toolshed, tilts it by turns under each of the windows of our house, then hefts wide planks up rung by rung so he can board the windows lengthwise. When he hammers into the window frames from the outside the sound inside is something awful, driving and quivering, and no matter how many times I experience this throughout my childhood, still I feel restless indoors—threatened, shaken up like an unpopped soda can, and I can’t help but think of the reptile rooms at zoos with their pleading, warning signs: PLEASE DO NOT TAP ON THE GLASS.
  Even with the house tended to there are the animals to think of. Andy rigs up our rickety painted trailer to drag behind the pickup, and our mother sharply deputizes Jessica, Ian, and me to the task of luring the fauna up the ramp and into the enclosed cube: various dogs, cats, ducks, chickens, and goats forced into uncomfortable proximity, cloistered together shoulder-to- shoulder, the plywood boards beneath them groaning under their combined weight and splintering against their flanks. The goldfish and guppies in the plastic-lined pond under the high-stilted house will have to fend for themselves.
  But even with the animals safely stored away, there remains the more impossible question: Where will we go? Our mother places calls to her parents in Dallas, or to our father’s brother, Steve, who lives in Austin, and with whom she still socializes sometimes, despite the divorce. “Sure, of course you can come,” they say, because that’s what you say to someone who is fleeing a storm, so we set our course Dallas- or Austin-ward, trying not to think of where we will set the animals loose once we arrive.
  Perhaps it is this that causes us to remain every time: the knowledge that, wherever we go, we will become an unimaginable burden once we arrive. Whatever the cause, at some stage, our mother always changes her mind. “The radio says the storm is turning,” she tells us, and within the half-hour we’re lowering the ramp on the trailer and opening up the back, letting the animals escape again. “Just so they won’t get restless, while we decide,” our mother says one time, except that once they are loosed we know we won’t be gathering them again, and while Mom and Andy bicker we linger, miserable but not-yet-dismissed, near the idling truck while the clouds unfurl like dark-stained batting across the sky. When the decision finally comes to stay, our mother snaps the truck door shut, hard, so that it echoes across the yard like the storm’s first thunder crack, and she asks us why we’re just standing there, why aren’t we making ourselves useful and unloading the bags?
  The only time we make it off the property, I remember thinking This is it, this time we’ll make it out, but when we stop for gas at a station just outside of Rockport we’re stuck at the end of an interminable line, all of those fleeing the coast creating a massive traffic jam that coils through the gas station parking lot and a dozen cars deep onto the highway. Here, we run into a neighbor, someone we know well enough for Andy to swap tools with but not so well that we’ve ever seen the inside of their house. It’s a squat hovel a few blocks away, and I know the daughter, Nicole, because she rides the same bus as me, and sometimes she sits in the row in front of mine, and I can see her unwashed, shaggy hair, thin in places where a scabby scalp shows through. The neighbors’ vehicle, it seems, is broken down and in need of a jump. Jessica, Ian, and I sit crammed into the backseat of the truck as Andy and our mother dig out the jumper cables, maneuver the truck into place, nose-to-nose, our long trailer clogging up the bustling lot. If I squint against the sun I can just make out the shape of Nicole perched in the backseat of her family’s car, too. After the jump, our neighbors’ car revs right to life, and with a grateful wave they clamber back in and drive off, but when Andy tries our truck it won’t start. “Dammit, that jump must have done something to it,” our mother says, stopping by for a moment in the cab and glowering out the windshield at where Andy clangs about under the yawning hood; all the while, the other cars in the lot sound their horns in frustration at the space we’ve taken up. How long we sit there, I don’t know, but I do know that by the time Andy gets our truck working again the lot is empty, Rockport drained of all its evacuees, and we don’t bother setting off after them, but instead circle right back into town, which awaits our return ghostlike and abandoned, and which echoes loudly back the sound of grinding gravel under our overladen tires as we pull into our driveway.

