I lived in Florida for more than two years, and I'm living in North Carolina now. Each state has major athletic teams called the Hurricanes. Folks in these states tend to watch the Weather Channel when a big storm is churning the the Atlantic or the Gulf. With good reason. Unlike, say, my childhood home of the midwest, hurricanes are known to happen in Florida and North Carolina.

Three weeks ago, Dennis messed around for more than a week, eventually dumping more than a foot of rain in my area. Some mushrooms grew in my yard, but that's about all that really happened.

Two weeks later, a monster storm called Floyd threatened. This time, I went out and bought some water. See, here in the United States, the only real threat to our houses (if they follow code) is trees falling on them. Unless the storm is utterly huge (we're talking one of those 155 mph puppies, the real rare ones), the wind shouldn't rip the roofs off. Remember those pictures of a wiped-out Homestead, Fla.? Those houses weren't built to code. The Big bad Wolf coulda blown them off. 'Nuff sed.

But unlike stury roofs, electric lines will fall in relatively minor winds, so as Floyd bore down on the coast, I sat at home Wednesday night, waiting for the power to go out.

It never did.

In fact, I even went to work on Thursday, something that I hadn't expected at all. But the day dawned beautifully (hurricanes almost always leave gorgeous weather in their wake) and so I reluctantly drove over to Raleigh to earn my check.

My wife Barbara was in the middle of the mess, over in New Bern, N.C., covering the carnage for a newspaper. She didn't come home Thursday. Or Friday. Saturday afternoon, she asked me a serious question.

"Do you think people have any idea what's really going on in eastern North Carolina?"

"Not over here," I said. "We're just basking in the sunshine."

"It's a war zone," she said. "There's no food, no power, no water and the rivers just keep rising. Some of them are double flood stage."

Floyd, which came ashore as a "mere" category 3 storm with winds around 110 mph, dumped up to 20 inches of rain on parts of coastal North Carolina. The winds brought relatively minor damage. The rains brought utter devastation.

And so, people who blinked at the sun in disbelief Thursday afternoon soon realized they had to run for their lives. This region, rich with hog farms and hog lagoons (which hold ultra-swank pig waste) was about to go under. Literally.

We can learn things from nature. It's not the obvious things that are the problem. It's the silent undercurrent that can be even more deadly.

An obvious example is the whole Y2K issue. For years, people have been complaining about big brother and the way technology seems to be crowding out humanity. Everyone could see and understand these things. But it was a prehistoric programming protocol that really spelled out the trouble with our reliance on machines. Ask five people what the Y2K problem is, and you'll get five answers. Even now, with all the hype, the best most folks can guess is that "the computers won't work."

Polticians might pay attention to this as well. It has been said of both Nixon and Clinton (not to mention Reagan and Bush) that the events precipitating scandals were nothing compared to the lies and deceptions which followed. A sprinkling became a downpour became a torrent. And then the floodgate finally gave way. Or, to put it more succinctly, a blow job is a blow job, but a lie could get you impeached.

The flood waters are still rising in parts of eastern North Carolina. So far somewhere between 19 and 25 people have died in the brown water. More people will die before the torrents recede. Indeed, as so many hog waste lagoons have been flooded, we're likely to hear reports of some rather archaic-sounding diseases before this ordeal is finished: typhoid, cholera, tetanus, etc.

The real irony is that the rains brought by Floyd wiped out an 8-month drought. The city of Greensboro has filled its reservoir once again. That which brings life also destroys.

But enough already. Only one fable allowed per column. Floyd's lesson is easily observed: Don't pay attention to the bluster. It's what follows that's much more important.

Jon Worley painted the inside of his house during Dennis. He had his floors refinished during Floyd. He's hoping another hurricane doesn't show up while he's trying to move his CD collection.