Recently in ma nature Category

I woke up this morning to the most beautiful, glorious, welcome sound I could possibly hear. It was the sound of geese making goose noises as they flapped through the air. It signals that fall is on its way.

Unlike climberchica who dreads the end of summer, I long for it. Especially this year. This summer has been ridiculously hot. We had weeks where the daytime highs barely dipped below 100 degrees. It was nasty hot ... the kind of hot where you do anything to avoid leaving your house. And I hate living like that ... I LIKE leaving my house and going outside!

Oh, but fall is on its way! And with fall comes crisp cool air and PERFECT mountain biking weather!! I'm hoping that we will be rewarded for our unreasonably hot summer with an early fall. I really can't wait.

Around this time last year I wrote about the excitement of hurricane season and how part of me lusted for the excitement of experiencing nature's fury. Right now I'm eating those words.

Since Sunday night I've been glued to CNN. Watched the news leading up to the storm, heard the talk of how this could be the end of New Orleans. Woke up Monday morning to the news that the storm had shifted, and now towns further to the east were getting pounded, but it looked like the Big Easy had been spared. While my sympathies are most certainly with the people of Biloxi and other coastal areas, a big part of me was very very happy that this vibrant, soulful, colorful city had weathered the storm, so to speak.

I woke up this morning to much different news. News of rising water, people trapped in attics, and complete and utter disaster.

Its heartbreaking. I grew up on the Gulf Coast and know the area fairly well (altho not really as far north as Louisiana). If I had to pick (and I would never want that job!) ONE city or town to be demolished, New Orleans would be last on my list.

I am angered by the people who keep referring to this as "our tsunami". Of course this is an event of epic proportions in America, there is no doubt about that, but to compare this to the tsunami is preposterous. People had several days warning that the storm was coming. We have a huge country with a large infrastructure in place to deal with this sort of thing. The face of our entire economy wasn't changed in just one day. And the number of fatalities is staggeringly different. No doubt this is the biggest natural disaster we have experienced in a long, long time and the long term implications of this will be huge ... but its not the tsunami.

Hopefully this will make people think about how our cities are developed. About the steps we take to protect our towns and homes and families. About where we locate our cities. Obviously, New Orleans has been around for a while, but there is something to be learned from this from a planning perspective ... its time to reexamine the use of levees to control the smaller and more regular floods that maintain the natural soil conditions. Its time to take steps (and god knows I don't know how to do this) to prevent chemicals from our factories from leaking into the water supply in these types of situations. We need to take seriously the threat of these types of disasters. This time it was New Orleans ... next time it could be Miami or Key West or Panama City. Or it could be tornados ripping across the prairie or earthquakes rocking the west coast. What can we do to keep this kind of destruction from happening? I have an infinitely huge respect for mother nature's power .... how can we build cities that can withstand this sort of force? What can we learn from this??

I'm just rambling.

On a related ranting note, I watched the MTV VMAs (yay for watching trashy tv on the trainer!) Sunday night before being sucked into CNN. I was appalled appalled that no mention of the hurricane was made during the show, aside from "I'm happy to be here in Miami tonight ... glad the storm missed us!" ... NO well wishes for the people in NOLA, NO updates on what was going on. Nothing.

My thoughts are with those people who have suffered, and will suffer for a long time from this. I wish there was something I could do ...

I don't know why I haven't blogged about the travesty in southeast Asia yet - maybe because it just seems too tragic and unreal and I just don't know how to put words to it.

As I think I have said before, I have a newfound respect for any natural disaster. Ever since my experience in the tornado that tore the roofs off so many buildings in my apartment complex last year, I know what its like to be in a disaster zone - or at least I thought I did. Our tornado was pretty mild as far as these things go. Noone was killed, we were only without power for a few hours, and property damage was limited to a fairly small radius. But it still felt huge. There was still fire trucks and ambulances and helicopters and news crews and debris everywhere. Trying to take that experience and apply it to something of the magnitude of the tsunami is mind-blowing to me. I can't even fathom what its like over there.