  Even as a child, I know better than to think that it’s easy to live through a hurricane. In seventh grade, my history teacher, Mr. Jackson, hosts a day full of events commemorating the infamous Hurricane of 1919, which decimated Rockport in the middle of its most boisterous period of growth. Mr. Jackson, known for his in-class theatrics, pulls out all the stops for Hurricane Day, bringing group after group into an ominously dim-lighted classroom, seating us cross-legged on the floor, then prowling before us, narrating the events of that fateful weekend: the way the tide surged and the animals began to act strange, the fish abandoning the bay in favor of deeper water and the horses and cattle meandering in from the range to lean uncannily against the sides of the barns and farmhouses; the hoisting of the red flags that warned denizens of the town of the coming storm, as though the dark and swirling sky were not warning enough; how the winds began in earnest on Saturday night, so that by Sunday morning ships that had been at anchor were now deposited onto the shore and rows of bayside fishing shacks had disappeared without a trace. I sit gripped in fear, listening to detail after detail of Mr. Jackson’s telling, the dozens of oral tales he’s collected of this place. He shows slides that emphasize the damage, leveled buildings and pilings snapped in jagged halves and, memorably, the great fanned circle of a windmill caught in the sprawling branches of a live oak tree behind the Fulton Mansion, held aloft like a towering, gaping eye. On the next slide, a more recent picture shows the windmill still in that tree, the branches threaded through it, holding it more firmly in place. Yet in all the stories of loss, death, of people fleeing desperately for higher ground, of sturdy buildings rent from their foundations, somehow the most striking image for me is the one Mr. Jackson uses to illustrate the massive destructive force of the winds: how after the storm, they’d found pieces of straw driven into wooden posts across the city, as deeply as though the straw had been an iron nail.
  But somehow, failing to evacuate never feels like this. Neither does it feel like the tornado watches and warnings of my Missouri childhood, before the divorce, eating ice cream in case the power went out and switching on The Simpsons so that Mom and Dad could read the ticker alerts that scrolled underneath; then, if the weather got bad enough, piling into the closet under the stairs, all five of us together amongst the winter coats and sleeping bags, the closest my family ever was. No, Rockport during a hurricane evacuation feels alien, gutted, like a contagion movie after the illness has had its way, leaving behind only one percent of the former population. The storefronts are all closed and shuttered, the parking lots empty, the houses dark behind their plywood patches. Only the radio crackles with life, but the music is gone: all that remains are the alerts, the desperate pleas. If anyone is left in Rockport, you must evacuate now.
  We watch movies for as long as the power remains, selecting from our scant pile of VHS tapes, each one so comfortably familiar as to be nearly memorized. A particular favorite is Cecil B. DeMille’s 1956 The Ten Commandments, starring Charlton Heston as Moses and Yul Brynner as King Ramses. This movie is such a beloved part of the family lexicon that some Sunday mornings, when my siblings and I can’t bear the thought of going to our mother’s oppressive church, we compel her to stay behind and watch The Ten Commandments instead, arguing that it’s just as educational, and for a time we maintain a respectable rate of success before she tires of our scheme; and when I get my bangs cut blunt across my forehead my siblings call me Nefretiri after Anne Baxter’s regal character, who wears her similarly dark, straight hair in that style; and when the town is evacuated and only we are left behind, I start to think of the straw in the wooden post, and the windmill-eye grown into the tree, and it feels like the angel of death will come in the night and we are the fools who have failed to smear lamb’s blood above our door—but somehow the hurricane always turns.

  Most of the hurricanes come while my siblings and I are away, safely in the Midwest for the summer with our father. Our mother writes to us long, hand-penned letters on skinny patterned stationery with circled page numbers adorning each corner. That first summer—when Dad lives in the apartment in Carbondale near the faculty neighborhood, an apartment so small Ian has to sleep out on the couch, and we spend the summer with the neighbor kids and their camcorder, roaming the streets and shooting short funny videos in the empty houses their parents leave behind when they go to work each day—that summer, our mother’s letters tell us all about the storm conditions, the various tropical depressions building and dissolving out there in the Gulf. Most are wrung out over the water, blustering and raining themselves into little more than a wet storm by the time they make land. By the summer of 1999—when Dad has moved in with Angie, the summer he marries her there in the living room, and I head up the procession, spreading flower petals as I descend the spiral stairs—she writes of Hurricane Bret, the reports of its behavior out in the Gulf, the uncertainty of where it will land. Even as my siblings and I grow older, she keeps writing to us of storms, as though that’s all there is to say: as though all we have in common, the only safe territory between us, is the potential destruction of our home and everything we know. The years pass, and she writes to us of Allison, and Bertha, and Fay, and Bill, and particularly of Claudette, whose name she resents because of its close resemblance to her own. “Already people call me CALL-ette,” she complains to me, affecting a twangy Texas drawl, during one of our rare phone calls, the ones I spend cross-legged and confused on my bed, never certain what to say, what might set her to crying, or shouting, or chiding, or talking in that clipped, ice-steel voice that always precedes something worse. “Now they’re all calling me Claudette. I don’t want to be compared to a hurricane!” It’s a joke and it isn’t, so I laugh and I don’t.

  I won’t compare my mother to a hurricane, but I will describe the precautions I begin to take to avoid destruction:

1. Packing my bag heavy when I go to Illinois, then returning lighter, leaving my most precious things behind in my room at Dad and Angie’s house so they won’t be in my mother’s path, so they won’t suffer the same fate as the piles of books she’s torn up and the movies and CDs she’s confiscated and thrown away when I’m off at school for the day. “You really want to write that filth?” she asks me, watery-eyed, when I tell her I can’t find a notebook I’ve been composing my novel in. “You can do that at your dad’s, but not in my house.”

