STORM CHASERS
Growing up, the biggest weather event we ever experienced was a snow day. Now we are doing well if we manage to go a few weeks without a named storm. Back then, we got our weather intel from guys in front of static wall maps or 10 characters of text in the upper right-hand corner of the home-delivered newspaper. These days it is hard to make any plans without checking the hourly forecasts, weather radars and interactive maps. Fire? Earthquake? Flood? Extreme heat? "Polar Vortex”? Hurricane? Cyclone? Tornado? Lava? Don’t worry: “There’s an APP for That”! I have used them all, including LAVA, in the last year alone. Even with natural disasters becoming a constant, global norm, our family seems unusually prone to finding itself in one epicentre or another. I am, ironically - or appropriately - writing this story while heading into the path of the Named-Hurricane-of-the-Week. The objective of this trip is to drive (and worse still, ferry) H home from the East Coast. We similarly had to fight our way through hurricane weather a year ago when we dropped her off. I am starting to wonder if I am an inadvertent storm chaser.
I used to be an intentional storm chaser. This happens when your partner is a windsurfer.[1] In our windsurfing era, M was a weather jinx in the opposite way that we seem to be today. After spending 30 minutes checking local wind reports and chat groups; 30 minutes loading 10,000 lbs of gear into and on top of our compact sedan; 30 minutes driving to the "gnarliest” stretch of waterfront; 30 minutes (but felt like 30 hours) of shore talk (“Yo Dude, I’m thinkin’ maybe a Four-Oh or maybe a Three-Eight or maybe a Four-Two” [2]); followed by 30 minutes rigging whatever set up was dictated by all the weighty deliberation; M would sail out to the middle of a Great Lake or ocean… only for the wind to completely die out. So, to help guarantee wind success, we would take “skunk-proof” vacations in the windiest places we could afford to get to.
Once, we undertook a 20-hour journey, including 8 hours of ferry rides, to the Madeleine Islands. Perhaps you have heard of 'Les Îles-de-la-Madeleine', with their famous sandcastle competitions and world class lobster, their colourful clapboard cottages and artisanal wares. Sounds idyllic, doesn't it? It did to me when M conned me into going…during the height of hurricane season. We were the only people (dumb enough to be) on the island. The houses were all battened down. The lobster shacks were long closed. The ocean was a tempest. The only place we could set up our tent was in the shelter of the campground bathroom stalls (an ensuite!). M was “stoked” because an “epic Nor’easter” was “raging/honking/cranking/howling". I, meanwhile, spent the week on Baywatch duty (as though I could do anything if he got sucked out to sea) and getting sand blasted. M made it up to me on the drive home with a dinner at Red Lobster, where, encased in full body bibs, we ate frozen lobster from the previous season.
Maybe our storm chasing was tempting fate, because at some point along the way the script got flipped and the storms started to chase us. My first weather based experiential tourism was on a girls’ trip to NYC in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy caught us totally unprepared. It was a glorious day. The sun was shining. There wasn’t a hair of wind. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky. The streets were hopping, the tourists were shopping.[3] We had no notion there was a hurricane bearing down on us until we encountered, at 11:30, a handwritten note written on scrap paper on the front door of Starbucks that read:
“Closing at 12:00 due City-wide shutdown”.
Me: “Wait, WHAT?!?”
This seemed like a good time to pay for some emergency cell service coverage. Sure enough, it’s all over the news - NYC was in an official state of emergency. Every flight and train was cancelled, and all the Manhattan bridges would be closing in an hour. Suddenly, “Sex and the City” turns into "Escape from NY”, but with 8 moms toting Athletica bags instead of Snake Plissken and his MAC-10 (but otherwise same-same). We sprint (or, in my case, jog-a-walk) to our hotel on the upper west side. After gathering our give/take 100 bags we join the throng at Hertz, where M (our hero from afar) has secured us an ARMADA. Only problem is that New Yorkers only rent ARMADAs in the winter, so it takes many, many minutes to extricate it from the elevator access parking garage. The clock in the waiting room is ticking like a bomb counting down. Like “24 Hours” before an ad break. When the truck finally arrives, we do a 10x speed version of Car Tetris, jamming in eight women and all the luggage one would expect for a NYC girls’ weekend.[5] One by one, everyone clambers aboard, until it is just me and one empty seat…the drivers. Never in this screen play did I envision myself as a semi driver in downtown NYC during a crisis. I am not sure I can even reach the pedals. But Sandy isn’t waiting for us to draw straws, so apparently, I am now joining the cast of “Fast and Furious”.
You might think that this adventure made me more wary of weather events. You would be wrong. In the end it was anticlimactic. After we laid patch pulling out of the Hertz, we drove up a weirdly quiet Riverside Drive, crossed George Washington Bridge…and then straight all the way to Canada. Clear skies the whole way. But also, it’s hard to feel truly threatened by “Sandy”. “Sandy” is the name of my dog sitter. I need a name that reflects the severity of the situation. Take this month’s string of hurricanes: Alberto is hair mousse, Beryl is my friend JT’s mom, Chris is the guy on your Ultimate team, Debby sounds like a teenaged babysitter, Ernesto is M’s barber. A branding note to whoever has naming privileges – you need be more exclamatory. EXCLAMATORY!!!! “Ian" isn’t going to slam Sanibel to the mat. These storms need 1980s era WWE name like “The Undertaker”. “Dorian” isn’t going to flatten Treasure Cay you need a Monster Truck name like “Grave Digger”. If you want me hunker down, let alone evacuate, it’ll take more than “Francine” to get me in gear.
