Family and Other Natural Disasters

An 80% chance of rain?
Christmas came early!

If you live in Central Texas, you know we had an outbreak of severe weather last weekend. Normally, rain is such a rare occurrence that a late afternoon sprinkle that wouldn't be thought serious enough to cancel an outdoor wedding in other parts of the state brings the city (and traffic) to a halt and a Christmas morning-like glee to our local weather reporters, who would otherwise be stuck spending the afternoon buried in a thesaurus, trying to come up with new words for 'hot' and 'dry.'

However, on Sunday we had the third tornado warning I can recall in my years in the Austin area. The first was many years ago, and I remember shuffling down the stairs at work to the basement with several floors worth of coworkers at a rate of a stair a minute and then promptly turning around and shuffling up the stairs at the same rate because by then the storm had passed, like some sort of anxious and dispirited slug oozing through a tunnel.

"Look, either it skips over us and nobody
ever has to know, or it plows through
the building and we save a crap ton in
lapsed salary...either way, it's a win!"

The second also happened while I was at work. My boss at the time was also involved in buildings and disasters and such and he told me later that by the time the tornado warning moved through the bureaucracy, it was too late to do anything about it so they decided not to tell us. I remember people milling around in confusion because their phones were telling them we were in danger but the building alarms (which are very good about notifying us of Serious Disasters like overcooked popcorn) were strangely silent on the subject of tornadoes. Of course, that particular boss was more truth-ish than truth-ful, so perhaps it didn't go down quite like that.

So, Sunday morning, I was in the bedroom, making my grocery list. Mother was in the living room, on her tablet. The children were in their respective lairs, and the cats were sleeping (duh). Then the cell phone cacophony begins. Mother and I check our phones, go, "Huh. Weather," and go back to doing what we were doing before. The cats don't have cell phones because they would spend all their time texting poo emojis, blowing up my phone demanding early dinners, and ordering Kitty Crack on Amazon. Bob would probably exceed his data limit on ESPN, given his predilection for kicking things and Daisy would spend all of her time on Internet self-help forums.

Eleanor and Bruce, however, do have phones and, as young Austinites, have no memory of actual weather. They both came running into my room, somewhere between OMG! and WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! I explained that this was a warning for the whole county, and the odds that a tornado would actually carry us to Oz or even to the backyard were pretty slim, but that the National Weather Service issues a warning because tornadoes are so unpredictable. My son looked at me, then at the two windows, and said, "So, WHAT ARE YOU DOING IN HERE?" And, in a rare moment of sibling unity usually reserved for the advisability of dessert, his sister agreed.

This Tornado Warning is brought to
you by "Bridge Over Troubled Water."

So Bruce called Betty and they invaded Eleanor's room, which, as the converted garage, has no windows and plenty of comfy seating. I summoned Mother, because, I figured that, if I had to succumb to cell phone-induced panic, I was taking her with me. She immediately retaliated by playing a record of my 1985 summer band camp performance, followed by Simon and Garfunkel's greatest hits. Daisy, our calico cat, ran into the room and hid under a chair--not, probably, because of some innate cat-sense of impending weather, but because Daisy's main life goals are (1) food, (2) affection, and (3) hiding, and Eleanor's room is the Holy Grail of Hiding because the door is usually closed. Bob, being completely lacking in survival skills, was still sleeping on his perch by the back window, and I had to go grab him at the insistence of the kids. And there we all remained, for half an hour, until the warning expired and Eleanor evicted us, which may not have happened in exactly that order.

So how did Mother and I become so nonchalant about Nature's Fury? Well, it all started in 1980. We lived on ten acres of land outside of Sinton, Texas, roughly 30 miles west of Corpus Christi. That September, Hurricane Allen came barreling towards Corpus Christi as a Category 5. For those who are not life-long Gulf Coast residents, here's a quick summary of hurricane categories:

• Category 1: A Good Rain ("We needed it!"--the mandatory Texas response to any rain, sort of like "Amen" for weather) + A Day Off Work/School
• Category 2: Put Away the Gnomes and Patio Furniture
• Category 3: You'll Probably Lose That Half-Rotten Tree, Your Patio Cover, and Some Fence Boards
• Category 4: Board Up the Windows and Stock Up on PB&J (Plywood, Bleach, and Jugs of Water)
• Category 5: RUN FOR YOUR LIVES--WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!

Patience (n)-- (1) A boat that survived a Category 5
hurricane anchored in the middle of a harbor. (2) a
quality Mom was completely lacking in by the time
Dad returned to Sinton after protecting said boat.

So, when Allen was a Category 5 and showing no signs of weakening, panic ensued, at least for normal people. I think we have previously established that my father was not normal. Although we technically had a half hour head start on Corpus Christi evacuees, we were delayed by Dad's pre-evacuation checklist. This consisted of: (1) securing his welding shop, and (2) securing his boat. I am assuming (3) was securing the safety of his loving family, but we'll never know because he never made it that far. (1) was easily managed, given that the shop was a large, metal building; however, (2) involved an elaborate (though successful) plot to protect his sailboat by sailing it into the middle of Corpus Christi harbor, dropping four anchors off the side, and rowing back to shore. If you're curious, three anchors broke but one held, and all the normal people who lashed their boats to the dock came back to find their boats (and the dock) smashed to toothpicks. So, from a boat protection standpoint, this was an awesome plan. From a get-your-family-to-safety standpoint, however, it was somewhat lacking.

By the time he got back to Sinton, the hurricane was already on shore, so there was no chance of us heading out of town. In fact, we barely had time to make it to the local Red Cross shelter, situated in the Sinton High School gymnasium. I don't remember much of the shelter, other than wall-to-wall people and clamoring noise from both inside and outside the building. In this situation, a normal family would have figured, "Oh well, the hurricane is upon us. Guess we'll make the best of it. Because only crazy people would leave a hurricane shelter in the middle of a freaking hurricane." I think you know where this is going.

Looks like a fabulous time to fire up the grill!

My father looked around at the mayhem of a packed shelter, uttered some profanity, and got in his truck and drove back to our house, in the middle of an actual squall. Mother, ever prudent, waited until the eye was overhead before driving us home in the car. My most vivid memory of living through a Category 5 hurricane was not the howling winds or booming thunder or even the otherworldly stillness of the eye passing overhead. It was pulling into the driveway to see my father at the barbecue pit, trying to grill a roast before the eye passed. In this particular endeavor, he failed, due to obvious problems with kindling, the random gusts of the wind stirring up during the eye, and the general thickness of roast. The attempt was spectacular and the failure epic.

*I.e., this little fish pond, the dirt from
which raised our house and provided a
convenient slope for all the water to roll
downhill and flood everyone else's house.

Ultimately, of course, we survived. The house withstood the storm without even a drop of water inside, for various reasons that subsequently became a source of contention with the neighbors.* Nevertheless, it is the sort of experience that alters your perception of 'bad weather' pretty much forever. After you've driven through a Category 4 hurricane and witnessed a man prioritize sailboat security and the salvaging of perishable meats above trivial things like personal and family safety, it is pretty hard to get worked up over a mere tornado warning, even with a half dozen cell phones and tablets squawking and screeching over the "Sounds of Silence."