Listening to the storm
10/07/14 05:21
I have a very clear memory of being ten years old. We were in a large canvas wall tent that our family owned, pitched at chippy park on the Boulder River. It was very dark, except for the occasional flash of lightning. Although I might have been sleeping, I was awake, and for a minute I was a bit afraid of the coming storm. My father’s calm voice was reassuring: “Lie on your back so you can see the flash when it lights up the tent. As soon as you see the flash, start counting - one one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand, four one thousand, five one thousand, six one thousand. There hear the thunder? It took six seconds for the sound to reach us. Sound travels slower than light. It takes about 5 seconds for sound to travel a mile, so that lightning strike was more than a mile away.”
“The lightning will come closer, but not so close that there is no gap between the flash and the thunder because the lightning is striking near the top of the ridge and we’re about a half a mile from the top of the ridge. It won’t strike down here. It’s looking for the shortest path to the ground.
“Then after the time gets smaller, it will start getting longer as the storm blows across the ridges.”
I lay there, warm in my sleeping bag, listening and counting. After the storm blew overhead, I had trouble counting because the thunder would echo through the high ridges and valleys and I could still hear the echoes from one thunder as another started to boom. The next thing I knew, it was morning and dad was frying bacon over the fire outside the tent and I was eager to get my shoes on to go outside.
My father didn’t grow up in the mountains. He was born on the open prairies where violent summer storms spawned tornadoes. One time a twister moved their barn, the biggest building on their place, a foot off of its foundation. An unlucky chicken had gotten its leg stuck under the building as it settled. It had taken months to get the barn squared back up and make the repairs necessary for a stable building.
But he never conveyed any fear of the weather to me. Weather was, for him, always a rational exercise - a puzzle to be solved. And he knew a lot about the weather. When I was older he showed me the maps with the isobar lines, showing where the pressure was high and low that could be used to predict wind direction and, with a little less accuracy, the speed of wind we might expect.
The memories came to me as clear as if it were yesterday this morning as a little thunderstorm passed well to the south of our place. I can judge the rough distance of the storms from the amount of rolling echoes in the hills. Even when I can’t see the flashes, I can tell that the storm is quite distant by the sound. The echoing thunder brings back such pleasant memories that it is fun to simply lie on my back in bed and listen. There’s no point in trying to count and judge distances. Our house isn’t a tent, and the flashes aren’t always visible when the storm is to the south and our bedroom is on the north side of the house. And the storms in the hills tend to have lightning strikes closer together so that it is hard to tell which boom goes with which flash. But I have little to fear from a summer thunderstorm. The real dangers of the thunderstorms around here are flash flooding, and wind damage, with occasional occurrences of lightning striking buildings. In dry weather lightning is responsible for fires, which can also pose a threat. Our home is not in a low place prone to flooding and since last October’s blizzard, we’ve remove the trees that might fall on the house itself. I suppose the neighbor’s trees could fall on the garage, but we are safe in our bedroom.
You get a different picture of the weather watching the weather channel on TV. I don’t ever do so, but they used to put the weather channel on at the care center where my father-in-law lived. It seemed to me that the station was nonstop coverage of weather disasters. They had to have crews disbursed all over the world to find storms that destroyed buildings and created havoc. Thinking about it now, I understand that they played a lot of recorded footage - not all of those storms were occurring at the same time as they were being shown on the television. The channel could be upsetting to some of the residents of the care center, because they didn’t always understand that the storms pictured were in other locations. We haven’t had a hurricane around here for a long time. We finally asked the staff at the center to select a different channel for the television. If I had lived there, I would have figured out where they kept the remote to simply turn off the set. Short of that, I could always unplug it. But then I think differently from the people who staff the home. I probably think differently from the people who live there. I’d probably be annoying to the other residents. When my time comes, I may be a challenge to the staff.
I find watching the weather and listening to the world to be far more entertaining than the television. I prefer open windows to air conditioning. I like to go outside in the rain and get wet. I am a big fan of taking off my hat and facing into the wind just to let it blow through my hair even though I don’t have all that much hair these days. I think of myself as being easily entertained.
