Natural disasters
As a tornado comes to the UK, I've been reminded of another one but in human form.
Snow is nice in movies and pictures.
Like this one by Dave Johnston of a train over the Glennfinan viaduct in the Highlands, capturing a scene that immediately brings the Hogwarts Express to mind:
In everyday life snow is slightly less practical and bucolic for two reasons.
—Reason number one: it means it is cold.
—Reason number two: so cold for it to snow. And settle.
Do I need to say more?
Being born in the middle of the month of January I considered myself a child of winter. This is my season, I claimed. “My favourite days are winter sunny days” and “I love a crisp and bright winter morning, it makes me feel invigorated” were also part of my winter solstice repertoire.
Until now.
If social media gurus have taught us anything is that we need to put our needs first. That changing your mind is a sign of maturity, not weakness.
Well, I’ve matured and seen the light. I prefer the summer. Please take me back to the cosiness of a heat wave and the warm embrace of mother earth and free me of this cold indifference I’m being treated with. I was born in the wrong season. I’m made for laziness and languor, not for reinvigoration.
I finally understand why British people emigrate en masse to Spain when they retire. The Mediterranean coast of Valencia is the turf of the “sod it, Charles, we’ve had enough of this weather” crowd. And Benidorm is its epicentre. To the point that a UK TV series was named after the city many of Brits picture as their geriatric Shangri-La, their very own “I’ve seen better days” Dorado.
As a child I was quite fond of snow. It meant that if it was high and thick enough we didn’t have to go to school. I loved school, always have, but shaking things up every now and then is what keeps you from falling into the inertia of existence, even as a 6 year old. I also loved snow because my internal thermostat wasn’t yet active and therefore I couldn’t feel the cold, or the paralysing pain of a snowball when it lands in the middle of the face. Everything was fun and games.
Until the sun came out and then that was it. Snow melted away and it was game over.
During my teens and early twenties snow was a neutral event for the most part, something I no longer responded to with a childlike enthusiasm as I got used to it with every new winter. Snow became that relative that pays you a visit once a year, stays over a couple of days, and until next year at the same time. You aren’t sad at them leaving because you know they’ll be back. Also my internal thermostat started working properly and I didn’t look forward to freezing my ass off as much as I did in my childhood.
We can only be in awe of what is new to us. Confronted with the marvels of nature, even at its wildest and most powerful, it is hard not to feel a sense of trepidation as well as not to be humbled by how insignificant we are when the elements are beyond our control. But there is also a sense of wonder when we see something of such force materialise in front of our eyes for the first time.
The second time I lived in the USA I was in New Concord, a tiny village in Ohio in the middle of nowhere.
The place, as the house I lived in, was surrounded by nature, a surprising amount of deers, racoons and another animal that foraged outside our bin bags every night and which we failed to identify. During the rare sightings in the dark we eventually agreed that it was furry, long, wide and moved quickly. Romy, the Argentinian girl I lived with in a shared house of six, and I referred to it as “el bicho” to distinguish it from the rest of regular human and non-human visitors that roamed around the house.
During that year we met Sahil, a lovely and sweet guy from Delhi studying Business Management. The isolated environment we found ourselves in, otherwise knows as deep America, was not the picture most people coming to the USA to study probably have in mind, but Muskingum College, the private liberal arts institution we were now all part of (which became Muskingum University in 2009) was apparently very good, and a great magnet for attracting an international mix of new undergraduates year after year, of which Sahil was one of them.
Myself and Romy were there as Spanish language teaching assistants, as were other four people which covered French and German. All of us received complimentary housing, a pass for the dinning hall with all meals included, and a monthly allowance in exchange of 8 hours of teaching per week. So good luck to those hoping to learn anything from us.
Sahil became one of our closest friends as we clicked in the induction week, where all new international students took part in seminars and activities and were paired with older students that volunteered to help everyone adjusting to campus life. Myself, Romy, Sahil, and Joe, who was one of Sahil’s housemates and also a volunteer for the the induction week activities, quickly became good friends and started spending more and more time together.
