Weather Whining

 

It's been snowing this week and I'm already tired of scraping off my car and driving carefully over potential car accidents in the guise of frozen slush.  My daughter and I spent an hour digging out the driveway and her car so we could get it unstuck from the side of the road.  As the guys in pickup trucks left for work and easily cleared the foot or so in the street, my daughter's more low-slung car got stuck three times just getting out of the driveway.  Anyone in the southern United States want to take in a northerner sick of the snow?  I do laundry and dishes and make mediocre and repetitive dinners?  

Truely, between the heat and humidity in the summer and the colossal bugs that also like warmer weather, I couldn't make it in the South.  My family went to San Antonio to visit relatives and it was 90 degrees with 90% humidity.  We thought we were going to die.  And we were living in Arizona at the time.  It's a dry heat. Yeah, like getting into your car when it's 110 and seeing the insulation has melted out below the dashboard in the passenger side is o.k. because, "It's a dry heat."  My parents were stationed in Texas and in Hawaii, both memorable for the humidity and the size of the insects.  I understand Western Canada has the same thing in the summer.  And you get to freeze in the winter, so there's no getting away from it.

Each section of the United States has ample reasons for Weather Whining.  When the Southern U.S. received an unprecedented amount of snow and cold over last winter, the Northern U.S. teased them about declaring an emergency just because of a little snow.  "We have 10 inches and it doesn't slow us down!"  It's like a "who has the biggest snow dick" contest.  They must have pickup trucks.  What the South doesn't have, and doesn't need to have, are snow-plows, below-zero grade outerwear and methods to take care of 10 inches of snow and ice.  It just isn't cost effective.  We don't have storm cellars here, but we do have snow plows.  But if I lived in Tennessee or Oklahoma and had to choose one, I'd definitely go for the storm cellar.  You'd think Kansas would have the most tornadoes, but you'd be wrong.  I think it's the whole Wizard of Oz thing.  I looked it up and Texas has the most tornadoes in the U.S. followed by Kansas, Oklahoma, Florida and Nebraska.  A list from 2020 has Mississippi first, then Texas.  

It seems unfair that Nebraska has the potential for both tornadoes and blizzards.  I read (and can recommend) a book about the Children's Blizzard of 1888 by David Laskin.  A unique and devastating weather phenomenon, like a snow storm version of "The perfect storm", this blizzard worked it's way south from North and South Dakota and Minnesota to Nebraska, Iowa and Kansas.  It was particularly devastating for the people in Nebraska because the brunt of the storm hit in the afternoon when the children were dismissed from school.  In three minutes the temperature dropped 18 degrees. Lost in the blizzard with zero visibility they were subjected to an overnight wind chill of 40 below zero.

My experience with tornadoes comes from the Laura Ingalls Wilder book, These Happy Golden Years, set in South Dakota.  The two things I remember are her description of the sky turning green and how random and vicious the tornado was, touching down in one location and stripping the very clothes off the people caught in the storm and leaving other things untouched.  Although the people are driving in cars rather than in a horse drawn buggy, the tornados were as eternal and mindless last year as they were in 1884.  Laura's blizzard four years before this, and 8 years before the Children's Blizzard, had a similar randomness.  One person wandering in the whiteout of the blizzard froze to death in his own farmyard.  The students at Laura's school walked together in a line from their schoolhouse, hardly able to see each other, to get to their homes in town.  A chance contact of one of the children in line bumping into the corner of the last building at the other end of town before the prairie opened up saved them from the blizzard swallowed them whole.

There have been floods this year as well.  Tennessee was hit very hard after heavy rains and 28 people were killed in the flood that followed.  Floods in New York and New Jersey as well as Alabama were also from flash flooding due to record rainfall.  Other floods are caused by hurricanes or other intense storms.  Floods are one of the major causes of death, an average of 85 people per year in the United States.  The Johnstown flood in 1889 was caused by a combination of very heavy rain and the failure of the South Fork Dam.  There is a story in my own family of relatives in Texas, two boys who waited out their flood by climbing a tree and staying there for several days.

Because I am familiar with or even know people in the various states of America, I listen more intently and grieve more intensely about these than in other countries.  Almost 200 people in Germany died in a flood just a month before the flood in Tennessee.  It always annoyed me when the news reports a disaster outside the United States and says, "130 people died in the plane crash, 4 were Americans" as if we only care about deaths if they are American deaths.  Well, here I am worrying about the people in Tennessee when Germany was hit harder than that and I hadn't even heard about it.  Are we all so egocentric or is it just me?  I don't think we as humans mean to be ignorant of people and places outside ourselves.  But in an emergency, the closer we are to the eye of the storm, as it were, the more it joggs us out of our complacency.  If my child is sick, if my neighbor's child is sick, if a mother across the world's child is sick, they are all equally important.  But to each mother, the concern centers on the child that is theirs.  It doesn't dilute my concern if it spreads to other people, other states and other countries.  But, I can only feel so much across space and time before I can't bear it and I retreat back to my own.  When we lived in Los Angeles, my mom would call and ask if we were o.k. because she was worried about the earthquake.  "Earthquake? What earthquake?" I would answer.  Somewhere in the area, but not my area, evidently.

Blizzards, tornadoes and floods are as impersonal as a mountain or the ocean.  They just are and they don't care about us one way or the other.  It's fine to help people prepare and give them ways to obviate the risk, such as not driving into a flooded street just because the water doesn't look all that deep.  Or shelter in your basement or storm cellar during a tornado.  It's not fine to "Monday morning quarterback" someone else's disaster.  "Well they should have..." "I wouldn't have..."  Yeah, whatever.  You don't know unless you experience it yourself.  I myself after years of earthquake training at work, duck and cover, stood by my sink directly in front of my kitchen window during an earthquake, wondering what was happening for several seconds before I froze in fear, gripping onto the sink until it was over.  Not so good in an emergency, am I?

People do what they can do.  They make the decisions they make and sometimes die from a bad choice.  But sometimes they die even if they do everything perfectly.  Or they live despite themselves.  The funnel cloud touches down on your house and not the house next to yours.  You don't prepare for snow because it never snows where you live.  And then it does.  People may not be prepared because they never needed to be.  Until their own "perfect storm" happens and catches them unaware.

Two weeks later and the snow has all melted and our high is approaching 50 degrees Fahrenheit.  And yet.  A town in Western Australia also had 50 degrees just two days ago.  50.7 to be exact, except they measure in Celsius and converted back to Fahrenheit, it was a record 123 degrees.  I wonder if the United States sticks with Fahrenheit, because hot weather in Celsius just doesn't sound all that hot.  No, I'm not accepting comments for how dumb that last sentence is.  Give me an inch and I'll take a ... kilometer!