The power of nature

There are some news stories that just force you to catch your breath and mutter "Jesus Christ" while looking at the television. The tornado destroying the suburbs of Oklahoma City is one of those stories. An old colleague of mine lives near there and I was happy to find out from Facebook that she is ok but a lot of people are suffering out there tonight. I know that much of the country considers this area to be flyover country but the degree of devastation that we are seeing out there is almost unimaginable.

I was lucky in that during my five years in Kansas I was able to, for the most part, avoid the major storms. Lawrence was hit by a tornado right before I moved to the region and the Joplin tornado hit after I had moved away. There were a few storms (and one tornado at least) that hit the region while I was there and I will say that it is the weirdest feeling in the world. I still remember being out running errands one afternoon and just going "the air just feels wrong." It wasn't even raining yet but you could actually feel the air pressure changing and you knew that something bad was happening. I went home and that turned into the one storm where I actually ended up taking shelter in my bathroom because I really wasn't sure if a tornado was about to hit my apartment.

(My apartment building didn't have a basement. In fact, the only place that I knew in Westport that had a basement was Kelly's and I didn't know if the best course of action in a storm was to run down three blocks, past the portion of Westport road that would always flood, just to get to a bar which might be safer than my apartment. Possibly the only time in my life where I decided that going to a bar could be the wrong decision.)

The entire nature of tornadoes always amazes me, especially how we just have trained ourselves to admit that they just happen. Think about it, we take it as a matter of fact that occassionally a storm will cause winds to circle to a point where a cloud will come down from the sky and destroy everything in its path. We consider this to be just a part of nature, a bit of background noise like earthquakkes and volcanoes. Instead I think we should always be in awe of just what this planet is like. Events like this just point out how little influence we have on what happens around us. In the end, the planet wins. Best we can do is understand that it has the upper hand and anticipate when it is going to play its cards.

(Side note: Ray Manzarek passed away today. I am on the record as saying that the Doors are my least favorite band of all time, even beating out the Grateful Dead. However, I've always said that Ray Manzarek's noodling on keyboards was the only redeemable quality of any Doors song so I want to give him some praise here. Plus, I didn't know that he produced albums by X and Echo and the Bunnymen so for that he earns my respect.)