When I was a young student of archaeology, I recall being gobsmacked by the notion that the curvaceous Tennessee River had changed its course again and again over millennia and the one I knew, the one whose bluff I lived on for roughly a decade and where my kid spent the first few years of his life, probably looked radically different from the river native populations had hunted and fished multiple thousands of years earlier. This matters to archaeologists because of the cultural materials (artifacts and such) the river and its shoreline tend to belch up, incessantly.

These changes to the landscape over time, I learned, might have looked something like the movement of a snake, where alluvial silt piles up in the water, effectively “pushing” a bend in a river over to the other side. So where there had been the river shore, would now be the actual river, and where there was river, now silt. And on and on. Just imagine the time-lapse video that might’ve made.

In The Control of Nature, John McPhee tells three compelling stories, each unfolding in a different locale—two of them here and one abroad—about never-ending human attempts to bend nature to its will, to save lives and boost commerce. (Hat tip to the Army Corps of Engineers for trying to tame the Mississippi.)

It’s not all about failure. But we all know who ultimately wins.

We sure are a confident species aren’t we. Good for you for thinking that way, said a famous comedian a long time ago.

Nature won here a couple weeks back when we were due house guests for an extended birthday celebration. It was an already fragile situation where our time off had been planned carefully around other, less predictable schedules, and the day’s trip from inland out to the coast was fraught and presented considerable road blocks for the parties involved. In short, the planets needed to align just so.

Then Hurricane Debby insinuated herself on the horizon and conspired to upend plans.

She was only a tropical storm by the time she reached us, but had the audacity to crawl along at a snail’s pace and dump stupid barrels of rain upon us. What she did here was minor in comparison to the havoc she wreaked down in Florida and farther inland. <Insurance rates going up in three, two, one….> We huddled with our guests by text and in phone calls, thinking maybe, perhaps, we could just…push our plans out by one week?

By some miracle we pulled it off, all five of us, and the delayed visit came off without a hitch. Mainly. One of our guests had to leave his work later than planned and so came in a separate car and another left his socks at home. Not too bad, considering.

My dad was one among our company. I really, really was rooting for him to make the trip, difficult though I know it is at this point in his life. Did you get much flooding, he asked me on a couple occasions.

Nope, I said. Except right along the coast, where people live in houses on stilts, and that’s what they signed up for in the first place.

Still, driving him around town, and out over the Intracoastal and into Fort Fisher, I saw some areas that had been inundated and still had standing water. Same situation as we crept back north, where I took the scenic route on our way to lunch on Monday so dad could get a sense of the scope of this pizza slice-shaped town we call home. We observed water pooled up, still, in some yards, and I imagine it must have been so much worse a couple of weeks ago (nothing like my friends and colleagues up in Vermont have seen this summer, ironically).

A few weeks earlier during a doctor visit, my conversation with the doctor and his assistant had somehow turned to the H-word, and how Chef David and I are in our third summer here and have thus far weathered one tropical storm per, but not yet, you know. My doctor quipped, “If it’s only a one or a two, it won’t be so bad. Unless. Unless the water table is already high, as it was with Florence a few years back, and the storm moves slowly. Then you’ve got trouble.”

Hmm. Seems to be about where we are right now. I’m guessing drought is no longer an issue, as the discussion amongst the weather folk had suggested in the late spring and early summer. But we’re just entering prime time for foul weather in these parts, so it’s not too late for trouble.

Several days ago I scrolled past a post in a social thread where somebody had suggested, If you evacuate for a category one, you don’t deserve a ‘Salt Life’ sticker on your car. Always with the bravado.

The reasoned person in me knows you can’t live your life just waiting for trouble. But I will say without shame or remorse I will not hang around for even a category one storm, nosirree. (You can have your Salt Life decal, and just go on and roll your eyes.) Instead, I’ll be off like a prom dress to higher ground, thanks, to a reliable ’net connection, there to stay until the waters recede and the power returns.

Because while I can’t bend nature to my will, I surely can will myself away from nature. I’ll try to remember my socks. (And good for me for thinking that way.)