I am a chieftain among men when it comes to missing out on
awe-inspiring natural disasters. That’s not to say that where I go is safe to
follow: quite the contrary, but I am never a part of the terrible experience
that so many can say that they lived through.
In particular, I can think of three stories.
The first takes place in Disney World, believe it or not. We
had gone down to Disney in a trailer to stay at the only trailer park in Disney
because having a big family meant sleeping several feet from half your
immediate relatives. I was seven, and at the time, I didn’t know any better. I
thought camping was the best I could ask for…that is until two tornados tore up
the county. It was the deadliest tornado disaster in the history of Florida,
with forks of lining that even Floridians couldn’t handle, knifing through the
sky and splitting open trees. The real sufferers, however, were people that
lived in a trailer park five miles south of where we were. Sleeping tight in my
own trailer, I never saw a thing, not the swirling winds of either tornado nor
the bright flashes nor the deluge that came with them both. When I woke the
next morning, everyone had a story to tell but me.
The second was one of the most destructive blizzards the
northeast has ever seen. It happened in October, which was why it was so
devastating, hauling down trees that hadn’t lost their leaves, felling ancient
monuments to the existence of nature in the few small spaces where they hadn’t
been pushed out by Connecticutians. My father, and he was not alone in this,
described it as looking very much like the pictures of Hiroshima when you walked
through the forest. Everything had been pulverized. People were without power
for months in a part of the country where missing your TV shows can be a
tragedy. A tree fell through my Aunt’s roof and, to my knowledge, wasn’t
removed for almost a week because there was simply too much damage to the
infrastructure of the state to allow engineering crews to do anything else. And
while this once in a lifetime experience was taking place, I was spending my
very first winter in the south of the country, away from the northeast, where
snow had also paralyzed the state…except that the snow was a dusting of half an
inch and only resulted in a distinct shortage of eggs and milk at the local
WalMart, the shortage being caused by paranoid denizens and not the storm
itself.
The last was one of the first earthquakes that I can
remember hitting the east coast. As long as I’ve lived here, there has been
only one. Mind you, I’m the kind of person who wonders what it must be like to
have the Earth shift beneath your feet, rattling and vibrating and pulling
pictures off the wall (because that’s about as disastrous as I can imagine). It
happened near Richmond, VA while I was living in South Carolina, only two
states over. By all means I should have felt it. I should have heard glass
shattering and metal groaning. Certainly, some of my fellows did sitting in
different buildings, but I was in the engineering building, which for some
strange reason, had been properly engineered not to do those very things. How
is one supposed to experience a natural disaster if you are so well prepared,
University? What really cooks my goose is that the vibration was felt by people
in the next room who quickly came over and let me know what their bottoms had
felt. Unfortunately for me, I had been sitting on a cushy chair with my feet
pulled up Indian style. I never felt a thing.
So to you, Mother Nature, while some might find you moody or
vindictive or to be a stone-cold bitch, I say thank you. For whatever reason,
and I don’t want to say it was the invasive species project I did in AP Biology
(though it might have been), you have spared me your wrath. If you could kindly
keep doing that, I would be more than appreciative.
Hugs and Kisses,
Bryan Thurston
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