Storm to the South

A little while ago I watching a storm cloud move across the sky south of me. I thought I could almost see a funnel cloud in the middle of it and imagined having to hide behind the counter in the cafe if it veered in this direction. The sky got darker, there were rumbles in the distance, and then it rained, but that was all. It’s been a rainy spring here but nothing very far out of the ordinary so far.

I like thunderstorms, but they’re usually milder here than the ones I remember from growing up in Florida. There, the rain assumed a tropical intensity, and lightning seemed to split the sky wide open. Some years ago, I was riding Amtrak through Iowa, and I clearly remember the thunderstorm that blew up as we were sitting down to dinner that night. With the flatness of the land and lack of buildings it was possible to see a long way, and we had an unobstructed view of the storm, which seemed notable for the intensity and frequency of the lightning but was after all probably nothing unusual for the northern plains.

I remember thinking that I hadn’t seen a storm like that since Florida. I don’t know if the spring storms are more intense over Iowa than they are over Kentucky or whether it’s the wide-angle views that make storms seem bigger. It was fun to watch the storm from the safety of the dining car, just as it’s always enjoyable to sit in a dry room, preferably in a cozy chair with a book in hand, and watch rain fall.

Not so fun to be caught out in a storm in a place like Texas or Oklahoma, though. It’s safe to say that a career as a storm chaser is out of the question for me, since my instinct is to go away from a storm, not toward it. A couple of years ago, I was on my way to visit a friend in the Dallas area, and just south of the city, I ran into the blackest, most ominous cloud I’ve ever seen, really downright Dante-esque if you can picture what a storm cloud rolling out of Inferno itself would look like. I was alarmed but noted that no one else was pulling off the road, so, like them, I just kept going until I drove out of it some twenty minutes later. There was no thunder with this storm, but driving into it was like running into a solid wall of water, and it stayed that way until I drove out from under the cloud, back into normal reality, twelve miles from my friend’s house.

Why is this mythic? Well, all natural phenomena are part of the fabric of myths and have their own gods and goddesses (we were just talking about Iris, the Greek goddess of rainbows, last week). In modern life, we talk about weather in scientific terms, and even if you watch The Weather Channel for hours at a time, as I’ve been known to do, you’ll hear hardly a mention of Thor, Aeolus, Zeus, or any other weather god from the old stories, though Old Man Winter may sometimes be mentioned in a whimsical way.

Some people like the idea of reverting to the old nature religions that tend to personify natural events and give them human qualities. My enjoyment of nature isn’t diminished by hearing it spoken of scientifically. The science of weather is complex and fascinating, and the forms and characteristics of the old myths play around the edges of my imagination when I watch weather programs or look at a storm through a window. Is there some reason a scientific approach has to clash with having an imaginative relationship to the world? Not that I can see. I can listen with interest while someone describes the dynamics of a tornado and still find that the archetypal twister in my mind is the one that carried Dorothy to Oz.

Ecclesiastes Says

You know what they say about the weather in Kentucky, right? "If you don't like it, wait five minutes." I've actually heard that other places lay claim to the same quip, and that I cannot attest to, but here, it's basically just a description of the facts--especially this time of year. Spring is very changeable.

Just the other day, I was covering up with sunscreen and turning on the air conditioning for a drive to Louisville on an absolutely gorgeous afternoon. The passing scene consisted of baby blue sky, greening fields, and redbuds, and the road was practically singing under the tires. Yesterday afternoon, while I was at home, intent on an online job application, a storm that looked to be God's answer to Job blew in and caught me almost unaware. While I was fixing dinner, all hell broke loose, if you picture hell as consisting of ominous rumbling, black skies, bilious light, and torrential rain. I was tending several pots on the stove when the noise caused me to look out, and it occurred to me that I might have to run for the closet, pasta or no pasta, if it got much worse. Things settled down later, but it turned cold overnight.

Today, I was back to my down jacket and gloves; there was a cold rain spitting intermittently, and spring seemed like a dream from another lifetime. I had the heat on in the car, and a turtleneck suddenly seemed like a great idea again. That's nothing, though. I have actually seen it snow in April (and once, long ago, even in May), so unless we get a blizzard, almost anything else is business as usual.

I should really be writing about the book I finished the other day, but I'm slightly exhausted by the effort I've put into job applications, so you'll have to excuse me for putting that off. Trying to discuss the ins and outs of Edith Wharton's love life seems a bit much under the circumstances, though the book was interesting and not what I was expecting. (I thought it was going to be like The Bostonians but it was more like The Paris Wife. OK by me.) I'm only too glad to be busy with applications, but what I would really welcome is results. It would be pretty ridiculous for a woman with several college degrees, numerous skills, and considerable personal charm to end up on public assistance, but that appears to be the direction I'm going in. Don't say I didn't warn you. (Yes, it is pretty weird.)

