Storm warnings and Vivaldi
Yesterday — one of the few hot days we’ve had so far this year — I was walking across campus when I noticed that it was getting darker, rather rapidly. I looked up and saw a bank of dark slate-blue clouds moving in. At the same time, the wind suddenly picked up, almost buffeting me off course as I crossed a street, flinging random bits of dirt and sand at great force. I hurried toward the library, where I’d been planning to put in an afternoon at my part-time job, trying to get there ahead of the rain that was already beginning to fall, because I knew my umbrella would immediately turn inside out in the wind.
We sometimes get tornadoes in these parts, although I’ve never actually seen one. So I was thinking “Could it be a tornado? But it didn’t seem like tornado weather today!” as I half-walked, half-ran ahead of the storm. But when I got to the front vestibule of the library, where a small crowd was gathering to avoid the rain, I was told “Ma’am, if you’re coming in, you need to go down to the basement.” In short, there was a tornado warning after all. But in ten or fifteen minutes the hypothetical tornado had passed, and in under an hour the sun was out again.
The most dramatic tornado-ish weather I remember, by the way, took place one sweltering afternoon in Chicago during my last year there. A bunch of us had gone to Promontory Point for a swim. Before we’d been in the water for very long, the waves started to get choppier, and we could see a bank of clouds heading toward us across Lake Michigan. Soon a coast guard boat (lake guard? whatever the equivalent of Coast Guard for the Great Lakes is) came around to warn us out of the water. Off in the distance, we could see lightning flashing between the clouds and the lake surface. We stood on the rocks of the Point watching it for a while. The sky was a very pale luminous yellow-green. “Tornado weather,” one of my housemates declared, pointing at it. Eventually we dashed back to the house we all shared, not quite soon enough to avoid getting soaked in the rain, nervously joking about imminent electrocution as we went. Ah, summer. The storms are my favorite thing about it.
Now I want to spend an evening or two listening to the Summer concerto of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Especially the third movement, with the thunderstorm.
Oh, that was great: I could see myself turning to look at the wall of the sky. Beautifully described.
I spent part of my youth in Iowa…very familiar with running to the basement and yellow-greengray skies, though I’ve never actually SEEN a tornado.
And you’re absolutely right, no matter how often played, Antonio probably describes it best.
Living in the northeast and on the coast, our biggest nature problem is hurricanes, and we don’t get too many of them. The thought of a tornado scares the hell out of me. It’s the most frightening thing I can imagine (and I can only imagine it, having never been anywhere they occur). Your description gave me shivers.
Oh, tornado skies are just *such* a yellow-green-gray – I wonder if they weren’t the inspiration for some of those 70’s refrigerator colors. But then again, who wants their kitchen to be threatening?
You know you’re in a group of proper Midwesterners when the tornado sirens go off, and everyone continues talking, raising their voices to be heard as the rain pours down onto the little party tent you’ve set up outside. I still can’t understand how people can be so afraid of tornadoes when they live quite happily with earthquakes which you can’t on radar screens or even see coming – is this the cultural legacy of the Wizard of Oz?
Nah, it’s the anticipation. You can’t predict when a quake will hit, so you don’t think about it. And when it does happen, it’s over quickly.
But watching a storm coming closer, the sky looking strange and frightening, the sirens going off, everyone full of nervous energy (the air too), not knowing where exactly the storm will hit, just that it will hit… *shudder* Then repeat every week for the rest of the summer!
Of course, I’ve lived over half my life in California, so it may just be what you know versus what is strange.
It certainly is just what I know versus what is strange, but that won’t ever stop me from possessing the only correct view on the matter 😉