That’s how the day it snowed for the first time Sahil texted Romy at 8 in the morning and asked us to please go outside with him to play in the snow after breakfast. He had never seen snow before in real life, he would explain later, as the dryness of Delhi makes it an almost impossible phenomenon. Now if you asked two people who have seen their fair share of snow in their lives to go out in a freezing winter morning, the logical answer would be “For fuck’s sake” but Romy and I wanted to raise above our limiting snow-centric beliefs and were too young to be cynics.
So instead, Romy knocked on my door after reading Sahil’s message, I opened it half-asleep just like her, and she delivered a classic Argentinian reaction at 8:05 am “Yegua, ¿qué onda con Sahil? ¿Está al pedo y quiere que nos caguemos de frío porque el pibe no vio nunca la nieve? Y bueno, mirá por la ventana. Ahí también la ves la nieve”1
She then turned around and went back to her room, closing the door behind her. I saw no reason not to imitate her and go back to my bed.
At 11 am, after both had finished breakfast and started to function, we texted Sahil to confirm we were on our way. In the five minutes that it took to walk from our house to Sahil’s, Romy and I didn’t stop swearing and complaining. When we got to Sahil’s house he was already on the porch waiting for us and he was beaming. “Snow! Snow everywhere! Look! I can’t believe it!” he even gave little jumps with every word, his eyes were sparkling, his face lit up by a smile he couldn’t, nor wouldn’t suppress.
He was 19 but right now he had turned 5. His enthusiasm for a weather phenomenon that Romy and I had experienced many times over the years was utterly annoying and I finally understood the meaning of the expression fair-weather friends. Romy and I fell in that category, that much was clear to me in that instant.
So off we went to a day of playing in iced rain dressed in clearly unsuitable clothes. Truth be told, we all had a lot of fun as the snow arrived during a weekend over some holiday I can’t remember (it may have been Thanksgiving) and most local students had left the campus, so there were only a few of us around and not much to do anyway.
What I remember from that day is that the campus looked particularly beautiful and eery given the lack of usual traffic of students coming and going from one building to the other. Which meant we could enjoy it in its pristine, artic-esque condition, as the fresh snow that fell overnight had presented it to us in the morning and before the slush would replace the thick white mantle that covered our feet with every step.
Along with its petite dimensions (you could literally walked around the campus and the whole village of New Concord in 20 minutes, several times if you proceeded at good pace), bucolic setting, and liberal arts college (University since 2009, remember), another characteristic of New Concord was that it was a place subject to the force of the elements.
After the first picture-perfect snow, we had a blizzard closer to Christmas that shut us down for a few days. There would be another one in March, which was even worse and had us disconnected from the world for about a week as the roads were blocked.
New Concord was not only prone to blizzards but also to more extreme climate phenomenons as it happed to be conveniently placed in a tornado alley. Another weather-related phenomenon that is better to watch on screen or see in pictures, but a tad less thrilling in real life despite how mind-blowing it can be.
However, when you come from a place used to the ABC of weather conditions (sun, rain, snow) being confronted with the possibility to witness a tornado is somewhat exciting, albeit stupid. Very stupid let me reinstate that. You do not want to be anywhere in the proximity of a tornado. I had newly arrived in North Carolina for my senior university year when hurricane Katrina hit and I still remember how the weather changed and the sky turned grey all of a sudden for about a week even though we were not directly impacted by it and it only passed by very quickly through the state before hitting New Orleans.
But like the snow that prevented me from going to school when I was a child, a tornado could prevent me from following the laws of gravity when I never thought that could be possible. Because in all honesty the chances of me being near a rotational simulated gravity machine like those the astronauts train in were zero then, and are zero now and for the foreseeable future. But a tornado offered a tangible possibility of removing the gravitational pull the earth exerts on me, on all of us. It is rather thrilling when you look at it that way.
And ridiculously stupid, it bears repeating.
One day Abby, one of the four housemates Romy and I shared our house with, stomped into the house shouting “Down! Down! Down now you two! Don’t you hear me? Dooooown!”
Romy and I were upstairs talking in my room and didn’t pay much attention because according to Romy, who shared a room with Abby “She screams nonsense in her sleep most nights, don’t worry”. We carried on with our conversation but heard hurried steps coming upstairs and Abby’s voice getting louder. She was now on the landing, in front of my open door, screaming at us “You two, basement, now. Now I say. Basement. Now!” and stomped downstairs again.