It looks like the weather is trending warm again starting tomorrow, and we should have a nice weekend. So much back and forth could be disconcerting for someone who isn't used to it, but most people around here are hip to the facts of Kentucky weather. You can go from one of those storybook days when it's almost impossible to wish yourself anywhere else to a lowering day of wet winds and chilling rain that makes you ask yourself "What am I thinking?" "Who ordered this?" in the mere blink of an eye. Oh, well, to everything there is a season--even unseasonable spring weather.

Galleons of Night

The best word for the weather we've been having is probably "unsettled." There's nothing strange about summer thunderstorms in Kentucky, but it has been unusually scorching for June. Over the last few days, huge clouds have blown in that looked like they might have sailed all the way up from the Gulf, and there have been rumbles of thunder and showers off and on. The brief afternoon storm we had on Tuesday didn't do much to break the heat; when I walked that evening, it was like pushing through gauze just to stroll down the sidewalk.

I heard yesterday that some of the storms in the Midwest were turning out to be severe, but it looked like most of that weather was passing to our north. Nevertheless, the sky grew very dark late this afternoon, and I unplugged several appliances while waiting to see if things would blow over. The heat index was supposed to be near 110 today, and I was hoping a good storm would push some of the hot air out. That did in fact happen, though the extreme change in temperature was rather jarring. When I went outside a while ago, the wind was very cool, though the hallway of this building was still humid. We had not one but two tornado watches, issued by two different bureaus, including one in Oklahoma (and they should know).

A few weeks ago, I was nearly caught in a storm when some black clouds that I thought were moving in a different direction turned out to be heading the same way I was. How nice! I hadn't gone very far when a decisive lightning flash put an end to my walk, and I had to scramble up a bank and onto the porch of a nearby office building to avoid a drenching. The worst part was brief, but I ended up having to head home anyway because the light but steady rain that followed showed no signs of letting up, and there were a few dark clouds still on the horizon.

Even though things looked clear when I went out earlier tonight, the wind was gusting, and I decided against the risk of getting caught out in another storm. It seemed more like the interlude between two tempestuous scenes of an opera involving Valkyrie and various agitated gods than a true clearing. Also, I had seen the word "derecho" in yesterday's forecast, a term that apparently denotes very strong winds. While I'm not sure I've ever been in one, it's one of those terms like "wind shear" or "scirocco" that doesn't bode well for a calm walk in nature. It seems a good idea to avoid going out in conditions with exotic-sounding names the mechanics of which you're unsure of.

I'm still hearing rumbles of thunder, though our tornado watches have expired. Although I like summer thunderstorms, the restless conditions over the last couple of days have seemed--except for the heat--more like autumn than June. I saw some high-flying clouds streaming over the moon the other night that were straight out of some adventure story involving Gothic suspense and derring-do, something by Daphne du Maurier, perhaps. Instead of the usual suburban scene, you half-expected to see a cloaked rider heading down the street at a gallop, with a ship moored at a dock at the end of the road and mysterious cargo being boarded. However, it was merely the same old street on a cloudy summer night.

Scene II: A Tempest

My brother, who lives in a sparsely populated state, once said he'd like the place even better if it had fewer people than it did. That may sound misanthropic, but I can sympathize. Where I live, it's nearly impossible to walk out the door without falling over someone or getting an earful of overheard chatter from people you don't even know. One expects occasional inconveniences such as these as part of the price of living in society, which is why rules of courtesy are necessary. Of course, that only works if people follow them, while my observation is that people seem not to have heard of them. Whose idea was it to do away with the Golden Rule?

People talk about feeling alone in a crowd, but in my experience that would be a rare thing these days; others are all too apt to enter my personal space, whether I'm drinking coffee, reading, walking through the park, or shopping for groceries. If someone isn't blocking my light in the cafe, he's talking too loudly on his cell phone, pulling out in front of me on the street, or failing to keep his dog under control so that I can walk in peace.

Were all of these people raised in a barn? Are they exhibitionists? Are they merely addled? Are they trying out for reality TV? Who told them being obnoxious is a good idea? Am I less forgiving than I used to be? (Any and all of these could possibly be true.)

This afternoon, I was sitting in a corner chair in the coffeehouse, minding my own business, as usual. I had been sitting outside, though it was a shade too cool for that, and I moved indoors when it looked like I could find a seat. I had, unfortunately, forgotten my earplugs, which is a real no-no if you plan to spend any time at all in Starbucks, but I was engrossed in my book, and things seemed to be going fairly well until other people started filling up the corner where I was sitting.

