Weather or Not

Weather.  Someone said to me not long ago, “It is humbling to consider that when you come to die, the crowd that day will be determined by the weather and they’ll sum your life up in twenty minutes or less.”  Humbling.

“Shelter” is such a “taken for granted” in America that we live more disconnected from the fragility of life as it is exposed to the elements.  It breaks in on us now and then—in California, by earthquake, in other places, snow or tsunami.  Here in the South, we live chronically subject to the tornado and hurricanes.

Hurricanes are different in that they are coming for days.  There’s always time to get away if you want to skeedaddle, even though it is some sort of honorable foolishness in this part of the country that there is always some guy named Leonard or Dude who never leaves and is filmed with a cigarette hanging out of the side of his mouth while he grins and nails up plywood on his flimsy house and shrugs his shoulders.  “I’m going to ride ‘er out.”  Sometimes Leonard is never seen again, but often he makes it.

I don’t have any expertise on weather, but this global warming issue seems persuasive.  How could billions of us NOT have an impact?  Now, what we can do, or whether it’s too far gone, who can tell?  We’re going to have to ride ‘er out.

If a hurricane is like watching an approaching army from a mountaintop, a tornado is more like running

into Jack the Ripper.  Here in Alabama, when our local weatherman star says, “The sky is falling,” the local Publix grocery store looks like the aftermath of a locust plague and everybody heads for the house and their safe place.  My wife and I have sat through more than a few in the dark, sitting down in the basement where my office-studio is, listening to the weather radio and praying for strangers nearby.  After last April, the anxiety only went higher.

The closest I ever got to death out in the elements, other than almost drowning when I was six (I got hit by a car crossing the street that year, too, so I have to say, vulnerability I do know as a friend), was out in a rainstorm on a mountaintop in Colorado in the summer of ’73.  It came on quickly, and we were surveying in a remote area where there wasn’t even a road.  All we could do was crouch under a little hollow in a mountainside and wait.  By and by, a bolt of lightening and a thunder clap came simultaneously.  I saw the lighting hitting the ground about 100 feet away.  My arm hair was standing straight up.

The three of us on that survey crew hollered.  I think I yelled, “Whoa!”  Surely the most useless word I ever spoke, but I didn’t have time to compose any elegant thoughts.  As fast as it came, it was over.  And, Lord, we were glad to be alive, we were.  Exhilarating.

That’s what tornadoes are like—Jack the Ripper comes down the street and goes on by, and you are so grateful.  Missed it this time.

Reminds me, like the time I huddled in the rain, that life is very precious, never guaranteed, and worth treasuring every day. Electric lights, indoor plumbing and the delusion of endless electricity have fooled us.  We’re riders in the rain who still have to take cover when the siren sounds.

Since the weather Chicken Littlin’ is going on today, thought I’d post a couple of storm songs.  Bluegrass, country and folk have always written songs about duststorms, avalanches, hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and earthquakes.  Take a listen to two if you’re huddling down somewhere.  “Galveston Flood” by Tony Rice and “California Earthquake,” a Rodney Crowell song performed by the Seldom Scene.

This earth is where we live.  You have to respect it.  Like Clint Eastwood said, “Man’s got to know his limitations.”