Infernos and whirlwinds - Part Two; Wind

How absitively posolutely appropriate!  Today I planned to discuss spinning entities.  So while I was sleeping someone set my personal brain blender on frappé just so I'd be in the right frame of mind.  I may have to delay this posting because I'm having a really difficult time remaining vertical (even sitting) at the moment.  No bad weather or headaches; just an awful lot of inanimate objects doing way too much moving.


Now it's the next day.  I'm still more dizzy than normal (that's just so surreal, being normally dizzy that is), but more like mix or blend rather than frappé.  So we can get back on topic, at least until I wander off in some other direction as it seems I always do.  I often dream about tornadoes.  They appear similar to the one in the Wizard of Oz, but there are always multiple funnels.  In this case, I hope my dreams have absolutely nothing to do with reality.


Rain in Florida is common, but it usually passes quickly and is different than rain anywhere else I have lived.  I can remember playing in the rain often, so there must not have been a lot of thunder and lightning.  I also remember it raining while the sun was shining, and standing on one side of the street perfectly dry while watching it pour down on the other side of the street.  Of course, tropical storms and hurricanes are not like a typical Florida rain, though they also are common in Florida.  When we lived in Florida, the most feared weather event was a hurricane.  Hurricanes can spawn tornadoes.  Basically, they are the exact same weather event except for their size.  Hurricanes are huge and usually many miles in diameter (typically 300 miles wide).  A tornado is typically 250' in diameter, but some have been known to grow as large as a mile across.  They both have extremely strong winds rotating around a center "eye".  Hurricane winds are from 74 to more than 155 mph over a fairly large area; tornado winds range from 73 to over 300 mph in an extremely compact sphere.  The eye of both a tornado and a hurricane is the area where the barometric pressure has dropped to it's lowest point (obviously with low pressure causing me to have whopping headaches, this is just one more reason I need to stay away from hurricanes and tornadoes).  I can recall one hurricane in Miami when we went outside to play during the eye of the storm, but it didn't last long and the backside of the hurricane was far more violent than the front.  I only remember one tornado in Florida.  It passed so close to our home we could hear that lonesome whistle blow (it really does sound like a freight train roaring down the tracks, but without the whistle), but no one we knew suffered any damage.


Living in New Jersey was not particularly worrisome as far as weather goes.  Yes, it snows, but seldom does it snow enough to call it a blizzard.  It's cold and wet and gray, but not really much of a disaster.  There have been tornadoes and floods and I understand there have been rare hurricanes and earthquakes in New Jersey, but nothing spectacular like that happened when I lived there.  We did have problems with a flooded basement more often than we would have liked.  Once we had to evacuate the house because the water in the basement almost reached the electrical box, but that isn't the kind of thing that gives me nightmares.


Maryland was pretty much like New Jersey -- usually less snow, but no really disastrous type weather.  I know they got clobbered by Hurricane Agnes, but that was in 1972, and they still talk about it like it was last week, because nothing even close has happened since. 


Norfolk offered hurricanes and tornadoes (and water spouts), but I only recall one of each in the time I was there.  The hurricane was mild (as far as hurricanes go) and the tornado wasn't near my home.  Water spouts are tornadoes that are over water.  They can come ashore but they are typically not nearly as strong as a tornado and dissipate rapidly once over land.


New Hampshire offers up some unpleasant surprises in the winter, but rarely has spinning winds of any type.  Of course, those gales in some of those blizzards can be pretty rough.  When the temperature is -30º F and the wind is gusting to 25 mph, it can do some serious damage to skin tissue and freeze your lungs.