Now, don't get me wrong, I get it that Starbucks is a public place and that they're in business to keep the seats filled. But this particular Starbucks has a number of segregated seating areas, designed, I'm told, to create quiet places for people who want to read or study. I was sitting in a screened-off area near a large table where people usually congregate with books and laptops, but for some reason, everyone who entered that space was incapable of doing so without creating a scene, a not uncommon thing in Starbucks. People in line near the pastry case seemed intent on projecting their voices to the farthest corner; a large woman flounced in front of me, noisily taking the adjacent chair with a bit more ado than was really required; another patron walked back and forth in front of me several times, talking loudly on a cell and (quite unnecessarily) bumping my footrest; someone else camped out in my peripheral vision, apparently to read his text messages--not quite in my space but just close enough to be annoying.

Any one of these would have been irritating by itself; in the aggregate, it was just plain ridiculous. I got up and left.

Well, this story ends a little better than it begins. Rather than going home mad, I decided to take a short drive. I checked out the site of the future branch of the public library on Richmond Road and stopped to get gas. While I was doing that, I noticed some very dark clouds massing in the northwest: really Old Testament, Wrath of God thunderheads. I thought I could get home before they arrived, but since I was on a side of town I rarely visit any more, I drove around for a while, marveling at how little I remembered of the streets, though I used to be out there quite a bit.

Over here lived someone I interviewed when I worked at the newspaper; back there somewhere is a church I've been in, though I couldn't begin to find it now; my brother used to live on that street; I used to know someone who lived down that hill. It was almost as if I'd driven into a time warp, and I wandered around for a while, pleasantly lost. The leafy suburban streets looked both familiar and unfamiliar in the altered light of the approaching storm; it felt a bit like Van Gogh's Starry Night, a little town drowsing under a tumultuous sky. I seemed to be reclaiming something that belonged to me in the process of driving around.

When it started to rain, I was still in the wilds of suburbia. Lightning flashed, thunder rumbled, and small bits of hail hit my windshield. I decided I should be getting home, in case the weather got worse, so I started in that direction. I kept remembering people I'd known who lived in this house or that one--where are they now? The church steeples on Tates Creek Road stood up dramatically against the thunderheads, water was ponding by the side of the road, the wipers could barely keep up with the rain, and I . . . was feeling much better.

A spring thunderstorm doesn't sound calculated to be calming, but somehow it had that effect. Actually, I think it was just catharsis. Just when I was feeling like a thundercloud myself, here came a real one, washing everything clean. When I pulled out onto the road I live on, the changed light (aided, maybe, by my feeling of having revisited the past) made the street look subdued and elegant, like an old black and white photograph. I almost expected to see a Model T drive by.

It was still raining when I pulled into our parking lot, and I still had a little coffee left in my cup, so I sat for a few minutes and read some more of my book until the downpour eased a little. It's ironic that driving around in a thunderstorm could be more relaxing than sitting in a dry, well-lighted coffeehouse, but those are the facts. Sometimes a little solitude is better than a crowd.

After the Storm

Yesterday we had a thunderstorm that, despite its brevity, managed to wreak a maximum amount of havoc in a minimum amount of time. It seemed to happen in the space of only 15 minutes. I was in the coffeehouse when it hit and would nearly have missed it if I hadn't glanced up from my book and seen how extremely Stygian the view had gotten through the front window. It wasn't even 5:30, but it looked like night was falling. It had all happened in a hurry.

Since I was planning to go to a movie, I left the coffeehouse to go home for dinner. The rain had passed over, but I heard thunder off to the east. I moseyed through quiet residential streets, not realizing the storm had done any damage until I got to a stoplight, half a mile from home, which was not working. When I turned left, I found myself stuck in a line of molasses-slow stop-and-go traffic. When I got clear of that, the next stoplight I came to was also on the blink.

When I walked into my building, there were no lights in the hallway, and an alarm was sounding insistently. In my apartment, there was no electricity at all, though I did have phone service. I called to let someone know about the alarm, discovering from our apartment manager that he had no power either. I went back out into the hall, crazily lit by a white emergency light on the exit sign but otherwise dusky, to locate the source of the alarm, which turned out to be a wall panel next to the stairs. The building seemed unfamiliar, transformed into a slantwise, alternative version of itself by the shrilling alarm and altered lighting.

I thought to myself that it was a good thing I was planning to eat leftovers anyway; my pasta salad was still chilled inside the non-functioning refrigerator. In the back of my mind while I ate was a lingering memory of the great power outage of February 2003, which lasted on my street for almost a week and for much longer in other places. I knew this outage would likely be resolved within a few hours but thought it best not to count on the lights being on when I came back home. I was doubly glad I had plans because watching a Jimmy Stewart movie in the familiar environs of the Kentucky Theatre seemed much more appealing than trying to read a book by battery-operated candles with an alarm shrieking in the background.

