Hurricane Force Winds

I hadn't heard much about the windstorm forecast to hit tomorrow, until late today. I dutifully bought some extra batteries and some extra cat food. I filled my sink with water tonight, in case the power goes out at the city pumping facility, so I'll have at least some water for washing dishes. I did my dishes and washed my dirty laundry, also in case that is not possible for a couple of days. And that is the sum total of my storm preparations, outside of getting anything out of the yard that could blow around.

I called my brother tonight. His storm preparations? He and his wife headed over to Shore Acres, to watch the big blow, like many Oregonians do. Wish I could have been with them. We did this when we were growing up. It's a wonder we survived. We used to stand out on the jetty at Bandon, near the end of it, when storms came in, and let the huge waves explode over us.

Once, my brothers and I made a raft out of driftwood logs. Unfortunately, about that time, the tide went out. We were being washed towards open ocean. My parents screamed from shore for us to jump off and swim for shore. I did. My older brother took longer to do this, but he finally did, too.

We were always on the beach as kids, making forts and houses out of driftwood, tying them together with seaweed, digging huge sand tunnels, jumping waves, exploring tide pools with our pants rolled up and feet bare.

We got caught by the tide more than once. More than once we had to swim for it, to get back to shore, when we wouldn't notice the time, or the change in the tide, as it rolled back in, swallowing our escapes.

So a Columbus Day equivalent they're calling this windstorm. I hadn't heard anything of it, either, until this evening. Guess I'm kind of solitary, isolated from news of even what's going on in Oregon sometimes.

When big storms hit, I often think nervously of the animals out there, suffering with it, and of the homeless. I'm thinking of Homeless Richard and those cats there with him. How will they make it through? And his girlfriend. There are no shelters that take women in the winter over there. Not women with addiction issues. The men, even the drunks and addicts, they have a place they can go, if they so choose, cold winter nights. But not the women.

My father was still a duck hunter at the time the Columbus Day storm hit. He'd go and shoot a duck dead out of the sky, then expect us not to break teeth on pellets eating it. We never ate it. We'd spit it out in our hands down beneath the table when he wasn't looking, fold it in a napkin and stick it in our pants or our socks for later disposal. Wild duck tasted awful and had all the shot pellets all through the meat.

Nobody could shoot a duck then with that storm so strong. The ducks and other birds would try to fly and would just be like standing still in the sky, the wind was so strong.

I always cheered for the ducks when my father was out with his shotgun. I was just a little kid. I didn't like meat then and at an early age, declared myself a vegetarian. I stayed a vegetarian until I was about 16 or 17. I eat meat now, but not much of it and I still don't like it. Just never liked meat much. I'll eat it though, if I'm hungry and there's nothing else. I'll eat pretty much anything if hungry.

So we came home in the midst of the storm and a big window in our house had just blown apart. All my postcards sent me by my grandparents, whom I loved, when they travelled, had flown all over the block and were ruined. My bedroom window was the only other one that had blown open. It was the only other window on the side of the house taking the brunt of the storm.

There were downed trees everywhere. Downed power lines, too. I don't remember a whole lot because I was so little. I do remember the town was a great big mess.

There have been other windstorms since then, but nothing like that one. Last December, just after my eviction notice from the slumlady, there was a big windstorm. All that night, branches from the line of trees to the west, hit the roof of that shack. I got all my cats in my bedroom and we just didn't know what to do except finally just go to sleep. There was no power.

The branches hitting the roof and side of the house sounded like the house would crash apart. I remember trying to peer through the rain and darkness at that line of fir trees sending twenty foot branches onto the roof to see if any were leaning like they'd fall and if they were, were they leaning toward my shack. I couldn't really see, so I went to bed, since there wasn't anything else I could think to do about it. I didn't have heat I don't think, at that point, due to the furnace being shut down as dangerous. This really mattered nothing since the power was out.

I remember trapping the Holly colony. Every time I went up there, a storm would hit that usually included lightening and or hail. I remember driving home through the flatland grass fields with lightening hitting all around. I remember I was scared and didn't know if I should stop or speed up or just what I should do.

I spotted the warehouses where I had trapped scores of cats and drove right into one of them. The rain pounded like elephants thundering on the corrugated tin roof. Clashes of thunder shook the buildings. The old tin roofed warehouse moaned and groaned and whined under the weight of that storm. But I wasn't afraid anymore.

I love dark warehouses. I spent two years in those warehouses trapping the 220 odd cats who frequented the mice infested seed sorting and storage barns. I knew them like the back of my hand. Old friends, I would call them. So taking refuge in an old warehouse during an intense storm was like making it home.

So this storm tomorrow, I wonder if it will really be a puncher. If it is, hope the trees in my backyard don't crash down. Hope the tree in my neighbors yard by my bedroom doesn't crash down either. But, there's not much one can do about storms and acts of God and the like, except just go to bed and go to sleep.