To be fair, history would suggest this is a “me” issue. Once, when the fire alarm went off in our apartment, M & I not only did not vacate the building, M proceeded to take his morning shower while I lulled about in bed reading my book.[4] Given that the fire escape was directly outside the bedroom window, and M was immersed in water, this felt like a viable plan. Until an entire team of firemen came storming into the room. The scathing scorn-eye I received for our blatant disregard for safety is seared in my memory (though mostly because, true to form, they were super cute). Despite this, and even though that same apartment building burnt down in a fiery inferno a short time later, I still routinely ignored warnings. I blame this in part on the 'Great Ice Storm of 1998'. Admittedly a devastating weather event, but twenty-five years later our city remains in a constant state of repeat-panic, cancelling buses and sending out alerts if there is even the slightest whiff of freezing rain. This Boy Who Cried “Sleet” approach has the contrary effect of encouraging me ignore weather forecasts, rather than heed them.
If 2018 is any indication, this also applies to the newly developed smart phone alarms. In the past handful of years, our area has become a tornado hotspot. The twenty years before that? Zero funnel cakes in the sky. We don't have bunkers located a theatrically far sprint from our farmhouses. We don't know what actions to take (“find shelter in a ditch”, apparently). Even so, most people wouldn’t be doing what I was doing in the middle of a tornado “Outbreak”: demolishing an outhouse located under large, old Oak trees.[6] It was only when I stopped for a bathroom break that I noticed S had been desperately calling. Turns out, her teacher had told her it wasn’t safe to go home from school and that she should “call her mother”. Presumably, I was meant to reinforce this smart advice. I instead said:
“You’re fine. It’s not like it’s a Wizard of Oz Moment.”
This at almost the exact time a tornado touched down and carved a path of destruction 22 km long and a km wide through the city. Not my finest parenting moment. Nor storm preparedness moment.
This, at least, was grounds for me to finally smarten up and take weather reports seriously. But even with our arsenal of natural disaster apps, we still manage to find ourselves in the active zone of hurricanes, wildfires, even volcanoes. Last year, we took C and her friend to Iceland. As we go through customs, the border agent nonchalantly reports:
“There have been 2000 earthquakes in the past twenty-four hours. Nothing to worry about, it just means a volcano is going to erupt”.
Me, once again: “Wait, WHAT?!”
As the week progressed, the volcano still hasn’t gone off. Rather than being relieved, we are disappointed. When it finally does blow, there is a warning issued that “No spectators are permitted in the area” due to toxic fumes and…like, MAGMA.
Us: “You can be spectators?!”
We now really, really, really want to go to the area. At least M, C & I do. I suspect C’s friend is questioning her chaperones’ judgement. On the way to the airport for our return flight, we pass by the eruption zone and see cars going through a police barricade. We of course immediately turn in. The policeman says:
“You know it’s a 9 km hike into the volcano?”
“Yes Officer!”, we respond gleefully, knowing no such thing.
We start gearing up for 18km Out-And-Back hike over uneven lava rock. It is 4:00pm and we have already done a major hike that day. But we don’t even pause to ponder whether we are doing this. C’s friend, on the other hand has her turn to say “Wait, What?!” as we start marching off. There were toxic fumes, sandstorms (but I am used to that from the windsurfing vacays), and extreme heat (obviously) along the way. Totally worth it. Hours later, back at the car, we assured C’s friend that “She’ll thank us…one day…for the once in a lifetime experience”. Unless, of course, we all got Black Lung from the gaseous smoke.
When I later asked C what she would have done if her friend had opted out, she said “I was all in.” Code for “I would have ditched her.” It appears we have passed this storm chasing trait down to our children. The other week, a friend worried about her daughter: “You wouldn’t believe where she is – right in the path of a hurricane!” I would, given that Day two of S’s first solo trip abroad found her on a beach in New Zealand facing the oncoming eye of Cyclone Gabrielle.[7] Day TWO. S calls, from the other side of the world, and technically the future, “HELP ME!”. Every parent’s dream check-in call. Cue the Windy APP, with interpretation by our sailing buddy, who was on yet another continent/time zone. In the end S saved herself, which she is good at doing.
So, would I believe it, as my friend asked?
Indeed, I would believe it.
In fact, I have come to expect it.
It’s like Mother Nature is trying to tell us something.
Something along the lines of: Get the f- out of bed, you dumb ass, this IS a Wizard of Oz Moment.
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[1] My own brief foray into windsurfing was cut short by a shark encounter. You might say Sharks are not a natural disaster, but only if you have not seen “Sharknado”.
[2] For those of you who don’t understand “Dude-speak”, count yourselves lucky.
[3] Turns out the whole "calm before the storm thing" is real. And super misleading.
[4] I am not sure where I got off having such a laissez-fair attitude given that this was not the first fire at that apartment. The first being an oil fire that I started myself. My response was to personify the 'chicken with its head cut off' idiom while yelling "Fire! Fire!”. M calmly put the lid on the pot and rolled his eyes at me.
[5] The Hertz guy shook his head, “Not Possible”. Moms with multiple kids in equipment heavy sports? Done, literally, like dinner.
[6] While binging the Song Exploder podcast on my (storm-) noise cancelling headphones. Including, ironically, “Episode 13: The Microphones, I WANT WIND TO BLOW”.
[7] It is never a good sign when you need to google “What is the difference between a hurricane, cyclone and typhoon?” (The answer is basically geography).