However, it was while living in New England that I came closest to being blown away by a tornado/water spout (since it's journey took it over land and water quite a few times).  My ex-husband's parents had a cabin on an island in Lake Richardson in Maine (right next to Mooselookmeguntic Lake; sorry but I love that name).  The cabin was built slightly lower than the uppermost point on the island, so when you arrived by boat, you went up from the dock, crested the rise and started down the other side slightly to get to the cabin.  The only thing higher than the highest point of land was the smokestack from the wood burning stove in the cabin (of course there were trees that were much taller).  This turned out to be a really fortunate placement.  Steve (my ex) and I were there with another couple for a weekend.  It was a clouded gray day, but we took the boat out anyway.  The female part of the couple with us was about 7½ months pregnant.  After cruising around the lake for awhile, it started to get really choppy and our friend was extremely uncomfortable with all the bouncing so we turned to go back.  Before we got back to the dock, the weather turned really bad and the boat was being tossed about so severely, I was worried we were going to have to deliver the baby right there.  But, we made it to the dock about the time the rain started coming in torrents.  We raced up the hill and dashed inside the cabin.  I had gone into the bedroom in search of dry clothes when I heard the train.  I froze and just stood there staring out the window.  The others were all New Englanders and had never heard a tornado before but I was entirely too frightened to warn them.  Almost immediately I saw all the trees start to cascade like dominoes alongside the cabin.  The cabin shook, and soot and ash came down through the wood stove, but the building itself was not hit.  The tornado had followed the same path up the back of the island from the boat dock that we had (and luckily missed the boat but not the dock).  When it crested the top of the hill, fortunately it kept going upward.  The only part of the cabin that was damaged was the chimney for the wood stove.  It was blown completely off the roof.  The tornado jumped over the house and the front side of the island and landed in the lake in front of the cabin.  It kept moving across the water until it hit land on the other side and then made a path up through the trees as it headed off toward the east.  All the trees in a nearly perfect path on the back side of the island were now laying down, broken off or completely uprooted.  The outhouse, which was no more than 30' from the cabin, was no longer accessible because there were dozens of trees down between the cabin and the outhouse.  None of us were injured, but all of us were sickly pale and incredibly shaken.  As soon as the weather calmed some, we took our friends back to the mainland and they went home, choosing not to spend the night on the island.  We called Steve's folks and told them what had happened.  They were astounded because as far as anyone knew there had never been tornadoes in Maine.  But Steve and I went back and spent the night at the cabin.  The next day his folks came up and we started cleanup and repairs.  We took the boat out and went around the lake to see all the damage.  I have pictures but I don't look at them often because to be perfectly honest every time I look at them it scares the living daylights out of me all over again.


Georgia, like North Carolina, is notorious for spring tornadoes.  When I lived there in the early 1970's, I can remember driving to work one stormy morning.  The world had a greenish tinge to it. The clouds were dark and swirling and the rain was sheeting.  As I was driving on Interstate 20 headed east (I lived in Austell on the west side of Atlanta) toward Fulton Industrial Boulevard (where I worked), I just happened to look up at the clouds.  There, pirouetting overhead, was the eye of a tornado.  It was quite a bit above the ground, but I was still able to look right up through the center of it.  I almost wrecked my car.  Thank God it stayed up there, but I just couldn't shake the fear it was going to dip down and pick me and my car up like Dorothy's house.


Now I live in North Carolina.  We're not actually in tornado alley since we are east of the Appalachian Mountains, but it is pretty much guaranteed there will be tornadoes in the spring  (and sometimes summer and early fall too).  We have a NOAA weather radio and it goes off regularly with alerts for severe weather.  Tornadoes in North Carolina are not like the ones in Kansas, for instance.  The land here is not flat, and not much of it is open field or plains.  You can't see a tornado coming from miles away.  As a matter of fact, you pretty much can't see it until it taps you on the shoulder, and by then it is too late.  That's why I have the radio -- I don't like those kinda surprises.  I have stood on our deck and looked up through the eye of a tornado, just as I did while driving in Atlanta, but we have been fortunate and so far not actually been hit.  Many of our friends have had tornado damage in the last few years.  Usually, the damage is caused by broken or uprooted trees falling on houses and cars, but it is not abnormal for the tornado to actually strike and destroy buildings in our area of the country.


I love North Carolina, but every time we have tornado watches and warnings my blood pressure rises, my heart rate increases, and I start making plans to move to the tropics.  Sure they have hurricanes, but I'll take a hurricane over a tornado any day.  I'm not stupid enough to sit still and let a hurricane come get me, but tornadoes don't send calling cards, they just show up unannounced and uninvited and take whatever they please. Truly scary anomalies.