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Storm story
by Celeste White
Growing up in Kansas City, without mountains, ocean or wilderness, I developed a fondness for the raging thunderstorms that lit up the Midwestern skies. So when I moved to Redding, I was disappointed to learn that the rains took place in the winter, when the absence of extreme temperature clashes meant very little violent weather. Boring storms, in other words.
Well, that was OK, I told myself. Who needs wild storms when you have mountains? And not just mountains, but volcanoes! And wilderness! And cougars and bears! And people who live next door who build replicas of Civil War cannons and shoot them off when you least expect it! And for the first few years that I lived here, the storms tended to be rather mild-mannered. At their worst, days of pouring, sodden, vertical sheets.
Soon, though, I learned that no two years here were ever the same. And one year my husband and I decided to splurge and spend a romantic weekend in a B&B on the northern California coast, paying extra for a room with a view of the ocean. And we decided that it would be fun to wind our way to the coast on one of those hair-raising tertiary highways that unfortunate, unsuspecting city people are always somehow getting themselves onto during the worst winter storm of the century. As we drove, we noticed a lot of downed limbs. Gee, we said, there must have been some really high winds come through here! Then we drove past a car on the side of the road, its front windshield smashed in by a fallen tree limb that measured about three feet in diameter. Wow, we exclaimed—really really high winds!
We finally arrived on the coast and began looking for the sign to the B&B. Dusk was settling and the landscape beginning to darken, but oddly, no lights appeared in any of the dwellings we spotted. Richard decided that we had missed the turn-off and so turned around and took the road he deemed most likely. And as we turned, we saw the sign for the B&B lying in the grass.
Arriving at the inn, we learned that a hurricane had wandered up the coast from the South Pacific and that all the power was out for a hundred miles up and down the coast. The storm had bounced off the coast back out to sea, but it was expected to return in the night. All the restaurants were closed so the owners served a cozy dinner of bacon and potato soup, crusty bread and red wine. And when they sent us off to bed with a snifter of brandy, things were feeling snug.
However. In the middle of the night, the hurricane did indeed return. The storm shutters had been fastened, and this inn had successfully occupied this spot for almost a hundred years. Even so, the minute the hurricane made landfall, I never slept another second. The wind roared. It whined. It whistled and screamed like a banshee. It beat on those storm shutters like a possessed ax-murderer. I fully expected the storm shutters to blow off into the night and the wind to explode through the windows, spraying us with a slurry of water and broken glass.
This storm, hands-down, was absolutely the most exciting storm I have ever experienced!
And we made it safely to morning, when we headed back inland as soon as the eye of the hurricane gave us an opening.
Of course, since then, I have experienced several exciting storms. There was the storm that hit in the wee hours of the morning and tore the rolled roofing off our guest house. There was the storm that wrenched the cap off the stovepipe to our woodstove, our sole source of heat, sending torrents of water gushing down the creosoted innards of the stovepipe and into the fire itself, extinguishing it immediately and filling the house with a stench like rancid ham burned to a crisp in a skillet. As anyone might have predicted, this happened at midnight on a Saturday night. And then there was the time we got caught on I-80 when the levees broke.
So, now I realize I get to have it all; mountains, cougars, wilderness and exciting storms. It’s paradise here, isn’t it? Aren’t we lucky?
Celeste White is a writer and artist who lives in Redding.
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I would love to read other people’s storm stories! Does anyone else have any they’d like to share?
Celeste, this was a wonderful story, as exciting as any good adventure book could be. Like a good book, I couldn’t put your story down (or get off the computer) until reading the end. I grew up in Delaware, a mid-Atlantic state with lots of weather, especially summer thunderstorms and like you, I love them and since we got them so infrequently in California, each one was awesome to me. I also missed snow while living in the Bay Area so when we retired and moved to O’Brien Mtn., I was pleased to hear that, “you may get a dusting of snow”. Well, our first winter there, we received two feet right off the bat. Each winter Mother Nature gave us more than a little snow and we loved it all. That is, until the “Big” storm of December 2004. Although we were safe and sound, good friends living closer to town spent the night clustered in fear in the center of their home listening to their trees thrashing and cracking under the weight of so much snow. It turned out that their home was safe but lost many, many wonderful shade oaks, along with their deck, but the miracle was the huge oak that gently fell upon their glass sun room without harming a thing. Yes Mother Nature can be quite schizophrenic.
