Everyone Talks About the Weather
Technology is so powerful and ubiquitous in the modern world that I often get the (false) feeling that we, as in mankind, are in control of everything, bending the world to our will and controlling our environment. Of course, all it takes is a bit of severe weather to disabuse me of that fallacy. A snow storm with a loss of power, a long summer hike when you run out of water , a tornado, hurricane or flood in your vicinity and you are suddenly very, very aware how not in control you are.
My weather stories are all ones I'm just glad to have survived. In 1984 I was in Advanced Individual Training at Ft. Benning, Georgia (now Ft. Moore). I was learning mortar gunnery during a week long training exercise in bitterly cold weather. We were permitted to burn wood in 55-gallon drums to stay warm in the bivouac area. My first night, when I was awakened for guard duty, I hung my field jacket on a stick poking from the barrel to warm up while I laced my combat boots. Just seconds after doing that, my jacket burst into flames which I could not extinguish. I spent the next six days in the middle of winter trying not to die of hyperthermia with no coat and a psychotic drill sergeant who made me do pushups when I told him what happened. Were it not for a member of my platoon who sacrificed the liner of his jacket for me, I probably would have been a weather casualty.
in September of 1996, Hurricane Fran struck North Carolina with full fury. I live over 100 miles from the coast, but still in the part of the state considered the coastal plain. The thing about hurricanes is that you get plenty of notice. People who live right on the coast have the ability to evacuate and many do when things look threatening. Further inland, things get complicated. It's never quite clear exactly which way the storm will turn and in any event, where would we all go? So we just hunker down and hope for the best. In my region, the ground was already saturated from another hurricane we'd weathered just two weeks prior. When the winds made their way to us, many, many trees couldn't stand because their roots were already loosened. Aside from pure wind damage that caused missing roofs and fallen church steeples, trees took out the power grid with a vengeance. Schools were closed for the better part of two weeks and many people, including my family didn't get power back until after that. The first days after the storm were the worst. Gas pumps and ATMs didn't work and people feared going hungry.
In 2010 I traveled to the charming pre-colonial intra-coastal town of Edenton, NC for a three day bicycle tour. I camped in the town park right beside the Albemarle Sound. Although some people had RVs, most of us were in standard nylon tents, well protected from the rain that started to fall shortly after dark. I fell asleep to the sound of the rain and awoke a few hours later to the sound of the proverbial freight train that tornado victims describe. The wind blew in a way that I've never experienced for a short period, at most a minute or two and the subsided. I could hear people begin to shout and heard the questions begin. "What was that?" and "Are you OK?" A few hours later, at daylight, fallen trees and damaged buildings confirmed what we already knew, a freak tornado had visited us and, as you can tell from the picture above, some were lucky to have survived.
I've had other close encounters with multiple hurricanes and other tornados as well as a close call or two when hiking and camping in winter weather. All of that happened during the run up to the kind of wild swings in weather that climate change is causing these days. I may be in the autumn of life, but I'm afraid I may well see things more terrible than what I have already experienced.
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