Warning to Boise State football fans heading to Jacksonville for the Florida State game:  tropical storm likely.

  Disclaimer: There is nothing official about this warning. The forecast doesn’t call for a storm.

  But don’t rule one out.

  The reason:  Tropical Storm Tim will be at the game.

  Regular readers of this column are well aware of my ability to run afoul of the weather gods when traveling. I’ve been run out of mountain lakes by storms that turned bone-dry creek beds into knee-deep rapids, stuck in blizzards on mountain passes, celebrated Thanksgiving on Puget Sound with gale-force winds, a power outage and a lily white turkey languishing on a hibachi. 

  A group of friends trusting enough to travel with the Woodwards to Boise State road games have learned the hard way about my propensity for encountering weather-related emergencies. 

  The games are an opportunity to spend a few days taking in local attractions in other parts of the country. That was the case a few years ago with a Boise State-Virginia game in Charlottesville, Va. Charlottesville is a few hours’ drive from Kitty Hawk, N.C. and the Outer Banks. We planned on pleasant days of exploring beaches and learning more about the place where the Wright brothers invented the airplane.

  Until the storm hit. Hurricane Joaquin in the Atlantic combined with the highest tides of the year to flood much of the North Carolina coast. High tides, heavy rain and strong winds had us muttering the star-crossed travelers’ lament:

  “What the #$%@! are we doing here?”

  Waves battering the beaches were as high as we were tall. In a photo taken on a beach, my wife’s hair looks as if she’d been standing in the wake of Air Force One. Roads closed; normally busy resort towns were all but deserted.

  Did we come home early? Did we hunker down and ride out the storm? Did we try to get out of its path?

  No. We’d come to see the sights and weren’t about to let a little weather stop us. So, throwing caution (and everything else that wasn’t tied down) to the howling winds, we headed to Cape Hatteras.

  Cape Hatteras is a narrow, broken strip of islands stretching into the Atlantic from the mainland and back again. So many ships have sunk in its  treacherous waters that they’re known as the Graveyard of the Atlantic. The Cape Hatteras road is an alleged highway, with apologies to proper highways everywhere. Parts of it are single lane. There are bathrooms that are wider. 

  This was the road we drove as the storm was bearing down. Parts of it were underwater. It was a good thing our rental was a big SUV or we could have ended up doing a highly successful imitation of a sailboat.

  My most vivid memory of that day is of sitting in a little cafe where we stopped to have lunch and confer over whether to turn back to our B&B or continue on and have our names added to a future plaque memorializing those swept out to sea. The sky was the color of lead. Rain was blowing sideways.

  The conference was a short one, frequently punctuated by “What the #$%@! are we doing here?”

  We turned back.

  It was a good thing because the road closed a few hours later. 

  Back at the B&B, we vowed to avoid future games in hurricane country. A vow we kept – until last year’s game in Troy, Alabama. By then, memories of Cape Hatteras had lost some of their punch. And what were the odds of something like that happening twice?

  Pretty good, actually.

  At first we didn’t pay much attention to the red flag that went up on the beach. Clouds had replaced the blue skies of the previous days and the wind was picking up, but no big deal.

  Then a second red flag went up, meaning the beach was closed to swimming because it was too dangerous.

  The reason: Tropical Storm Gordon.

  The storm short-circuited a story I’d wanted to write for years. A public relations officer with the Navy had arranged a tour of the base in Pensacola, Fla., where I was stationed decades earlier and to which I had never returned. (A tornado, incidentally, flattened several blocks of Pensacola during my tenure there.) The helpful P.R. guy had gone so far as to set up interviews with Idaho students at the base.

  All for nothing. Gordon closed the base the day before the interview.

  It also ended our vacation. After yet another storm conference, we checked out early and drove to Mobile, Ala., to catch our flight home. The next day, the storm closed the causeway to Mobile. If we hadn’t left early, we’d have missed our flight. Lodging options were limited on the rural road we took to Mobile. Think Billy Ray’s Rooming House, Dogwater, Ala. 

  We were fortunate to get some of the last rooms at a hotel in Mobile, where we  spent the evening sheltering in the lobby comparing storm notes with other guests and Coast Guard emergency workers. Gordon wasn’t a hurricane, but it was as close as any of us had been. People were on edge. If you’ve seen  “Key Largo,” the classic hurricane movie with Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, you have an idea of what it was like.

  Now, Tropical Storm Tim – clearly a slow learner – is heading to Florida during Hurricane Season.

  Of course there might not be a hurricane, tropical storm, tornado or other weather-related disaster there. The weather might be perfect. So don’t change your travel plans, and by all means enjoy the game.

  But don’t say I didn’t warn you. 

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.

Navy Week Brings Events, Memories

  If you asked today’s teenagers what the draft was, they’d probably say it was a cold air current that made them move someplace else while they were texting.

  The draft, as in “your life as you know it is over,” hasn’t existed since 1973, long enough that most young people today have little or no idea that it was a call to mandatory military service. 

