Date: 2008-04-08 11:14 Subject: Sometimes it Rains Security: Public

Nothing will wipe you out like a couple of nights of restless sleep, or no sleep at all. Last night, after tossing and turning for awhile, it looked as if I would finally be able to drift of and get some rest. There was a storm blowing in, but it seemed for a long while that we'd only catch the edge of it. The thunder wasn't the kind that cracked and split the night air, rather it was a deep bass that seemed to roll across the sky, lapping against some unseen shore. The rain was pleasant enough. Big, fat drops plodded and plopped outside my window with a staggered cadence, as if an army of thousands hadn't quite learned how to walk in step. The crickets refused to acknowledge any of this of course, and instead tried to hold the storm at bay by singing louder and even more frantically. I would have thought them silly, but how many times do we do the same thing in our own lives? Try as we might to ignore it or push if from our thoughts, we can't stop the inevitable from happening anymore than they can. We know there is a storm brewing somewhere on the horizon, and that sooner or later the false calm we try to wrap ourselves in will shatter, yet we turn a blind eye to it. Personally I believe it is better to meet the storm head on and face it, rather than sit and hope it will blow over, only to hear...

Sirens.

The piercing howl puts an end to my twenty minute nap. 2:30 in the morning. Why can't tornadoes come around at a decent hour? I am Ohio born, but I've lived or worked almost everywhere in the United States. I've dealt with hurricanes in Virginia Beach and South Texas, wild fires and earthquakes in Southern California, not to mention the treacherous winters of the Northeast states. The one thing I've never gotten used to though are tornadoes. Lucky for me this part of the country has more tornadoes each year than any other in the U.S., so I have plenty of opportunities to face my fears.

So here we are, trapped inside a meteorologist's wet dream. Three seperate storm fronts hitting us back to back to back. Winds are sustained at 70mph with gusts much higher than that. Hail the size of frozen turkeys pelts everything in their path. I turn on the TV hoping to get some sort of update, and it is nothing but local TV weather guys all scrambling for their fifteen minutes of mediocrity. One channel has Doppler 8000 surface to air tornado defense radar; codenamed: Viper! I've served on warships who have had actual weapon systems that are less pretentious than this thing. Apparently the Viper system is so advanced, not even full time meteorologists know it's secrets! The one feature they seemed to all love however, was Vortex Vision. This amounts to giant, cylindrical, spinning blobs that fill the screen everywhere a cloud rotation has been spotted, blocking out any and all useful information like town names or storm projection paths. Neat!

At first I am really trying to pay attention to their broadcasts, after all, they have lots of computer images and geometric figures, and they can even write on the screen like John Madden! After awhile though, I realize that they are pretty much just guessing and getting 99% of their information from the National Weather Service anyway. The only real reason I stay tuned in (other than my fear of tornadoes, of course) is that the other 1% of their information comes from "Storm Chasers".

Apparently, all you need to be an official "Storm Chaser" in Oklahoma is broadcasting equipment (the shittiest microphone and camera that Radio Shack's sale bin has to offer), a pocket thesaurus (for looking up as many versions of the phrase "lots of rain" as possible), a Mobile Command Center (a 1970 AMC Gremlin with a lightning bolt painted on the door), and a parka. These guys really are the stars of this late night reality show, and it made the threat of a potential tornado fun! One guy fell in love with the word "copious" and said it copiously every five seconds to describe everything he saw. Another chaser literally got lost and had to swallow his embarrassment and admit it live on the air when they asked his location. Yet another just stood in the same spot the whole time with a crappy camcorder and sent back "exclusive live footage" that amounted to an almost completely black screen which would burst white sporadically during lightning strikes. This guy was my favorite because not only wasn't he bothering to actually "chase" a damn thing, his comms with the guys in the studio were constantly broken. This led to him just repeating the lead meteorologist's name over and over again as if it was some sort of rain chant that could protect him,

"Dave? Dave? Dave can you hear me? Dave? Dave? Dave are you getting this? Dave? Dave?"

It was classic.

Finally at a little after 4:30am things started to calm down. No reported tornadoes, just lots of hail and wind damage, a tired man and a very nervous dog.

Not the way I would have chosen to spend a Monday night, but just like those other storms we face in life, sometimes you just have to make the best of it until it all blows over.