Once again, it’s been awhile since I’ve posted here, so let’s touch base. And what’s a better way of doing so than with the Weekly Writing Prompts over at John’s The Sound of One Hand Typing site.
One of his suggestions this week is “do you like thunderstorms?” Great question and I find most people have fairly strong opinions about it. My answer is I love ’em… ** . With a couple of big asterisks.
In general, I do. I find them exciting, so much so I’ll usually stop what I’m doing if possible and go to watch out the window if there’s a humdinger of a storm outside – the belting rain, swaying trees, house-vibrating roars of thunder and the accompanying flashes of lightning. Fascinating, exhilarating. God’s fireworks, outdoing what man does, even on the 4th of July.
I grew up in southern Canada, where our summers are comparatively brief, but we saw our share of good storms annually, quite often in spring and fall. It was one of the main reasons I think I got to be so fascinated with weather and forecasting as a kid. I guess I always was a bit curious as to what the so many different kinds of clouds were and found it interesting it could be really sweaty one day and chilly the very next. I wondered why. But it was those sudden, brief intense storms that occasionally blew in that made me take to the weather books. My family spent a few summer vacations in Florida and there, you could almost count on a big storm every day around dinnertime. It was exciting and cooled the place off after a sweltering day. I used to love seeing them out over the Gulf as they moved off in the evening, lightning illuminating the otherwise invisible towering thunderclouds.
I grew to understand weather maps and radars, and kept weather records for years. Tornadoes, although obviously terrible in what they could do, fascinated me most – so unpredictable, so powerful. Things like how can a house be flattened, yet the one beside it be intact, how could a stick get blown straight through a large tree, and so on amazed me and spurred me on to read more, watch more science shows. I’ve seen a few twisters in my day now – one a tiny little rain-wrapped one that spun by no more than a football field away from my apartment. Stood outside the back doors and watched the storm and noticed the weird tight spin in the rain; didn’t really know for sure it was one until afterwards when I walked around the neighborhood and saw the clear path it took, shingles ripped off roofs, large branches torn off, but only for that straight line maybe 20 yards wide. Fascinating.
I enjoyed the show Storm Chasers. It followed a trio of teams of guys (with the exception of one girlfriend who sometimes tagged along, it was all youngish males, adrenalin junkies basically) trying to guess where severe storms would break out on a given day and barrel along the highways and byways to find them. One team mostly wanted stock photos to sell and video clips for TV news; another was working on an I-max film and the third one were more scientific and tried to drop probes to collect data from storms going over them. Even though I figured much of the personality conflict between the dudes was staged for the camera, the storms they observed and ran into though made it a “must see” for me for a couple of years. That’s when I came to my first asterisk about storms – I love them… when I’m safely inside. I hate being caught outside when lightning starts flashing around me and also learned that they aren’t to be trifled with on the road.
Watching Storm Chasers, and having a weather channel on TV at home, some years ago, I felt inclined to try storm chasing myself. So, one hot day off, a severe storm was trucking in at a good clip towards my area and it became “tornado warned”. I looked out the window and could see ominous, dark-based clouds towering to the west; watched the radar on TV and could see how it was developing. I could tell approximately what it’s path would be and decided to load up some camera gear into my old, rather rickety car and try to see it up close. This was, I must add, before smart phones. The radar was on TV at home, not on a device I had with me in the car. I thus played it by ear… or eyes actually.
As it happened, I drove directly into the storm. As tornadoes typically develop near the trailing edge of large storms, the much, much smarter thing to do is skirt around the southern edge of the storm and come up behind it. But I found myself in the middle of this supercell on rural roads I wasn’t overly familiar with. Ones with big ditches! The rain got harder and harder, and eventually outdid my windshield wipers capacity to clear it, then, surprise, surprise, hail started pounding and making the road slippery and appear almost snowy. I had no choice but to try and pull over, without ditching it, stop, put on my four-way flashers and hope for the best.
I was lucky, nothing happened, and after maybe five minutes, the rain eased up and hail stopped and I carried on. Eventually, when it had passed by, I did indeed see two funnel clouds in the distance; whether they touched down or not I couldn’t tell because of hills between them and me. I got a couple of so-so photos which I ended up losing anyhow. And I got a good lesson, that storm-chasing was for professionals, with very sturdy vehicles and good radar capabilities!
So inside, yay, outside, nay. The other asterisk – I like ’em when I’m awake. The older I get the less I can sleep through thunder or even the flashes of lightning, which in the wee hours travel for miles further than the sound does. I like storms, but I like getting a good night’s sleep even better as I speed through my 50s!
By the way, the reason I’ve not been here so much lately is nothing bad. I’ve begun writing fiction again and am working on a series of short stories about an ordinary town that, like all ordinary places, isn’t quite so ordinary when you dig into it! Most of my spare “writing” hours, when not doing my music blog (A Sound Day) have been given over to that project… of which I’ll tell you more soon.
Everydave Life 