weather

WATCHING THE STORM ARRIVE

/ janpriddyoregon / 5 Comments

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Sometimes I worry about things. Mostly I have worried about that shallow and selfish threat to my country. You know, that one. But since I unsubscribed from cable television, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, I push those concerns to one side.

I worry about global warming and the use of poisons to control insects and weeds and people. I worry about cancers and the danger of a tidal wave washing my home away.

I worry about population growth, a concern when I was a little girl and the earth’s human population was less than three billion, and now approaching eight billion. I worry about the loss of empty spaces, that human need to use everything.

I worry that a journal that has short-listed my story for a year only means to tease me. I worry about using too much purple or not enough in the quilt I am making. I worry that the sweater I should be re-knitting for my grandson will be too large or scratchy or no longer colors he likes.

I worry that so many people are reading my post “Why You Don’t Want to Become a Teacher” and will think I did not love teaching and miss teaching with all my heart.

I worry about the way our community is changing into an industrial zone without people to care for more than income.

I worry about my brittle bones and bad teeth, my weight gain and poor posture, and finding better medical care.

I worry about the power flickering in and out, but not too much.

Those are the easy things.

I worry about dying and leaving my husband alone or being left alone by him dying first. I worry about alienating my daughters-in-law, each a dear person but not my daughter. I worry that I have failed to help my sons know and trust their obvious courage and kindness.

I worry my older granddaughter will throw herself on the floor in a fit of embarrassment. I worry that my younger granddaughter will be the pretty sweet girl people take advantage of. I worry about my grandson’s attention.

I worry every time my husband calls across the house to tell me about reading that someone we know has died.

And then.

And then I sit down during a break from the sewing machine and steam iron, push color aside, and I watch the storm come in. The waves are higher than yesterday. The sky is dark and brilliant. Rain makes a variable patter on the skylights. There is thunder far away, but the ocean roars steady over all.

And the sky is sometimes aqua overhead and bright and then darkening with heavy clouds. Those who only value the clear sunny days as good weather must have simpler lives than mine. This is the world I love.

My worries are fruitless, pointless, fussing. The storm is inevitable, inviolable, and out of my control. It is coming onshore.

I watch the storm arrive and I am not worried.

 

LIVING AT SEA LEVEL

/ janpriddyoregon / 1 Comment

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There is a major front moving in. Gary has come up the stairs twice to tell me about it. Perhaps two inches of rain. He will need to buy the whipping cream today—how much did I need? Three quarts. The tide sweeps up nearly to the hedge and he suggests we might get a walk up Shingle Mill rather than on the beach. And that reminds me of a very old essay . . .

Hoo-hoo-a-hoo Hoo-uh-oo! We heard the owl at the far end of our run on Shingle Mill that morning. It was the first day of Daylight Savings Time and this meant we were running in the dark again. It also meant we got to hear the owl. And my two-day headache finally left me.

We live at sea level and the Pacific Ocean is right outside my window. On a Thursday night we watched the news about the 8.9 earthquake in Japan (since upgraded to a 9.0), checked the estimated time of landfall in Hawaii and our coast. The news had pictures of a ten-foot wave sweeping across agricultural fields, smashing into building, carrying cars like so much driftwood. Ten feet might not sound like much, but that wave had the weight of the entire Pacific behind it. Nuclear reactors were off-line. The early estimates claimed 25-35 dead, but we already guessed this would increase ten-fold by morning, and again ten-fold, and perhaps again. But it was also clear that the wave would not hit here until after 7am and since we are always up between five and six, we went to bed.

We would have slept through the night and begun packing up in the morning, but a well-intentioned neighbor called to alert us at 2am and so we were up three hours early. School was cancelled, and this had been on the news hours before the call came. By then waves hit Wake Island and Midway. Hawaii was hit, but the estimated wave was less than four feet for our stretch of coast. More bad news about the Japanese nuclear power plants. The tide would be mostly out so that the estimated four foot wave, if it came, would look like a sneaker, nothing threatening. A local geologist was interviewed by a Portland television reporter, and it was all he could do to keep from laughing at all the fuss. “People can evacuate if it makes them feel better,” he said. Horning is a smart guy and I trust him, but better safe than sorry, and we’d already planned to leave.

The warning siren began blaring right at the time we were putting the dogs and cat in the cars. That was good news—no way anyone could miss hearing the Arch Cape alarm unless they were deaf. An hour before the time a wave was expected, we had packed up and evacuated ourselves and our pets to St Peters’ parking lot.

Through all this Gary and I were calm. An hour past anticipated landfall for the first wave, we went back home and unpacked.

