The hero of Hurricane Ike, one of the stories in Hunting Muskie: Rites of Passage, steps in today as guest blogger for Metaphors of Life Journal.
Hmmm, I am a bit uncomfortable doing this guest blogger thing. Pretty far outside my comfort zone.
Begin at the beginning, I guess. Can’t go wrong with that. My name is Ike, although most folks call me Hurricane Ike now. I’m not allowed to tell you why. Spoiler, I think is what they call it. You have to read the story about me to find out why.
I never imagined I would have a story written about me. I mostly just try to mind my own business and not be noticed. But that’s not easy to do when you are a full arms length taller than most people and built like a brick shithouse, as my father used to say
I expected to live my life alone, being the freak of nature that I am, and was okay with that. Yeah, loneliness got into my bones now and then. But we all have our crosses to bear.
Everything changed that day at the Texas Rice Festival. You need to understand, I don’t usually go to public events. Don’t know for certain why I decided to. You could say it was fate, as good an explanation as any. Anyway, that’s where I met Gibra and my life turned in a new direction.
Did I tell you where I hail from? A little town called High Island on the Texas coast. Haven’t ever been more than a few hundred miles from here. Never saw any reason to go anyplace else, although I might have changed my mind if I knew I would have to survive a hurricane.
Before you go picturing an actual island, let me set you straight. This area is mostly what they call coastal prairie and coastal marsh. You can go for miles without seeing a single tree.
High Island got its name because it sits on a salt dome. Now, I don’t know much about geography, but basically being on a salt dome means two things. First, we’re at a higher elevation most places on the coast. Something like forty feet higher which I guess kind of makes us a target.
Second, there is stuff in the soil that makes trees grow. We have woodlots here. Smith Oak Woods, for one. If it weren’t for the big Live Oaks that grow there, the story would be a god-awful sad one instead of a legend.
What more can I tell you without giving away too much? I love lighthouses. There are about a dozen of them still standing on the Texas coast. Think I would have made a good lighthouse keeper if that sort of job still existed. It was lighthouses that brought Gibra and I together. I doubt she would have given me a second look otherwise.
Other than that, well, there’s the Texas Ranger at the door, the picnic table that saved our lives, the bottlenose dolphin, the pelican, the abandoned rowboat, and of course, the gator I had to wrestle. They all figured into the story.
That’s pretty much all I’m allowed to tell you. I think you’ll like the story of Hurricane Ike. It is quite the epic tale, if I do say so myself.
~Coming in October 2017: Hunting Muskie, Rites of Passage – Stories by Michael Robert Dyet
~ Michael Robert Dyet is the author of Until the Deep Water Stills: An Internet-enhanced Novel double winner in the Reader Views Literary Awards 2009. Visit Michael’s website at www.mdyetmetaphor.com or the novel online companion at www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog.
~ Subscribe to Michael’s Metaphors of Life Journal aka Things That Make Me Go Hmmm at its’ internet home www.mdyetmetaphor.com/blog2. Instructions for subscribing are provided in the Subscribe to this Blog: How To instructions page in the right sidebar. If you’re reading this post on another social networking site, come back regularly to my page for postings once a week.
Tags: High Island · Hunting Muskie · metaphor · Michael Robert Dyet · rites of passage · salt dome · TexasNo Comments