Last Updated on June 1, 2026 by admin
Today is the first day of the 2026 Atlantic Hurricane Season. At 4:00 a.m. in Mobile, Alabama, the carrier was already by the door.
Cinnamon is seven. He is a Maine Coon, twenty-one pounds, with the kind of patient face that suggests he has seen things and chosen not to comment.
His person is Trent Galante. Forty-one. Paramedic. Eighteen years with Mobile Fire-Rescue. He has driven into two hurricanes in his career and stayed up through six others on shift.
In 2020, Hurricane Sally came up Mobile Bay slower than anyone expected. The eye crossed near Gulf Shores at two in the morning. Trent was working. His ex was at the apartment. The cat Trent had then — a gray tabby named Beaufort, ten years old — got out a window the wind blew in. They never found him.
“I’m not doing that again,” Trent said into a phone, three months after Sally, talking to his older sister in Birmingham. “I’m not going to be on a call thinking about my cat in the gulf.”
He bought the carrier in November 2020. The luggage tag is laminated. It says:
CINNAMON / GALANTE / 251-555-4419 / KIDNEY DIET / SUBCU FLUIDS Q3D
Every Saturday morning at 6:14 a.m., Trent puts down kibble in the carrier instead of the bowl. Cinnamon walks in. The carrier door clicks shut. Trent carries the carrier to the truck, drives one block, comes back, and lets Cinnamon out.
That has been the routine for five years and seven months.
NOAA’s outlook for the 2026 Atlantic Hurricane Season — released May 22 — predicts eight to fourteen named storms. Three to six hurricanes. One to three majors. Below-average activity is expected, driven by an emerging El Niño. But “below average” still produced four landfalls in 2014. One of them was severe.
Trent’s go bag sits next to the carrier. The carrier sits next to the door. The door is by the stairs. The stairs are forty-one steps from the truck.
“Below average doesn’t mean nothing,” he said. “It means I get nine months to remember what Beaufort looked like the last time.”
If you live in a hurricane zone, here is what June 1 asks of you:
- One carrier per cat. Hard-sided, not soft, if you can.
- A laminated luggage tag with name, phone, medication, and special diet.
- Four weeks of food and any prescription medication in a sealed bin.
- A photograph of each cat — printed, in the bin, in a ziplock — in case your phone dies.
- One practice run. Just one. So the carrier is not a stranger when the wind starts.
Cinnamon is asleep in the carrier this morning. He has decided it is his.
That is what five and a half years of Saturdays buys you.
It buys a cat who is not afraid of the door.