Great writing!!
Here’s another storm fact:
I always thought when I read about “gales” they were just talking about fancy rainstorms - not so! I discovered when I moved to England that you can have lashing gales - which, by the way, refers only to wind, not rain - without any rain at all! And we do, not very pleasant either, I think - mind you, nor do I prefer a gale with rain. I guess I just prefer weather without extreme winds.
But, like the writer, having grown up in the Midwest, I think there is absolutely nothing to match a fantastic thunderstorm, especially in the dark!
Thank you, Joan and Cathy, for the kind words, stories, and info! Yes, it’s true, sometimes Mother Nature can seem more like “Mommy Dearest” Nature. Joan, I remember that snowstorm in 2004 that you mentioned. That was another night I didn’t get a wink of sleep. We got two feet of heavy, wet snow in Old Shasta and all night long we listened to branches snapping off all our trees around the house. Nerve-wracking! I was sure we were going to lose one of our most important shade trees to the west of our house. Fortunately, it survived with some judicious pruning. But what an amazing tale about that huge oak that landed so fortuitously! Wow, and “lashing gales!” Just the very expression gives me the shivers! I wonder if such expressions gave J.K. Rowling some of her inspiration for her “Whomping Willows?”
Great writing about weather adventures! We had a tree do the hula during last Friday’s storm. It was swaying in circles in the wind and a grass “skirt” was lifting in a circle around it……around and around, hula style. If it had been J.K. Rowling’s tree, it would have pulled out of the ground, slithered over to the living room window and tapped on the glass. : - O
What a terrific image, Judy–charming and hilarious!
Celeste,
I remember one lazy Saturday on a sping day in Texas, bored by myself at home, while my son was working about ten miles to the north, refurbishing a home by himself in the middle of some farmland.
I heard the familiar beeping of the weather radio, so I turned on the TV. I saw that not only our county, but two surrounding ones, had just come under a tornado warning. I looked at the doppler and realized that the storm they were talking about was bearing down on our area.
I tried to call my son on his cell phone, but there was no answer. Knowing he listened to music at a looud volume while he worked, I figured I’d ignore the weatherman’s advice to stay at home, and I jumped in my car and headed north towards where he was.
I got to the house he was working on ahead of the storm, to see him packing up his tools. He knew by the feel in the air something bad was coming.
We got in the car, and headed back home. Before we got caught up in the hailstorm on the highway, we saw a small thunderhead (small by midwestern standards, I should add), with a long spinning “tail” behind it, ahead of the main part of the storm.
Depite the destruction that it held it was a beautiful as well. the air had that still feeling to it midwesterners should be familiar with, and the sky appeared burnt orange. The bottom of the clouds had that look like upside down bubbles were boiling out underneath of them.
We got home, and saw that that spinning tail did indeed develop into a tornado that ended up causing some destruction and taking two lives.
The memory that sticks with me the most was the bubbling boiling clouds, the feeling of the air, and the color of the sky.
Oh, wow, great story, anonymousagain! Those storm clouds truly are awesome (in the old-fashioned sense of the word :), aren’t they? Man, and to see an actual twister (without getting in its way!) –what an amazing experience. But they’re scary, for sure. And lethal.
My husband and I saw a funnel cloud touch down in the Central Valley north of Sacramento last spring when we were driving up I-5, actually, which was an incredible sight. It looked like a long, white finger, brilliantly lit up by the sun peeking through the clouds to the west.