I took my pink piggy LED flashlight, my umbrella, and my foldable rain cape with me when I left, feeling somewhat like a Girl Scout assailing the wilderness. There were no functioning traffic lights as far as I could tell. Things were moving surprisingly well, if slowly, though I don't think I'd have wanted to be a pedestrian trying to cross the street. I encountered an officer directing traffic at the biggest intersection, but otherwise, it was inch forward, keep your eye on the cars approaching from various directions, inch forward some more, and wait for your chance to go. The slightly chaotic air gave the scene an upside-down quality that might have been more carnival-like if it hadn't also been nerve-wracking.

It wasn't until I reached High Street downtown that I finally found a working stoplight, and then it was as if I had crossed the border from a topsy-turvy country teetering toward lawlessness back into the familiar world of everyday, just by passing through an intersection. The trip had seemed longer than it was, and I was sure I was late, but by the time I found a parking spot, I realized I was right on schedule. It was as if time had slowed down in the place with the power outage, but the clock came right again as soon as I passed out of it.

The crowd was a bit smaller than usual for a summer classics movie, so the rain had no doubt kept some people home, but everything else was as usual in the theatre as we waited for the movie to start. The organ played, the crowd sang "My Old Kentucky Home," the smell of popcorn hung in the air, the movie was introduced, and the lights went down. Up on the screen, Jimmy Stewart's smiling face appeared, and we settled in for an evening of Harvey, which in itself is a comic meditation on the intersection of different worlds--one everyday, and one uncanny. It was rather appropriate, under the circumstances.

My trip home from the movie was uneventful. By the time I got back, the stoplights were working, the power was on, the alarm had been silenced, and we were back to business as usual. It was, I guess, a little reminder of how we are all, always, at the mercy of nature, no matter how secure the trappings of civilized life seem. None of us are bigger than the most fleeting of summer storms. I guess it's good to be reminded of that from time to time.

Moonlighting as Gods

We're under a weather advisory right now, but so far, we've only had rain. That's probably a good thing, since there have been very severe storms in the Midwest today. I heard the storm warning alarm go off a while ago, but whatever the hazard was, it must have passed us by. Here, it's just a rainy Sunday.

I've always lived in places where tornadoes are a possibility. In Florida, hurricanes sometimes spawn them, and in Kentucky, we get tornadoes with severe thunderstorms. In high school, I spent one especially wild night listening to the radio by candlelight as a supercell storm raged outside. This storm was so immense that it affected multiple states throughout the Eastern U.S., dropping numerous tornadoes, one of which damaged our school. We had turned in English papers that week that were lost, our words literally carried away by the wind (now I always make a backup copy).

No wonder there were so many sky gods in the ancient religions; no wonder Thor's emblem is a hammer. I remember as a child seeing a commercial that featured an image of a cloud-wreathed god striking an anvil with a huge hammer. That was the image I carried in my mind of Thor or Vulcan, of how he created thunder and lightning every time he struck with his brawny arm. I could almost see him up there any time the clouds were especially black.

I suppose any time the origin of a force is invisible, the imagination is stirred like that. Right now, for instance, there's no thunder or wind, but there's plenty of noise above my head. For the last several years, I've had a succession of exceptionally noisy upstairs neighbors. If I hadn't seen them with my own eyes, I might have wondered if Thor or Vulcan had actually moved in above me! Sounds of heavy objects falling (Crack! Thud!), sounds of hammering and scraping, a commotion as of sizable objects being shoved or pushed -- it's all in a day's work around here.

It gives me sympathy for those poor denizens of the mythical realms who must have lived beneath the workshops of those sky gods (not having had any recourse to NIMBY petitioning, under the circumstances). I can imagine their dismay at all the thundering and yammering and unexplained but ominous bumps in the night originating from up top the mountain. They must have wondered what epic storm the gods were stirring up now every time they heard those low-pitched rumbles and ear-splitting cracks. I have wondered several times if someone was about to come through my ceiling and make an unwelcome deus ex machina appearance in my own living room. (You just really don't want a visit from Zeus; he's usually nothing but trouble.)

So if it is Hephaistos' workshop up there, what could they be building? Furniture? Ships? Trojan horses? All seem like odd hobbies for graduate students. When I was in graduate school, I barely had time to cook dinner, much less moonlight as a cabinetmaker. Maybe I have the wrong mythology, and it's really a latter-day Noah up there now, building an ark for a rainy day. The neighborhood is subject to drainage issues, after all.

The only problem I can see with that is he'll never get it out the window. He can't be a god, or he would have thought of that. I suspect it must be some human foolishness, which makes sense. I can't picture Thor using a dishwasher anyway.

Our storm watch has ended while I've been writing, and so, for now, has the noise upstairs.