During all this several things went well locally: We had many hours to prepare. We packed and left. The warning system worked. Oregon Department of Transportation (ODOT) reopened the Dennis Edwards Tunnel to allow visitors to return to Portland without detouring construction.

What didn’t go well: ODOT posted nothing, absolutely nothing on their website about the tsunami warning. I found out the tunnel was open from Facebook and later the news. The news stations reported the most dangerous scenarios over and over, and often showing images from Japan with a “live” label on screen while interviewing—voices only—locals about the threat to the Oregon coast. People turning on the news understandably feared the images went with the interviews. Many people were unnecessarily frightened. Friends from Seattle emailed to ask if we had an emergency kit in our car. Others thought the entire situation was blown out of proportion.

It wasn’t.

In January of 1700—Tuesday evening, January 6th, to be precise—the Cascadia subduction zone dropped, causing an earthquake magnitude of approximately 9.0 off the NW coast of the US and Canada. Scientists can be precise about this event because while none of the people living then on the Oregon coast actually wrote it down, the Japanese recorded details of the 5 meter tsunami that struck their coast. That’s about 16 feet. People died. 

That earthquake and tsunami was just the most recent in a series that have struck our coast. Until recently the general advice was to get to 50′ above sea level and we probably had a couple hundred years before another big quake would strike. But then the Seaside School District asked State of Oregon geologists to have a look at cores and advise us about where to move Cannon Beach Elementary, which is sited along Ecola Creek, just off the beach. The school can evacuate to 50′ in less than 5 minutes—they practice. The discoveries of the state geologists put the wave height at up to 100′ and frequency closer to 300 years than 500. We are overdue just now for a big one and that is why my school district, with four of our five schools barely above sea level, is scrambling to relocate and build a new campus higher up in the coast range. These buildings would also serve as staging for relief efforts and emergency housing when the next big one comes.

When that quake comes, if I am home, at least parts of my house are likely to collapse. I do not count on getting my car out of the garage, nor that local roads will be free of fallen structures and trees. I will grab the dog’s leash, stuff the cat into her carrier, change into runners, and I will run. I will not carry even the most practical of emergency kits. I will not take extra drinking water or food or my favorite pieces of jewelry, the family photos or blankets or any of the sentimental or practical items we carted over to the church the other day. There won’t be time. I will have only a few minutes to run to higher ground—best case scenario suggests 20 minutes total, and I will have spent part of that time fighting the cat to get her into the carrier. In a worst case scenario I might have only 5 minutes to climb 100’ above sea level and I will not make it.

If I’m at school during the quake, I will likely have a couple of dozen students in my room, and over a mile to run just to get to the base of a hill. There is a backpack in my room that I am supposed to carry, but I am old and small and the reality is that I do not want to carry 20 pounds of emergency items for over a mile. I might do it, though. I am a stickler.

Wherever I am when it hits, there’s a fair chance my husband will be someplace else. We have tried to figure out where to meet. Neither of us is hesitant to walk from wherever we might be, but getting from one place on the coast to another will be torturous. I figure I can run the highway from Seaside to my home in less than three hours. It’s about 14 miles and I ran a half marathon last fall in awful weather in a little more than two and a quarter hours. But after a quake, that highway will be mostly gone because it’s at sea level in low places, tumbled with rock in high places, and already sliding downhill any place above sea level. Bridges will have collapsed. Mud and downed trees, the drowned wreckage of human constructions will make barriers. Owls will always find their home, or a new tree. But if I head for my tsunami-swept home nothing along the way will look familiar, and I will likely need a day or two to get there from Seaside, if I’m lucky enough to find Arch Cape at all. 

If I were a girl of sixteen, Friday would have been a holiday off from school. But I am closing in on 60 and even a false alarm gets me thinking too hard. The adrenaline left me exhausted and achy and reconsidering. The next day I had a headache, and it wasn’t until this morning, three days after Japan’s quake, when Gary and I decided we were going out for a run despite the rain, that my headache is finally gone. It returns as I consider the future. Grim reality.

There is the stretch of flat road we often run, the road we ran this morning. We run laps east, west, east, and when I am headed toward the ocean its voice sometimes comes up strong like an animal roaring over my head. I always think of a tsunami when the ocean is in full throat; I consider where I would turn to find high ground, and that I do not have time to escape that massive rush of water. 

