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Seeing pictures of the devastating impact of extreme weather and tornadoes in the Mid-West, someone in a hectoring mood asked why on earth did we leave L.A. and move to Tornado Alley. We didn't, I replied. Tornado Alley moved to us. All we wanted to do was to escape L.A.'s four seasons: Earthquakes, Fire, Flood, and Riots. Carbondale, Illinois hasn't had an authenticated tornado in over 60 years. Lots of rolling hills. Tornados hate hills. They love the flats.
Still, as I write this, we've been tuned to TV, radio, and the internet for days now. Actually weeks, if you count media coverage of tornadoes ripping through Alabama, Mississippi and Tennessee, St. Louis, Joplin Missouri, Texas, and Oklahoma. These airborne bully boys have left in their wake devastating images, reminiscent of the firebombed cities of Berlin and Dresden at the end of WWII. And of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, Japan. Leveled is leveled.
Now it looks like it might be our turn, what with record numbers of tornado eruptions and extreme rain and wind storms, fed by the Gulf Stream and El Niñas. Climate change? Sure feels like it.
Meteorologists have already advised the quad-state area (Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Illinois) to "go to safe rooms in your homes if the warning sirens start." We can't hear the sirens today; depending on conditions, oftentimes we're just out of range. Worse, it's Spring, so the leaf-heavy trees muffle distant sounds more so than in the dead of winter.
So we stay in constant media contact with weather reports and bulletins--and we keep an eye on the skies and watch for suspicious, low-hanging, rotating cloud patterns out of our windows. And we keep ears cocked for the sounds of distant thunder.
Already, strings of tornados and thunder storms with 50-60 mph winds have largely, but not entirely, passed us by. It's left us nervous and uneasy. Warnings and watches come and go by the hour. NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) radio alerts go off at all hours, day and night. Uninterrupted sleep? Fuggedaboutit. Residual fatigue -- like low level anxiety -- stunts alertness and dulls my sense of "can do."
We're on a severe storm and tornado watch for southern Illinois right now and for the next 5 hours. Weather maps show a series of storms from Texas right up to Tennessee...and moving our way. We've seen the damage they've done and are still doing in Oklahoma, on their way north. Talk about trails of tears.
I hear threats of extremely high winds as I type this. My first reaction is "oh, the poor trees. The poor plants. The poor vegetables. My poor wife, Rachel." She has worked so hard to create this beautiful garden and mini orchard. The winds and hail will strafe and decimate; and the young fruiting trees will never reach maturity. If we get a tornado, our garden will be splinters of striplings."
I pause and feel a morbid chill. The last time I fretted about a tree, a lemon tree, during a storm, I ended up losing my house in the Hollywood Hills to flooding. Ironically, 35 years on, the lemon tree still stands. Portent? I hope not.
And, I mentally hug myself; really. Lose two houses, each in different parts of the country. How could that happen to me?
(Side swipe. I intended to tape the finale episode of Oprah's show for a later blog post [I was on her show]. But the local CBS affiliate just announced it's going 24-hour storm coverage, bumping Oprah. Well, Charlie Rose is covering Oprah's swan song and impact tonight. I'll catch that.)
I volley back and forth from the TV upstairs to our family computer center in the walk-out basement, to grapple with three Internet weather sites --The Weather Channel, Weather Underground and Weather Bug -- trying to find an animated map from which to gauge the trajectory of storm cells coming at us through the neighboring states. I try to estimate the time of the multiple storm systems slamming into Illinois' Jackson County and the city of Carbondale.
But I'm frustrated. They keep revising map functions and formats and nothing is where it once was; or works like it once worked. My wife hears my cursing and rolls her desk chair over to me. She gently elbows me aside, finds the animation buttons on each site, clicks on the maps then wordlessly walks away.
Rachel never gloats. I hate that about her. And that she finds everything I misplace. Or can't discern. I call her The F#*^ing Ferret! Would you believe, lovingly? I'm not sure I do either. Is there such a thing as a "too healthy ego?"
A few nervous minutes later I return to the television. Live, continuous coverage of storm tracks, damage reports, developing cells, unconnected to larger weather systems following one another into communities, like marauding bands of adolescents intent on terrorizing, bullying and raping strangers during a 1980s Central Park ritual wilding. I hear the rumbling of thunder.
