A friend of mine used to live in Florida. Occasionally his city would find itself in the path of a hurricane, and the almost nonchalant attitude he had about it baffled me. He wouldn’t dismiss it as no big deal, but his point always was that hurricanes don’t take you by surprise. You know they’re coming because they’re all over the news. There’s time to board things up and tie things down and get out of town if necessary. In Florida, hurricanes are going to show up sooner or later. It’s just the ways things are. Compared to hurricanes he found tornadoes to be a lot more frightening because they just show up out of nowhere.
I’ve been pretty lucky so far about weather related problems. When I was a kid at summer camp I was about fifty yards away from an enormous tree when it was hit by lightning and exploded into irregular chunks of wood and splinters. My old townhouse lost some siding when a storm tore through one night, but compared to some of the damage even three miles away I’d gotten off easy. Another evening when I was very young a tornado warning was announced and my mother hustled the three of us kids and any number of dogs we had down to the basement to wait it out while our father was driving home from work in the middle of the storm. My younger sister, all of four years old, was ready to run outside with a Wiffle Ball bat to chase the tornado away until our dad got home and loudly slammed the garage door closed after parking his car, giving all of us quite a scare that we'd just had a touchdown in the front yard.
I find weather fascinating: the beauty of it, the power, the incomprehensibly massive system that keeps it all in motion. Too often I’m one of those chumps that sees a storm alert come on TV and then wanders outside for a better look. Maybe I wasn’t very observant as a kid, but I can count the number of times on one hand I remember even seeing hail come down back then. I thought it was so cool to see those little pieces of ice falling from the sky it didn’t even cross my mind that it could be damaging. Now here in the 21st century it’s just as common as not to have hail accompany a summer storm, particularly when a big one come though and trips all the alarms. But like I said, maybe it was back then too and I just didn’t notice.
But somehow I doubt that. Looking at all that’s happened in the world in just the past five or ten years that has somehow been weather related it’s hard to deny that things are changing. I’ll admit that I’m basing this on purely anecdotal evidence, but when entire cities are being wiped off the map by hurricanes? And unusually devastating tornadoes or storms like the one that tore through Oklahoma tonight are becoming more frequent? You can only choose to keep your head in the sand or recite cherry-picked facts about the longitudinally cyclical nature of climate patterns for so long.
I see a storm like the one in Oklahoma appear and I feel a surge of survivor guilt, thinking “Thank God that didn’t happen here.” And as the story develops after storms like this and the casualties grow and the totality of the devastation becomes more evident, I always think back to an argument I had with a student long ago, back in one of the years I was teaching science. This kid didn’t like science very much and one day questioned why she had to waste her time learning about it.
“You need to learn to respect nature,” I answered.
She smirked at me like I’d just fed her some granola-induced hippie mantra. “So we recycle, and pick up the litter, and take care of all the little animals?” she snarked. “That’s why we have to respect nature?”
“No,” I said, matter-of-factly. “You need to respect nature because nature has no respect for you.”
And the disturbing truth is that nature will win every time. We saw that clearly today, and the people struggling through the tragic aftermath in Oklahoma will be living with that truth for some time to come.
