Somebody, probably not a native Floridian, had tampered with the sign.

It was one of those large poster-sized American Red Cross signs that you see adjacent to a prominent artery in a Sunshine State community. This one was in Wakulla.

That sign and thousands like it are there every year-like an after-school monitor-to warn us of Mother Nature's hankerings in hurricane season.

Just in case all the sunshine and hanging chads are ready to lull us to sleep. Or Her. Hurricane season is here to remind us. She can still fire back.

Hard.

On this gray and whispery Sunday in mid-October, just a few days after the Weather Channel had stopped being the daily topic of conversation at the water cooler, it is clear someone has done a bit of editing with the calendar and the sign in downtown Wakulla. "_5 days left in Hurricane Season," it read.

A lie.

After the staggering array of hurricanes that blew our way, some weak-hearted soul had apparently snuck up on the sign, couldn't bear to think of Mother Nature having that many more days to crank up her gusty ways and enacted a little revenge with a little subtraction.

Unless, of course, it was Hurricane Ivan that blew the "3" away. Or Charlie. Or Bonnie. Or Moe, Larry or Curley or whatever the name was of all those hurricanes that Mother Nature kept coming our way so hard, so fast and so steady almost all summer and fall.

Unless of course, the thief was the Weather Channel's Stephanie Abrams, who finally figured out a way to give Mother Nature a hint that she'd like wearing some dry clothes for a change and having the weekend off.

About an hour south of that sign, in the tiny, seaside town of Carrabelle, there was no such indication of vulnerability. There would have been a revolt on the order of Shay's Rebellion if some local had dared show such a sign of weakness.

Living on the water is different. When you wake up every morning and peer out over that green and grey imperturbable giant that laps at your shores, you have to remember that the ocean is watching, too.

Carrabelle is not unlike other Florida seacoast towns in that regard. When you live on the water, you recognize some things about your daily life. And accept them.

When you live with the fact that in a whit, a hurricane capable of leveling your town could come whistling across the water without a moment's warning, you don't flinch. You can't.

Like a champion prizefighter locked in a last-round, toe-to-toe struggle that could turn on the first sign of weakness, Carrabelle residents, like so many other Floridians who have chosen to live alongside the rich and fertile sea, are survivors.

Defiant survivors. While we do not normally think of them that way, whenever a hurricane comes whistling around, sending roofs and shutters and lawn chairs a flying, we notice they do not leave.

Well, maybe for a night or three. But not for long. That's what defiance is all about.

Dockmaster Millard Collins, a grey-haired, ruddy-faced gent with a ready smile and twinkly, merry eyes, says he doesn't have a choice. Defiance is in his system.

"I don't know exactly what it is," he said in a firm and resolute voice that seemed to hang word-by-word in the middle of his library-quiet tackle shop at C-Quarters Marina in downtown Carrabelle.

"Once you get that sand and salt water in your blood, there's no getting it out."

The way he explained it, you could tell he'd thought about getting it out. Probably more than once.

He talked about how he and his C-Quarters staff responded to the warnings of the most recent hurricane-"I think it was Ivan, it's hard to keep the names straight"-rushing back to the place, boarding up all the windows, pulling in all the benches and tables and everything that wasn't nailed down…

It was a wise and judicious move that ended up being a whole lotta work for not a whole lotta weather. That comes with the territory. You sensed a man who was in this for the long haul like a lot of Floridians.

OK, so Mother Nature called his bluff, then let him go. This time. Sort of. Maybe his marina was intact. His business wasn't.

"The bad weather, well, people don't go fishing in bad weather," he said quietly. He glanced over at a neat and clearly undisturbed row of business cards advertising his charter boat.

"Charters?" he said, repeating a visitor's question as though he enjoyed and sort of missed the sound of the word. "I haven't had a charter in two months. Nobody has."

He looked out at the marina, the boats quietly bobbing up and down as the tide rolled in. His shelves were stocked like it was the opening of fishing season. But the unending array of hurricanes had left these lures and lines and at-rest poles unfairly benched for the remainder of the summer and most of the fall.

"It's killed our business," he said. "This weather. Killed it."

He drummed on the counter.

"But it'll come back. Always does."

A regular popped in to buy a pack of smokes. He heard the tail end of Collins' conversation and smiled.

"He's right," the regular said, crooking his head to light his cigarette. "It was tough through all these storms. We almost ran out of beer."

Collins shot a look at him. Those brown marble eyes flashed.

"We aren't EVER going to run out of beer." Everyone laughed.

On this grey and solemn afternoon, he almost sounded like a philosopher. You could see him propping up a leg on a wooden barrel, popping the top of a Budweiser while he stared down another grousing fisherman, a guy who was just cursing his Fates for the ruination that these hurricanes had brought to his livelihood in the middle of the summer, his big season.

You could almost hear that wise, calm voice, a seaside counselor, a true Old Salt, explaining the way of the world.

"Well, son, when Mother Nature gets her dander up, sometimes, you have to wait the ol' girl out."

