Skip to main content

Damnation All Around

June Sky over Minneapolis
"Severe thunderstorms!", Public Radio reported.  "Already over the western suburbs.  Expect high winds and large hailstones."

Every time I hear something like that, I recall the time at Weyerhaeuser Grade School #303, in western Washington State, when our little band of learners came out of the "Old School" building on the back of the property, where we had played basketball, to find ourselves in a "severe thunderstorm", with lightning striking the fir trees just a few yards away, and where, for the first time in my life, I smelled sulphur in the air.  Damnation all around!

We dared not run across the gravelly ball field to our three-room, two-classroom, eight-grades "new" schoolhouse.  We stayed on the porch of the Old School, where my mother had said she went to school, to wait for Damnation to slack off.

Mostly, Western Washington, on the ocean side of the Cascade Mountains, simply leaked rain down on us, and occasionally, often in July and August, allowed the sun to shine down on our education and hay fields.
Storms were, for the most part, just unrelenting wind and rain.

Here in the Upper Midwest, storms are "systems" that have gathered themselves across the western half of the continent, meeting other systems, often up from the Gulf of Mexico, that roll across the great prairies like the wrath of god, thundering righteousness and retribution, with winds that might make an ocean proud of its relentless, rolling might.  It has been here, in the Midwest, that I learned what "straightline winds" are, in contrast to the tornadoes that trist trees into pretzels and houses into kindling.  So far as I can tell, when a tornado lies down on its side, and blasts, not in vertical spirals, but straight across the land, flipping trees down and roofs up, it is called "straight line winds".  That is not a scientific description:  a scientific description might say that "all hell is breaking loose".

I have come to think that the sky is not always a friend, allowing the sun to laze across from horizon to horizon, but the way howling blizzards get from Siberia and Canada to our town, and that put Gulf heat and water together with Pacific winds and Alaskan frost to make destructive concoctions.  A year or two ago, hailstones pounded our roof to shreds, and four garage doors to submission.

"I couldn't live in a place that does not have seasons!", our neighbors and friends say.  They mean they cannot imagine where United Air Lines got that "friendly skies" stuff.  Who wants to wake up and say, "Oh, damn!  Another beautiful day!"?

I do.  I still smell sulphur.  My friends and neighbors say that it is not the weather I smell, but my future.

That is scary, too.  It is all over the western suburbs.

Now, I am not inventing tales, when I say that, at this moment, the weather sirens are going off.

Is that sulphur I smell?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Friends-- My step-father of 35 years died this morning. His name was Conrad Royksund. He was 86 years old. He was born into poverty on a farm near Puyallup, WA. He was the first member of his family to attend college and earned a PhD from the University of Chicago. He paid his way through all of that by fishing in Alaska. He spent his professional career as a college professor. I met him when I was just 3 years old and don't actually have any memories of my life befor e he was in it. He was intimidatingly smart, funny as hell, and worked his ass off. He taught me to meet people with kindness and decency until I was certain they could not be trusted. He taught me to meet ideas with carving knives until I was certain they could. I will remember him as one of the bravest, most curious, and funniest people I have ever met. He left this world with a satisfied mind. We are so grateful. Dan Hubbard
1 comment
Read more

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back:  two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed!  Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore.  The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil.  We farmed, too, of course.  All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor.  Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...
Post a Comment
Read more

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer.  We do have an answer.  We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...
Post a Comment
Read more