But I can’t fathom what is interesting about watching the weather in some other place on a television set. Why do that when you could look out the window at the weather where you are?
I wonder if they’d let me pitch a tent in the yard so I could lie on my back and listen to the storm.
“The lightning will come closer, but not so close that there is no gap between the flash and the thunder because the lightning is striking near the top of the ridge and we’re about a half a mile from the top of the ridge. It won’t strike down here. It’s looking for the shortest path to the ground.
“Then after the time gets smaller, it will start getting longer as the storm blows across the ridges.”
I lay there, warm in my sleeping bag, listening and counting. After the storm blew overhead, I had trouble counting because the thunder would echo through the high ridges and valleys and I could still hear the echoes from one thunder as another started to boom. The next thing I knew, it was morning and dad was frying bacon over the fire outside the tent and I was eager to get my shoes on to go outside.
My father didn’t grow up in the mountains. He was born on the open prairies where violent summer storms spawned tornadoes. One time a twister moved their barn, the biggest building on their place, a foot off of its foundation. An unlucky chicken had gotten its leg stuck under the building as it settled. It had taken months to get the barn squared back up and make the repairs necessary for a stable building.
But he never conveyed any fear of the weather to me. Weather was, for him, always a rational exercise - a puzzle to be solved. And he knew a lot about the weather. When I was older he showed me the maps with the isobar lines, showing where the pressure was high and low that could be used to predict wind direction and, with a little less accuracy, the speed of wind we might expect.
The memories came to me as clear as if it were yesterday this morning as a little thunderstorm passed well to the south of our place. I can judge the rough distance of the storms from the amount of rolling echoes in the hills. Even when I can’t see the flashes, I can tell that the storm is quite distant by the sound. The echoing thunder brings back such pleasant memories that it is fun to simply lie on my back in bed and listen. There’s no point in trying to count and judge distances. Our house isn’t a tent, and the flashes aren’t always visible when the storm is to the south and our bedroom is on the north side of the house. And the storms in the hills tend to have lightning strikes closer together so that it is hard to tell which boom goes with which flash. But I have little to fear from a summer thunderstorm. The real dangers of the thunderstorms around here are flash flooding, and wind damage, with occasional occurrences of lightning striking buildings. In dry weather lightning is responsible for fires, which can also pose a threat. Our home is not in a low place prone to flooding and since last October’s blizzard, we’ve remove the trees that might fall on the house itself. I suppose the neighbor’s trees could fall on the garage, but we are safe in our bedroom.
You get a different picture of the weather watching the weather channel on TV. I don’t ever do so, but they used to put the weather channel on at the care center where my father-in-law lived. It seemed to me that the station was nonstop coverage of weather disasters. They had to have crews disbursed all over the world to find storms that destroyed buildings and created havoc. Thinking about it now, I understand that they played a lot of recorded footage - not all of those storms were occurring at the same time as they were being shown on the television. The channel could be upsetting to some of the residents of the care center, because they didn’t always understand that the storms pictured were in other locations. We haven’t had a hurricane around here for a long time. We finally asked the staff at the center to select a different channel for the television. If I had lived there, I would have figured out where they kept the remote to simply turn off the set. Short of that, I could always unplug it. But then I think differently from the people who staff the home. I probably think differently from the people who live there. I’d probably be annoying to the other residents. When my time comes, I may be a challenge to the staff.
I find watching the weather and listening to the world to be far more entertaining than the television. I prefer open windows to air conditioning. I like to go outside in the rain and get wet. I am a big fan of taking off my hat and facing into the wind just to let it blow through my hair even though I don’t have all that much hair these days. I think of myself as being easily entertained.
But I can’t fathom what is interesting about watching the weather in some other place on a television set. Why do that when you could look out the window at the weather where you are?
I wonder if they’d let me pitch a tent in the yard so I could lie on my back and listen to the storm.