The only reason we ever went to the basement was to do laundry or to host a party as we found the basement was the perfect setting for that. Unsurprisingly all houses had one so put two and two together…
“Maybe something is going on” I told Romy.
“Por ahí que sí, yegua. Pero viste que esta mina anda siempre medio alterada? Yo creo que es por ser animadora” which was her way of stating that Abby’s intense and sometimes extreme emotional reactions could only be explained on account of her being a football team cheerleader, not influenced by whatever extraordinary event or circumstance she was trying to communicate to us. An observation I could only agree with as in the time we had been living under the same roof it was difficult to miss that Abby was a somewhat volatile character.
As we proceeded to make our way from my room to the ground floor we kept wondering what could have prompted Abby to be in this state when as far as we could tell we were not:
A) in the middle of a house party and therefore she was sober
B) in the middle of a football match and therefore she was not cheerleading
These two being the environments in which Romy and I had registered a radical transformation in Abby, who went from passing for a semi-normal person to becoming an emotionally charged Hulk powered by alcohol or nonsensical spelling chants, depending on the situation.
When my right foot finally landed on the squeaky parquet of the ground floor, Abby emerged from the kitchen, alert, her arms trying to contain a number of overflowing food provisions arranged somewhat haphazardly like a precarious jenga whose pieces can collapse any second. We looked at her, she looked at us, and finally she said in a very calm voice that caught us off guard “I don’t know what the weather is like wherever you two come from, but FYI we have a tornado coming. I’ve got us some food and now we are going to go to the basement and we’ll stay there until it’s all over. It should be fine, don’t worry. And now ladies it’s time to move your asses unless you want to get blown away. Which I personally don’t recommend.”
Her stance was that of someone who was used to command and could offer direction. Was this a weird side-effect of being a cheerleader?
I don’t know if Romy and I were more impressed by seeing Abbey composed for the first time since we had met her, calm under pressure, cold-headed in time of a crisis, and taking charge of the situation, or by the fact that we were about to experience our first tornado. I caught a glimpse of Romy’s face and I noticed the same spark in her eyes that I could feel in mine. The same spark we noticed in Sahil’s eyes the day he saw the snow for the first time. But witnessing Abby in a previously unseen state of self-composedness, albeit briefly, we couldn’t risk reversing her to her default explosive setting by showing our excitement. Not with a tornado approaching anyway.
“A tornado? That sounds serious” Romy had now morphed into a seasoned actress and was performing her role to perfection, the fake concern transmitting real worry. “But, Abby, surely this is going to be nothing, right? I mean, you’ve lived all your life here and you haven’t been blown away yet?” I couldn’t believe she just said that but Abbey didn’t seem to register the sarcasm, focused as she was on getting us to the basement.
It was endearing to see Abby worry about us when most of the time her presence in the house meant chaos, drama or a mix of the two that always ended with wild emotional outbursts. When this mood hit, the recurring fixation was how she hadn’t still got an engagement ring from her football boyfriend, Tom. A goal she hoped to achieve before finishing university, which was only a few months away.
“I don’t know how this is going to be. It’s not a super big one, but you never know.” Abby said as she led the way to the basement. “They sometimes get out of control, it can get nasty real quick, so you can never be too careful. As soon as I saw the tornado warning on tv I ran from the dinning hall to let you guys know and shelter together in the basement.”
Again a furtive glance between Romy and I as we walked downstairs. How many tornados happen here to issue warnings on tv? The spark was now gone.
“I figured you probably don’t have tornados back home. So I didn’t want you to be on your own. Tom called me to go to his basement, but he is with his housemates. They have an emergency kit there and all, but I told him you guys probably didn’t even know a tornado was on the way.”
Another quick look between Romy and I. That’s why all houses in campus have basements. Fuck.
The threat of the unpredictable had transformed Abby into a mature version of herself, one we would love to hang out with instead of hiding from. But for some reason we struggled to believe this fantasy. Too many images of her being an emotional wreck lived in our heads by then. We wouldn’t fall for this imposter.
Our basement was spacious if sparse.