Standing out by the edge of the dock, Billy McKendree, who runs the Seafood Market over on the port side of the C-Quarters Marina, was talking about his long and winding road all across the state in the fishing business. He'd seen this kind of thing before.

What he noticed now was the quiet.

"The weekends," he said, gesturing at the empty Route 98 that stretched out before him, "there's no traffic. The motels are empty. The restaurants, there's nobody around.

"Usually, the Fridays, Saturdays, Sundays, that's when we make our money here. Not this year."

He had enough seafood in stock to get by, he said. More than he needed, really.

"A stretch of good weather would help, it really would," he said. But before he went much further, he stopped himself.

"What we can't forget," he said, as if writing himself a mental postcard, "is we were lucky here. The wind changed, the East Coast got it a lot worse than we did. I've been there and seen it when a hurricane really hits. Pensacola, places over there, they're much worse off than we are. We…"

He paused for minute, perhaps to think about the near-empty cooler and equally empty cash register, but also that at least both were still standing. "…We are lucky."

Living in such circumstances tends to change your outlook on the world. In the top left-hand corner of the front page of the Franklin Chronicle, Carrabelle's weekly newspaper, you could find an ad for the Florida Hurricane Relief Fund.

"Rise And Rebuild" it read.

Below it, the headline on the top story seemed encouraging: "Franklin County Escapes Serious Damage From The Parade Of Hurricanes"

Yet once you got into Tom W. Hoffer's Page One Editorial AND Commentary (yes, you get a lot for your 50 cents with the Chronicle) it seemed to ring out with a warning.

"Once again, Franklin county escaped serious damage from the last Hurricane, Ivan, which followed on the heels of Charlie and Bonnie," Hoffer wrote.

"Yet, the county still lacks fast, safe and reliable evacuation routes in the face of rapid development and construction."

He continued. "Seems a little strange to have built a 73-million dollar bridge to St. George Island only to have a repaired two-lane, washed-out roadway as an escape route from the county during a severe storm. Some priorities are a little out of joint here it would seem."

Or maybe not. Why build an escape route for people who won't use it? Even if perhaps there will occasionally be times when they should.

The fact is, Floridians understand that hurricanes, like alligators, mosquitoes and white-legged old folks in January, come with living here.

"Leave?" asked Don Joiner, Jr., seated with his dad and Sam Logan on board Streaker, a good-sized vessel sitting quietly at The Moorings. "Why leave?"

He laughed as he said it, as though he understood why someone would ask such a logical question and also why he would immediately laugh it off.

"We just took the boat up the river," Logan said, explaining how, at the time, he decided to cope with the potential wrath of Ivan. He'd gotten a phone call from the front office at The Moorings, who warned of the threatening weather, recommended moving the boat up the river and that's just what he did.

"We were more concerned about somebody stealing the electronics off it," he laughed.

"Plus," he chuckled audibly. "We got insurance."

As the three men sat and talked on the deck of the board, welcoming a visitor aboard, it was as if they'd simply passed a fender bender by the side of a roadway and couldn't be bothered worrying about things out of their control.

"Four of them, now that was a bit much," Logan said. "I agree. But maybe that means it'll be a while until we get another one. We got our quota now."

And while the weather's horrible turn did spoil business for a long while, Sam Logan, a commercial fisherman, even found a silver lining in that.

"Actually, the fishing usually gets better, a lot better after a hurricane," he said. "When you get those high winds, stirring things up way out there, that brings the fish in closer to shore."

So Mother Nature gives the fishermen a chance to make up for the business She chased away while She was spouting off.

"I guess you could look at it that way," he laughed. "The fishing will really pick up now. You watch."

As you drove through the quiet town on this Sunday, about the only visible place where Hurricane Ivan left his mark was on the outskirts of town at a place called the Island View Inn.

Perhaps now, it should be called "More of an Island View" since Ivan sent more than 200 feet of wooden pier down to Davy Jones' Locker.

The wide-open spaces now give motel residents an unobstructed view of Dog Island, if no place to go out and fish.

"We had two long piers and Ivan took both of them down," Island View Inn Manager Jeff Heried said. "We had a few broken windows and a few shingles ripped off. But that's it.

"To be honest, I thought they kind of overdid it down here with all the weather updates and everything around here. I'm from Green Bay, Wisconsin and I've seen bad weather and this really wasn't that bad."

Heried just moved to Carrabelle three months ago, just in time for Bonnie. Or was it Charlie?

"We lived 20 minutes away from Lambeau Field (home of the Green Bay Packers)," he said. "So it was a bit of a culture shock to come here and get hit with this.

"But to me, it wasn't that big of a deal. Sure, we had 70-80 MPH winds and it did cause some problems with power lines and things.

"But I felt like the media markets just saturated us with all this hurricane stuff. We don't need to see it on TV all day, every day. You don't need to give us an update 20 minutes after the one you just gave if there's no change. All it does is scare people."

Though he'd only lived in Carrabelle for a few months, Heried already seemed to understand the Florida spirit.

"You might have a rough night or a few hours without power or maybe get a little wet," he said, laughing. "But hey, it's still Florida. It's not Wisconsin. You aren't going to freeze to death.