2. Boarding myself up in my bedroom, barricading the door and shutting off my lights so that she might not know whether the room is empty or occupied, so that she might pass over me if she is looking to unleash her wrath. This is a risky move, because on the occasions when she does find me, I’m cornered, and her shrieking, red-faced, tear-filled lectures gust tirelessly in my direction, rising and rising in intensity, sometimes for hours at a time, late into the night, so that the next morning for school I’m heavy-limbed and puffy-eyed, having slept only an hour or two after she finally let me go. Or worse—she forces me to fetch Jessica and Ian, to sit with them on the couch so we can all experience her screaming together, the lines so familiar we could almost quote along with them like the showy scenes from The Ten Commandments: wide-ranging but extremely specific paranoid accusations against us (filthiness, sinfulness, insurrection), our stepfather and his family (alcoholism, misogyny, hatred of white people), our judgmental teachers (one of them threatened to call CPS, they don’t understand, don’t they know how impossible it is raising such spoiled and ungrateful children?), and most of all against our father, accusations of violence, infidelity, and double-dealing coupled with reminders that he would be doing more for us if he really loved us, dire warnings that he’ll turn against us one day, too. All the while we listen without speaking, without making eye contact, hoping we don’t provoke another outburst of violence: she’s small, but not so small that she can’t grab us by the throat and slam us against the sofa, can’t take up a nearby hairbrush and thwap us with its hard-bristled face. And yet, the physical violence is almost welcome, compared with night after night of blustering alone: it gives us something to point to, some visible storm-path we can indicate as if to say, See? I’m damaged and I need help.

3. Maintaining a horde of emergency supplies, snacks and money squirreled away under my bed and in my closet, for those days when she seems too tempestuous to approach. “We’re going through a chapter seven!” she cries when I try to ask her for lunch money, followed by a laundry list of all I’ve cost her over the years, how little I’ve given her back, how the bankruptcy is our fault, Jessica’s and Ian’s and mine; so the next week, instead of asking for money, I purloin a box of granola bars and keep them at the back of my bookshelf, behind the Mom-approved books that remain, and I take one per day to school and spend lunch slowly chewing it, oat by oat, as if I am carefully excavating something inside of it.

4. Evacuating, when possible, to a friend’s house, or joining clubs just so I can linger in their meetings, or talking with teachers after school, or taking the long way home, on foot, just for the opportunity to remain out of the surge zone a few hours longer.

  The year Jessica leaves for college, storm season is worse than ever. Hurricane Katrina forms out over the Caribbean, storms over the tip of Florida and into the Gulf, and for a few days it seems it is heading straight for us, and the schools close and the town empties and again we fail to flee in the face of danger—and again, the storm turns. Schoolkids from New Orleans are redistributed, some as far south as Rockport; a girl named Patricia joins our sophomore class, wearing donated clothes and looking forced-casual, leaning back in the seat of her too-small desk, like she is pretending not to know that we know that she has lost everything.
  Later in the same season, Hurricane Rita brews to the east. As teenagers on the Gulf Coast, my brother and I have developed something of a gallows humor about the coming storm, a thick too-casual skin like a carapace hiding the flooding depths of our fears, and we spend our time in self-amused pretense, explaining wryly to our friends’ horrified parents how our mother never evacuates us no matter the size of the hurricane, snickering over Internet satellite pictures of the Gulf with the image of a cackling Rita Repulsa, the Power Rangers’ nemesis, spliced onto the swirling cottony mass of the storm.
  Meanwhile Dad and Angie visit Jessica at college in Austin over her birthday weekend. Their timing is bad: they had thought September 23 late enough in the year to be free of the threat of the storm, but Jessica’s birthday is the exact day Rita makes landfall, and they are held captive overnight in the Austin airport by the jetting rains the storm scatters over Texas. That night, I lie awake listening to the relentless percussive rain on my roof and at the window, feeling the house sway on its tall stilts, unable to turn my mind away from the fact that my dad and Angie are only five hours away from where I am. Five hours! In Texas, that might as well be next door. Part of me wants to run through the rain to the nearest road, crook my thumb for a ride, or wave a big Texas-shaped sign saying AUSTIN AIRPORT like Pee-wee in Pee-wee’s Big Adventure; then, when I find my parents hunkered down over their luggage I can say, Please take me with you, please, I have to get out of here, things have been getting worse, so much worse, and I haven’t been telling you because I don’t know how to say it and all these years I thought I could handle myself if I just took precautions but I was wrong, I’m drowning, and I don’t want to think what might happen if I stay.
  Of course, I don’t make it to the Austin Airport that night. I don’t even leave my bed, clinging to it like a raft in pitching water. All around me, the house groans, bowing and bending in the winds that might have plucked it from the earth like a weed if they had wanted, that even now could snap it off at the stilts and send us crashing into sand or sea, or chew us all to thoughtless debris without once letting us fall.
  But the winds stop—they always do. By morning the world outside is quiet, and I gather myself from my bed, rise and dress and pause a moment with my hand on my bedroom doorknob, bracing myself to face whatever has shifted in the night.

Rachel Cochran is a PhD candidate in creative writing and 19th-century studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Additionally, she serves as assistant editor for Machete, a nonfiction book series through Ohio State University Press. Her short stories and essays have appeared in the Masters Review, New Ohio Review, Deep South Magazine, Glassworks, and others, and have won the Mari Sandoz/Prairie Schooner fiction award, the Masters Review short story award (second place), and the New Ohio Review’s nonfiction contest.