  Prior to 1973, the draft was something most young men dreaded. Barring a disability or other acceptable excuse, young men of my generation could expect to get “greetings” from the president and an all-expense-paid trip to the war in Vietnam.

  When my draft notice arrived, my father gave me some surprising advice. Dad had served in the Marine Corp during World War II. Expecting him to recommend the Marine Corps rather than reporting for an army physical, I was surprised when he suggested the Navy. It was some of the best advice he ever gave me.

  With Boise Navy Week coming up next week, Aug. 19-25, I’m feeling a bit nostalgic about my sailor days. And with relatively few young people from landlocked Idaho joining the Navy, or for that matter knowing little if anything about it, it seemed appropriate to share what it’s like for a young person who has never been to sea or maybe even left Idaho to be whisked off to a different world.

  I was a struggling college student when my greetings from the president  arrived. Struggling as in flunking out for lack of interest and having no idea of what to do with my life. When he read my note apologizing for doing poorly on a final exam and saying it might not matter because my future probably included Vietnam, a kindly professor took pity and gave me a passing grade.

  That was when Dad’s advice sent me to see a Navy recruiter. He signed me up and promptly administered a battery of tests. My grades were 100 percent on three of them – and 55 on the mechanical exam.

  “Son,” he said with a trace of a smile, “we don’t want you anywhere near a ship. You should think about joining Security Group.”

  “What’s that?”

  “I can’t tell you because it’s classified. But it’s good duty and almost all of it is shore-based.”

  First stop: Charleston, S.C. 

  In August! Never having been outside the western U.S., I wasn’t prepared for Charleston’s climate.

  “What’s the matter with the air?” I asked an elderly gentleman at the airport.

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “Why is there all this steam in the air? Did something explode?”

  “You aren’t from around here, are you?”

  “No.”

  “Well, get used to it.”

 Nothing was ever dry. Sheets, towels, clothing, everything was damp at best. But Charleston itself was seductive – tropical flowers, cobblestone streets, antebellum mansions … It was a breathtaking new world for a kid from arid Idaho, and one I would have missed if not for the Navy.

  Next came a training center in Pensacola, Fla., where we learned the finer points of low-level spying on our Cold War enemies. Before Pensacola, I wouldn’t have believed that beaches could have sand as white as sugar and water so electric blue that you couldn’t stop looking at it.

  Then Germany, where everything from cafes to cathedrals seemed  impossibly picturesque. It was there that we intercepted a message one Christmas Eve that none of us would ever forget.

  Virtually all of the messages we copied were in code, but this one was in plain English. Our work and even our presence in Germany supposedly were top secret, but the message began by listing every one of our names and ended by wishing us a Merry Christmas from the Russian Navy. It wasn’t quite the stuff of “Seal Team” (the TV show), but it was exciting enough that we talked about it for weeks.

  While stationed in Germany, I was able to visit every country in western Europe except Finland and Portugal. Without the Navy, none of that would have happened. 

  Those kinds of experiences are unknown to many of today’s young people, who don’t have to worry about the draft and know little or nothing about the Navy. Navy Week is a way to address that.

  “It’s not a recruiting tool, but it does stimulate interest in young people,” Lt. Jacqui Maxwell said.

 Young people, and people of all ages. The lead planner for Navy Week, Maxwell added that its purpose is “to reach out to the public to tell them what we do for a living. A lot of people in inland cities don’t know much about the Navy. A common misconception is that our planes are Air Force planes.”

  That can’t sit well with Navy pilots, who among other things fly the fighter jets of the famous Blue Angels aerobatic team and pride themselves on their ability to land on the pitching decks of aircraft carriers. The last I heard, the Air Force doesn’t have aircraft carriers.

  The Navy is the only branch of the military that conducts outreach weeks in cities around the country. Boise’s will include dozens of events, including performances by a Navy band and rifle team, opportunities to meet Navy reservists and crew members of the nuclear submarine USS Boise, and Navy oceanographers displaying core samples and their weather glider at the Western Idaho Fair. Sailors will be popping up everywhere from the fair and the Grove plaza to the Boys and Girls Club, Aquarium of Boise and family night at the public library. The Press will publish more details later this month.

  “We try to hit every demographic, from youth to veterans,” Maxwell said. “We love to come to Boise. It’s amazing how many Navy veterans there are there, and they’re always happy to see sailors in uniform. It’s a way for them to reminisce.”

  One of those veterans is Eric Lowe, one of only two Boiseans ever to serve aboard the nuclear submarine USS Boise.

  “It’s always great to see the Navy come to town,” Lowe said. “Navy Week does a good job of doing a Fleet Week type of community event in cities that don’t have a port and a naval presence. It energizes local veterans’ groups, it’s an opportunity for members the USS Boise crew to visit the namesake city, and for me personally it takes me back to what it was like to serve. It brings back a lot of great memories.”

  Great memories? No argument.

Tim Woodward’s column appears every other Sunday in The Idaho Press and is posted on woodwardblog.com the following Mondays. Contact him at woodwardcolumn@hotmail.com.