Storms

"The best thing one can do when it's raining is to let it rain." -- H.W. Longfellow

"Weather forecast for tonight: dark." -- George Carlin

Tonight strong storms are sweeping through our area. I'm compulsively listening to a local radio station waiting for...I don't know. Maybe for doom to fall upon me out of the sky. I don't fully understand why I become transfixed by the weather reports when bad weather comes in. It's almost a snake/mongoose thing. I know it's getting late and church tomorrow will be early. I know that my listening to the reports doesn't change what's happening outside. It doesn't even really give that all-important illusion of control we humans cherish so dearly.

I keep telling myself that I will get up, take a shower, and go to bed, but every time I reach for the remote to cut the stereo down, the ever-vigilant djs cut in with another report. I start tracking with them on my mental map of the area. I wonder if This Person who lives in This Area is okay, and suddenly, there's a tornado in That Area where That Person lives. Suddenly, it seems like I know people everywhere, and all of them are beset by Nature.

If it weren't for the tornados, I wouldn't mind the rain. I've always rather enjoyed thunderstorms. I remember watching them every summer at the camp our church went to on the coast. There are few things as impressive as a summer thunderstorm coming in off the Gulf. A shimmering gray wall of water slid across the silt-tinged waves. Silver threads of lightening traced messages that disappeared too fast to for my mortal eyes to read them. The wind, always a presence there, bent the palms like dancers performing a dangerous tango. Standing on the balconies and landings of the camp complex, I always felt as though I could fly into it and be dissolved into the magic of it.

Even though I'm nowhere near the coast now, I still enjoy thunderstorms. Now, instead of palms, pines dance, taller, less frantic. Half of my old house (see a previous post for more about this) has a metal roof, and the sound of rain on the roof is incredibly comforting.

While I was in Japan, I missed the rumble of summer thunderstorms. Their summer storms are typhoons. Typhoons are another kind of magic altogether, and not a terribly enjoyable type. Add this to the fact that they usually took several days to move through us, and all my groceries had to be transported by bike with me in semi-effective raingear, and you can understand my lack of enthusiasm. I was very fortunate that we never had a big one come in directly on top of us while I was there. They always steered enough north that we didn't catch the most damaging portions.

Although I don't mind the thunderstorms, I do mind even a tiny whiff of tornado. Suddenly, weather that had been highly conducive to reading and snuggling down into quilts with cats becomes a bleary-eyed radio vigil. The fact that they are horrifyingly unpredictable, destructive, and sudden aside, the primary cause of my tornado worries can be traced to two sources.

The first is a story my mom told me. When I was little, we lived in a trailer. Not a mobile home. Not a triple-wide with porch and spa tub. A trailer. One night the weather was particularly bad and Mom went out to listen for the freight-train rumble of an impending tornado. We're always told to listen for that in this part of the country. The tornado tiptoed up to the house closest to ours (my parents lived and continue to live out in the woods on about 40 acres of their own), ripped it up, and bounced over us without making a sound. A car horn from their house would have been heard, but not the total destruction of a house by a tornado. So much for an auditory warning.

The second is something I saw with my own eyes. There is a research station within driving distance where I live, and we'd have to pass it to go visit my grandparents when I was a child. As this research station, they had a huge equipment barn made from metal. Unfortunately, this station also sits in what we call a "tornado alley", meaning, for those of you unfamiliar with the joys of these storms, a place to which tornados seem to be drawn for some unfathomable reason. I can remember at least two separate times when a tornado came through the "alley" in which the station sits and blew the barn into pieces. For miles around, the tall pines had streamers of silvery metal woven through their branches, tied around their trunks like misshapen bows, and littering the ground beneath them. (BTW, every time the barn got/gets destroyed, they put it right back up again. Maybe they think the tornados will get tired of it eventually. I personally think I'd at least try to move it elsewhere on the property or SOMETHING.)

Every area has some sort of natural disaster they have to deal with. The area of Japan in which I lived was awaiting a massive earthquake/tidal wave. I'll never forget watching the far-too cheery NHK news girl gesture to a cardboard model of Nagoya and showing how far inland the wave was going to sweep. I can't tell you how comforted I was about *that* when I found out. Some areas have mudslides, volcanoes, or floods. A friend of mine from Brazil always told a joke concerning the lack of these types of natural disasters in Brazil. Apparently, according to the joke, the government more than makes up for it. It was a very clever joke, I thought. I guess we all just make the best of it we can no matter where we are. After all, what other choice is there?

It's time to take the remote by the horns (mixing metaphors along the way), and get some rest. There's nothing I can do about it anyway.