I'm getting a few stirrings of mal de media, pardon my French, a form of media illness I discussed in an earlier blog posting. It comes from spending so much time feeding on scary, menacing, horrific, depressing news and visuals and commentary that a sourness sets in and you feel anxiety beginning to get the upper hand. The multi-colored weather maps, ranging from mild baby blue to deep magenta, screaming the degree of intensity, energy and destructive danger, make me gulp.
Watching the tracking of these patterns, shapes and colors of cells is interesting and mildly entertaining when it's describing events on the ground in other counties or states. But when it's a line of storms coming your way in a diminishing countdown of time and mileage, it's a teeth-grinding, jaw-clenching stasis of TV-staring.
Time counts. You don't want storms to dawdle, gather energy. You want them to pass through like a NASCAR pack leader. A tarrying storm of energy, wind and rain is nothing but an invitation to worse life-devastating destruction.
"Tornado watch #347" on NOAA radio blaringly intrudes: "The National Weather service in Paducah has issued a tornado warning..." A few minutes later another storm, watch is announced. I'm caught in a pummeling tag team match of anxiety and fear. I want to slam off the radio...but I fear missing vital information, imminent warnings.
Then there's this total bizarro...thing!: Sequences of dire storm warnings are broken up by 7-day forecasts which are all sweetness, sunny and something else starting with an "s." Today you may die. "But tomorrow through Saturday it will be mostly sunny with only a 20% chance of precipitation, with 5-10 mph southwesterly winds."
My fraying composure begins to crack. I feel postal coming on and scream to my wife, "Are they nuts? Is this Twilight Zone Comedy Central?!!" She rolls her eyes, reaches over, turns off NOAA and goes upstairs to check on what may be our last meal for a while if the electricity goes as the tornado comes. We'll be huddled in the safe room with a cat (Waif), a dog (Satie).
I decompress. Truth be known, I turn off TVs and cancel newspaper subscriptions when my blood pressure reliably rises. My coping motto: If you can't stand 'em. terminate 'em.
"It's not their fault," I yell up to her. "Whose?" she yells down. "The computerized, Stephen-Hawking voices on NOAA," I say. "It's all computerized, all programmed, even the compassionless, disengaged, insensitive, Paducah-based male and female anchor voices of NOAA. They know not what they do." "They do know not," she yells down.
Satie suffers torment and indignities throughout the vigil because I won't take her out to relive herself if there is thunder and lightening and heavy winds. When lulls pop up I quickly leash her, roll outside but give her only a few minutes to satisfy her hard-wired sniffing urges before beginning my mantra, "poop or pee, hurry it up. I won't die for your desire to dawdle until you find just the right spot." This works...sometimes.
We watch this marvelous weatherman on ABC affiliate, WSIL, the Chief Meteorologist, Jim Rasor. Greater Carbondale is lucky to have him. We're a small media market. . He's good, he's calming, he explains. And he's personable, knowledgeable and tech-savvy enough to be the weather guy in any major media market in the country.
"It will be over us in an hour, around 6 PM," Rasor divines, as he gazes at the storm trajectory on the map with a computer program that also provides time and mileage estimates. We have an hour to eat before hell starts. Thirty minutes later, as I am glued to my computer, composing for this blog, my wife brings down a jug of wine, a garlic pasta dish and some "house" spinach salad. And cloth napkins. Class in the face of danger.
We begin to eat at our desks. Then as one, we both stop! And listen! Like a blown lightbulb, the sky suddenly darkens. The winds accelerate, and the rain begins its rampage, like in the classic Lena Horne song number from the film Stormy Weather.
We pull back from the glass doors, to the far end of the room, to keep us close to the poured concrete, windowless, half-underground safe room. We watch the storm unfold and await the 2-inch hail, the 70 mph wind, the deadly funnels predicted. The NOAA signal starts to break-up and the lights flicker. " It's here," our eyes speak. The rain washes in sheets against the door windows, pushing the double doors, but not quite forcing them open.
Lightning and thunder drown the senses.
Trees shake and branches tear.
We wait for the sound of an onrushing train.
Then suddenly...nothing! Silence.
We wait, breath held. Untrusting. A false calm? Nature's sordid trick?
Still nothing.
As we stare into the near-darkness, the sky slowly lightens, the sun emerges as the clouds literally part like some celestial Red Sea. Frogs in the pond start their croaking chatter and a lone red cardinal hops on the patio, searching for seed.
It's over. We high-five and slowly open the door and peek outside. Carbondale still hasn't had a tornado touch down in over 50 years. Satie senses an opening, stares up at me, stretches, and I go for the leash.