"We'll get the piers fixed. In fact, if it weren't for all the trouble that people had over in Pensacola-the guys who repair our stuff are over there-we'd have everything back up again. We're not going to back down."

And that, really, is what our state is all about. We understand that from time to time, our proximity to warm and lovely climates also leaves us occasionally vulnerable to weather temper tantrums.

But they pass. And when they do, it's always those who live alongside the water, who lead us back, step by step, hand in hand.

The dock workers are out there, waiting for the ships to come back in. The fishermen are ready to go out and bring back Sunday's dinner or Monday's lunch.

The fishing guides begin looking at the weather again and try and anticipate their next excursion. The resort employees go back to their jobs, waiting for that phone to start ringing again.

And gradually, slowly, defiantly, Florida gets back to work, back to sea, back to being Florida again.

You could see all of that in Carrabelle from one end of town to the other. Like other Florida seaside towns, they were strong, resilient, defiant.

Thankful, even. Especially on a gray and empty Sunday afternoon, just a few days after another ferocious hurricane was swept to the West, a near-miss.

The funny thing was, the only hurricane-referential sign you could find was out on the lawn of real estate agent Janet Stoutamire.

Stoutamire, who works out of her house, across the street from the IGA, explained she barely had time to talk because she was going to a birthday party for her pastor.

She was out adjusting the hose that was watering her lawn-yes, watering her lawn after four hurricanes in a row-when a visitor took note of the sign in front of her home/office.

As you would expect, the sign carried the usual advertisement for waterfront properties. Underneath, there was an inscription that, considering all that had been wrought upon our state over the past six weeks, was somehow life-affirming.

"Is that about the hurricanes?" a visitor asked, pointing to the sign's bottom line.

She smiled and hurried back inside.

The sign read: "God is great."

How Do Hurricanes Kill Fish?

Hurricanes are major forces of natural destruction.
Pictures in the various news media make it clear that these immense storms can devastate the landmasses in their path, but it may be difficult to see how hurricanes and tropical storms could affect fish. Here are some reasons you may see fish kills following a major storm event:

Freshwater flooding from rain or saline storm surge may trap fish in an inappropriate salinity. If this happens rapidly and the fish have no escape, species that are intolerant to changes in salinity may die.

Low dissolved oxygen is by far the most common cause of post-storm fish kills. When oxygen levels get too low, fish are unable to obtain the required amount of oxygen necessary for metabolism. Several factors may occur in concert to cause this condition:

• Wind-In small lakes or ponds, wind action may push surface waters to one side of the lake. Water from the bottom comes to the surface to fill the space the surface water used to occupy, bringing with it sediments and organic materials from the bottom. This water from the bottom is naturally low in oxygen. The bottom materials may include hydrogen sulfide; in high enough concentrations, hydrogen sulfide can be lethal to fish and is responsible for any "rotten egg" or "sewage" odors. Bacteria in the sediments are also brought to the surface; these bacteria decompose the organic material from the bottom, using up oxygen in the process. This whole event is termed a "turnover," since literally, the bottom comes to the top.
• Long periods of cloudy days-In aquatic ecosystems, the oxygen manufacturing system consists of microscopic organisms and aquatic plants that carry out photosynthesis: using energy from sunlight to create carbon-based nutrition for themselves with oxygen as a by-product. When there are long periods of cloudy days, these organisms produce less oxygen. At night, photosynthesis doesn't occur at all, and these same oxygen-producers are actually using up oxygen during respiration, just like fish and other animals. Under these conditions, it does not take long before there is little oxygen left for fish. Low-dissolved-oxygen fish kills often occur early in the morning, when oxygen levels are at their lowest.

Strandings due to flooding
Rising water may flood areas that normally do not contain water. After water levels recede, fish can become trapped if they are cut off from the connection to the main body of water. When the small ponds the fish have been trapped in dry up, the fish die.

Anatomy of a Hurricane

• Typical hurricanes are about 300 miles wide although they can vary considerably in size.
• The eye at a hurricane's center is a relatively calm, clear area approximately 20-40 miles across.
• The eyewall surrounding the eye is composed of dense clouds that contain the highest winds in the storm.
• The storm's outer rainbands (often with hurricane or tropical storm-force winds) are made up of dense bands of thunderstorms ranging from a few miles to tens of miles wide and 50 to 300 miles long.
• Hurricane-force winds can extend outward to about 25 miles in a small hurricane and to more than 150 miles for a large one. Tropical storm-force winds can stretch out as far as 300 miles from the center of a large hurricane.
• Frequently, the right side of a hurricane is the most dangerous in terms of storm surge, winds, and tornadoes.
• A hurricane's speed and path depend on complex ocean and atmospheric interactions, including the presence or absence of other weather patterns. This complexity of the flow makes it very difficult to predict the speed and direction of a hurricane.
• Do not focus on the eye or the track–hurricanes are immense systems that can move in complex patterns that are difficult to predict. Be prepared for changes in size, intensity, speed, and direction.