This afternoon the boyfriend and I were sitting outside at the coffee shop on a glorious 60 degree New Year's Eve day sipping on iced coffee and snacking on scones when an old friend that I have quite a tumultuous history with came trotting by. He lives elsewhere now and I was totally shocked to see him wandering around downtown. I do still care about him deeply, despite the fact that whats healthiest for both of us is to stay somewhat at arm's lenghth and keep our relationship only as acquantances. When we get together its sometimes wonderful and sometimes horribly awkward. And we avoid talking about the past - our past - at all costs.

After the pleasantries that are generally exchanged with someone you haven't seen in several months passed, he commented on how jet-lagged he was feeling. I gave him a hard time because he now lives only a time zone away and couldn't possibly be feeling the effects of the time difference all that strongly - and then he informed me that he just returned from Thailand.

And suddenly the disaster became very real to me.

He wasn't near the coast when the tsunami hit but had been in Phuket a few days earlier. He was lucky and safe and seems to be emotionally unscathed by the whole experience - mainly because he didn't witness it first-hand, but I shudder to think about how differently things could have turned out. On his trip from Phuket to the other side of the country, he met some people at a hostel who were traveling to the beach, and would have been in the town when disaster struck, and he hasn't been able to get a hold of them since. Its all just too much to comprehend.

This nomadic friend of mine, who studied for a semester in Spain and recently went to Australia and trots all over the damn planet for kicks said Thailand was the most beautiful and amazing place he's ever been. That sort of hit me watching all the footage of the waves crashing onto the beach. It makes it so much more surreal to see this place which looks like paradise being mauled in this way. In a way, it makes it more poignant - to see the sun shining and the palm trees one moment, and ultimate devestation the next.

If you can step away from it for a second, and filter out all the emotions that are involved with our human family suffering in this massive of a way, its, I think, rather humbling to see a force of nature that can bring us to our knees in this way. Its a constant reminder that, while we, especially in the developed world, and especially in chest-thumping America, think we are in charge, that we have control over what happens to us and how we live our lives, that we have so much power, that in reality, in some ways we are really power-less. That there are forces as big or bigger than anything we can create or dream up. That we aren't really in control. I'm not at all trying to sound insensitive, and my heart is absolutely breaking for these people, but in a way, its a good reminder that we're not really the center of the universe. Blame it on god, blame it on physics, blame it on Mother Nature - but remember that we're really not all that in control. This could have happened in New York or L.A. or some other massive modern metropolis where we feel we are so evolved and modern and on top of things, and the destruction would have been much the same.

Having said all that - I really do feel helpless - I wish there was something I could do for these people....

It seems my home state is getting pounded by hurricane after hurricane this year. Having experienced my first real "natural disaster" last year, I have all sorts of sympathy for them. Hurricanes are a little less forboding than tornados in that you know they're coming for quite a while, but they're also potentially more damaging, on a much much larger scale.

Part of me is happy I'm here. With the tornado season behind us, Kansas feels nice and safe right now. But part of me wishes I was down south, experiencing the thrill that is a storm of this magnitude. I realize that thats highly naive of me and that my readers in the Sunshine State are cursing me at the moment, but what can I say? I lust for excitement and drama and it doesn't get much better than being pounded by 100+ mile an hour winds and torrential rain and tidal waves.

Take care Florida folks. Stay safe, stay dry, and more than anything use your friggin brains. We're thinking about you!

This has been my favorite quote since I read it in Outside mag several years ago. In honor of the beautiful weather and my pending afternoon mountain bike excursion, I will post it now. Enjoy.

"One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am- a reluctant enthusiast... a part time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While its still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely mysterious and awesome place. Enjoy yourselves. Keep your brain in your head and your head attached to your body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe-deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculatlrs. I promise you this: You will outlive the bastards."

~Ed Abbey

The weather this past week has been absolutely insane... scary and thrilling and terrible and beautiful all at the same time. We've had the tornado sirens go off on two different occaisions, had a tornado touch down a couple miles south of here, and had torrential downpours almost every night culminating in another 3 or 4 inches of rain last night (and from what I hear parts of Kansas City got up to 8 inches?!)

I love it. It adds drama and excitement and a different kind of beauty to the days. A friend of mine who moved to sunny SoCal from the twin cities says she misses the weather terribly... the rain and lightning and thunder... I think I would too.