You’ve been watching the coverage of the tornadoes scouring their way across the south, no doubt? The best reporting, IMHO, is coming in over YouTube — especially from the storm chasers. Fox has also had some first-rate coverage. What hair-raising stuff!
My Texas aunt and uncle lived on the fringe of tornado alley. Once Aunt Audie described standing on the front porch of what no doubt was a wooden or brick farm house and watching a funnel cloud pass by a mile or two away.
Did they not have a storm cellar? Dunno…at the time she recited this story, I’d never heard of such a thing — we were Californians living by the mild, pacific shore of the Persian Gulf — so it didn’t occur to me to ask. But they probably did: rural families had root cellars in which they stored food and other perishables, a category that presumably would have included themselves if a tornado touched down in the front yard.
Rarely did we see much rain, there at the edge of the Rub al’Khali, a desert whose barrenness it would be hard — maybe impossible — to describe to a comfortable, untraveled American. But once we did see such a thing.
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It was late in the afternoon. I was a little girl, maybe eight years old (give or take), and all excited and amazed to watch the afternoon skies suddenly turn almost as dark as night as heavy clouds barreled in. What my parents thought, I do not know: they were not given to sharing their concerns (if they had any) with a kid.
We lived in a strip of company houses, two- and three-bedroom brick bungalows that the Company (that would be ARAMCO) had lined up in tidy rows, extending from the beach about…maybe…a third to a half of a mile inland. All of them housed White, mostly American company employees and their families.
This particular afternoon, a truly fierce rainstorm blew in, sometime on the far side on noon. The sky grew dark…that was fun. And then…gosh! It grew more than dark. Black, it was: almost black. Dark, dark gray. Lightning flashed. Thunder rolled, and the wind began to howl. I thought it was evening.
But it wasn’t.
My mother tried not to look scared. But she looked scared.
She told me to stay back away from the windows. I didn’t understand what she was talking about, but knowing that disobedience meant getting swatted into the middle of next week, I stayed back away from the windows.
It got darker outside.
My father was a stoic sort of a guy. In his world, any display of emotion other than amusement was unmanly. But you couldn’t miss that he was watching. That he was quiet.
The rain thundered down, torrents of water falling out of Ras Tanura’s normally soggy blue air. It poured by the barrel-full off the house’s eaves.
Lighting flashed.
Thunder roared.
A waterfall tumbled out of the black sky.
It didn’t last very long. At least, to my kiddish mind it didn’t. Shortly the storm ceased. The rain stopped pouring down. The lightning flashes drifted away.
I wanted to go out and play.
“NO!” came the answer.
We hung around in the house.
Before long, though, neighbors began to call.
Did you know…?
Did you see…?
Did you hear…?
Are you OK?
The wind blew down trees.
The water flooded roads. And parking lots. And yards.
The Hatches’ roof blew off. No, they weren’t hurt. Yes, they were all OK.
Other homes lost their roofs, but those houses hadn’t belonged to the families of a childhood pal like my friend Ennis Hatch.
The docks were OK.
No tankers had run aground.
Rahima, the Arabs’ nearby native village, was flattened.
The airport was shut down.
The road to Dhahran was closed.
. . . and . . . how CAN i count the ways i’m glad i don’t live there anymore?
We had to stay in Arabia because my father had a contract with Aramco, renewable every two years. He was paid handsomely to wrangle oil tankers in and out of the docks there. But sometimes I wonder about Americans who live in the path of horrific storms like the ones we’ve seen this week, here in this country.
True: one gets sot in one’s ways when one is born and raised in a given place. But after you’ve seen one set of storms like the ones that hit this week, wouldn’t you be inclined to move out of the area? Why stay where your home, your livelihood, and even your life are at risk from something as ubiquitous as the weather?
This, I suppose, is why we have so many people in California, Chicago, New York, and waypoints. But still…sometimes one wonders.
Yea verily: what a thing to see! What thing to contemplate!