Hurricane scare all for naught

OLD TOWN — “Hurricane Bill could hit anywhere from Massachusetts to Nova Scotia …”
My eyes picked up from the card game I was playing on my laptop to the TV screen, finally listening intently to what was just background noise moments ago.
“A hurricane could hit where?” I thought to myself.
The storm tracked showed it moving well east of Maine, but the report was there. A hurricane could possibly, maybe, sort of glance the Pine Tree State.
It doesn’t take much for my imagination to go into overdrive. Images of Florida after Hurricane Andrew, and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina popped into my head as I started to surf the Internet for a more detailed forecast of this new megastorm, Hurricane Bill.
Growing up in the Midwest, hurricanes are those storms you hear about on TV that sometimes survive long enough to drop rain on you a few days after landfall, but that’s about it. More often than not they were just the big storms that made the news back home. Tornadoes, on the other hand, you could expect a few to drop in the region every summer.
Now it finally hit me, two years into living on the East Coast, that a hurricane could strike Maine. Everyone I talked to, however, laughed off my irrational fears and told me everything would be fine. For one, Bill (somehow this storm and I got on a first name basis pretty quick) was to go well east of Maine so we had nothing to worry about. Secondly, we lived far enough inland that nothing would really happen except a bunch of rain would fall on us — and after the summer we had, how would that be any different than what happened in June?
This weekend came and went with little in the way of rain from the storm that churned in the Atlantic. No homes were destroyed and no low-lying lands were flooded. Heck I don’t even think Bill was able to keep the dust down in these parts of the state.
Bill did not pass by without causing some harm, however. There were reports of people being swept to sea at Thunder Hole in Acadia National Park, with the sad news that a 7-year-old girl from New York City passed away in the incident. But in Piscataquis County, Hurricane Bill was nothing more than a report on the news — and that’s not such a bad thing after all.