WEATHER GAGE*

/ janpriddyoregon / 2 Comments

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I have begun rereading Patrick O’Brian’s Jack Aubrey/Stephen Maturin novel series for the third time, this time aloud. I found the jargon and exposition early in Master and Commander hard going aloud, but we have moved on from there to familiarity with some details and absolute acceptance of the rest. My husband laughs at every bit of wit so we are having a fine time and sailing right through. (I began reading three days ago and we are already past three quarters through.) I try to stifle my impulse to explain what will eventually become clear in a next few pages or a few books. O’Brian builds tension and action wonderfully.

(I have spent too many hours in despair and crying of late. Lucky to be alive. Yes. But these are not proud times for my country.)

Perhaps O’Brian is one reason I thought about the wind so specifically during our walk this morning. Yesterday, we walked for two and a half hours, and then about another half hour later on. This morning we meant to have a short walk, but stayed out the better part of an hour, despite the stiff wind. It rained on us yesterday, but we really did not mind. Today over the ocean were blue skies, the moon still showing more than a half even as the time neared nine o’clock. Wind out of the south, gusting and sometimes holding at a light gale.

Dry sand blows over the top of wet sand, sometimes gathering they way snow will, though snow is very rare on our coast. I recall our Sequoyah, an Afghan Hound of considerable strength and sweetness, who did not like the sand piling on his toes when I walked him on a windy beach. He would pick up each forefoot in turn and shake the sand out of it, then dancing on the shore like a dressage horse. (I do miss the dogs painfully.)

We have over the years been possessed of two wind gauges—one belonged to my step-grandmother who left me the house. It was carried away during a great storm while we were in Arizona (with Sequoyah at dog shows, as it happens). The next gauge was also carried away during a storm. We were accustomed to steady winds of 45mph or more, gusts of 65 or even 70mph during an ordinary storm. A really bad wind coming from the west would bow the glass in our ocean-facing windows. It was a disconcerting sight, and the reason I was always grateful to have some sort of curtain or blind to lower against such blows.

We have had no wind gauge at all for years now, and though we can check with Cannon Beach for windspeed, because they are a larger community, we almost never do. We can feel it.

The last really impressive storm was 2 December 2007, the day a window facing the ocean blew out and I fixed in back in and wired it in place as best I could because Gary was still drugged from hernia surgery two days before. We were without power Sunday to Friday. It was dark and wet and boring that time of year with so few hours of daylight and inadequate lanterns.

The local public radio station reminded us every hour on the hour about a tree falling on their roof and never provided a speck of news about our end of the county. (I have never quite forgiven the necessity of driving to Cannon Beach in order to buy a Portland paper in order to find out what was going on.) We were warm enough with our wood stove which I cooked on. I’d made a large casserole of eggplant parmesan and we put thawing strawberries in oatmeal for lovely breakfasts, and experimented with various methods of grinding coffee beans—smashing with hammers and rolling with rolling pins—to fill the french press. It was a challenging week, but not a bad one. Rather fun, to tell the truth, though I was grateful to have hot water again by Friday night.

It was also the year my mother died, the year I graduated from my MFA program,the year our younger son married, and the beginning of the first of my still non-writing periods. I was mourning. I lost all humor from my writing, and my stories often were humorous until then.

And here, the day has worn on while I return to this posting, adding to my story and watching the weather change outside my window. The sky was clear aqua during most of our windy walk, then rain again (it rained last night off and on), and now the pale blue sky is flying overhead again.

O’Brian reminds me how one disappointment or embarrassment can dredge up a range of others long thought put to bed. There was a tide earlier this spring that cast up hundreds of crabs on shore—huge Dungeness crabs, and all male. A knowledgeable friend explained that they were likely scraped up from very deep water where they had lain for some time.

There is work to be done.

I have knitting to attend to and a partial knitting project to unravel and begin again, cards to send my grandchildren, and I am rethinking my plans for National Novel Writing Month. Last year I had intended to work on a series of short stories. I think that might be a good choice for this year. A baker’s dozen, aiming for 60k words, perhaps. So long as I write 50k of new words meant for a single book, I think that will answer.

I have already met my “writing goal” for the year of 100 rejections. Mostly because of 65 agent queries, it easily met that target a couple of weeks ago. I will not order new lamps, but move around the ones I have. I have been trying to send back the darned desk and hope to have it gone within a fortnight (finally!). I rearranged the living room sofa downstairs, shifted the one upstairs, and I will continue desk using a set-up that is imperfect but has done duty.

That is, I am rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic (if you know the saying?) and will muddle along. That is often the way when terrible forces are at work destroying the world. The ocean is white with foam from heavy surf, though not so loud at the other morning when it seemed to be deliberately cracking on.

In a day or two, at most, we will begin the next book in this series. When we have read the twenty volumes on my shelves, I will go hunting for number 21.

*Yes, that is the preferred spelling.