Tropical Storm Elsa has blown through Florida and left a trail of destruction and power outages. Now, the storm is heading toward New England, where we are battening down the hatches.
Not really. The storm is not supposed to hit until Friday and we really don’t have any hatches to batten. Mostly, we just shut windows, and hope we keep power.
The day before a tropical storm — or its big sister, a hurricane — is weird. Newbies rush to the grocery story to buy, in order, hamburger, milk, and toilet paper. Such a weather event gives you time to prepare, while the tornados that menaced my hometown seemed to drop out of the clouds and snatch houses with no warning whatsoever. In Tornado Alley, you learned that if you ignored the first tornado siren, by the time the second one blew, you were too late. I wonder if any one has ever done a study of the kind of religion most popular in Tornado Alley, where the weather can seem to capricious — like a vengeful Old Testament God, with rain and wind. It could turn you fundamentalist. That’s my excuse, anyway.
My introduction to a New England blow was Hurricane Bob, in 1991. As the newscasters began warning us, I was excited but confused. I have two days to get ready? What shall I wear? When it hit, Rhode Island and Massachusetts took the brunt, but I stood at my back door in Connecticut looking out through a wall of water, and watched a bush bend over, like it was bowing. Later, I drove to the shore, where boats were scattered on land like a giant child had picked them up and dropped them, and the sails looked like a cat had come a-shredding.
This go-round, the National Weather Service is calling for flash flooding in Connecticut, but I live on a hill and if my house floods, your house in Kansas is at risk, as well. In other words, it’s not the flooding that worries me sitting up high here. It’s the wind. Last year during a particularly bad blow, I sat on my stoop and watched a neighbor’s tree come down with an ear-splitting crack. I’d been whooping and hollering as the wind braided tree limbs together, but when the tree fell — almost in slow motion — I figured it was time to go inside.
There is something about the awful power of a storm that is so…so…appealing? Awe-inspiring? I can’t think of the right word.
Maybe “humbling.”
For a few months after we sold a house and were flush, we rented a shoreline cottage, and I learned there that the sea and the weather don’t care. They just don’t. You can give them human names and call them “she,” but storms do not care. Sometimes, the waves pounded the old cottage’s sea wall so hard the house shook and even when I asked God nicely to make it stop, it didn’t. A hurricane blew in and flooded the place (fortunately, we had neighbors who suggested we move our cars; otherwise, mine would have floated away) and it left the most interesting detritus and an overpowering smell of fish. Did the storm care that it carried off the life jacket I’d left on the porch, or the thermos I’d meant to bring in? It did not.
So here we sit, and as I write this, the wind has picked up and the temperature has dropped 10 degrees. A little boy at a family birthday party tonight said his baseball practice ended early because there was purple lightning overhead. Here we go, New England. Good luck to us.
I love the way you tell a story!
When storms head my way, the first thing I do is fill the bathtubs. Occasionally, I head to the basement (a particularly good move when the microburst was over us). I would go there with the kids when they were little during bad storms, and we'd make it a fun activity. The worst part of losing power here is losing power to pump water to the house from the well. (Why we fill those bathtubs!) Being without water is no fun. The other bad thing with these storms, beyond trees coming down and property damage, is crop damage. My brother-in-law is a farmer. Too much rain & heavy winds can wipe out fields. It has never occurred to me that God has anything to do with weather, but I grew up in the snowbelt region of Upstate NY. The scariest weather related thing was a guy down the street got lost in the blizzard and died. There might have been a cardiac event involved, too, but it felt like his ghost kept wandering in that area.
Indeed, good luck to you. Elsa left us yesterday, although in Central Florida we didn't get much of a visit. However, she's NOT a congenial guest no matter how much or how little a mess she makes.