Like most basements on campus it was the home of the washing and drying machines -which could fit in one person- next to which were baskets with perfumed detergent and softener. Five of each to be precise. Romy and I weren’t precious about the smell of our clothes as long as they were clean, so we amicably settled for a classic ocean breeze for both detergent and softener and split the cost.
I remember there were also some random tidbits here and there, including spare foldable chairs, a foldable table and an assortment of tools in a box. While I had no idea what a tornado emergency kit looked like, I was sure we didn’t have one.
Abby pointed at the table and Romy and I opened it so she could place on top of it the food supplies that she had brought from the kitchen. We then took a chair each and sat down. Unfamiliar with the tornado protocol we needed to follow, we were waiting for further instructions from Abby, who seemed a bit distracted now, as if she had suddenly rebembered something last minute.
She stood up and started to pace around the basement, checking every nook and cranny. Maybe she was looking for a hidden emergency kit -hope never dies- or a flashlight in case the electricity was shut down. I had never seen one around in the house but the basement seemed a plausible place to find a flashlight if one ever needed it.
“Oh yes” we heard her say as she kneeled below the staircase and reached out her arm in search of something “I was sure I’ve left it here" her hand kept moving in the darkness, and then it stop, presumably after having landed on what Abby was trying to grab “That was a very good idea, very good idea, Abby” she wasn’t speaking to us anymore, we realised.
From where we were seated we could only see her back.She was fumbling around, trying to retrieve something that we couldn’t see from where we sat. Abby took a step back, still kneeling, and eventually we noticed she was holding a black trash bag in her right hand. When she stood up and faced us her face was different, no trace of concern in her features, only a triumphant smile.
For some reason neither Romy or I thought speaking was required from either of us while Abby conducted her search so we just followed her body in a sort of transfixed state, and now we were curious to know what the mysterious bag contained. When she finally put the bag on the table, a thump broke the silent expectation and took us back to reality and out of the trance we had briefly fallen into.
I shot a quick glance at Romy, who was already waiting for me to look at her. We didn’t need Abby to take the contents out of the the bag to know that whatever was inside wasn’t a flashlight. Or anything that could be of any help in this situation.
“Ok, ladies, now we are ready for the tornado.”
And with those words she produced a 2 litre plastic bottle of Stolichnaya that Romy and I had bought for a house party a couple of weeks ago and that had mysteriously disappeared. As we refused to drink, Abby saw no need to get a glass and started drinking from the bottle.
“Do you have signal down here?” I asked Romy in Spanish, as she had taken her phone downstairs while mine had remained in my room.
“Yes, why?”
“Call Sahil and check he’s safe and whether he has space for two more people.”
“Two? There’s three of us.” Romy noted as she dialled Sahil’s number.
“Listen, I had mentally prepared for a tornado. I was ready to be brave and stay calm. However, being stuck in a basement with Abby drinking warm vodka out of a bottle while we wait to be, maybe, maybe not, blown away is a different type of natural disaster in the making and to be honest I’m not sure I can deal with that right now.”
“Sahil, where are you?” Romy said on the phone. “What? No, no, no, go back to the house and go to the basement, there’s a tornado coming. What? A tornado, a fucking tornado… What do you mean? Sahil, listen, I don’t care you don’t know what a tornado is. Go to your fucking house right now, don’t stay outside. Call me when you’re inside and put Joe on the phone, alright? Go now!”
Romy was the image of disbelief.
“Che, ¿pero en India no vieron Twister? O el Mago de Oz, qué sé yo. ¿Te podés creer que el pibe andaba por ahí tan tranquilo? Ni se dio cuenta que no había nadie por el campus. Qué pelotudo”2
Her phone rang a couple of minutes later. It was Sahil. He was home, heading for the basement, where his housemates already were waiting for him. “That’s why I had so many calls from them. I thought they wanted to go dinner somewhere… Can you believe that I’m going see snow and a tornado in the same year?”
Romy asked Sahil to put Joe on the phone, which he did straight away and without any formalities she asked: “So what the fuck is one supposed to do when there’s a tornado coming your way?”
Apparently the answer is head for the basement, wait until it’s over and ride the storm as safely and calmly as you can.
Which Romy and I could have perfectly done, had we been on our own. However, we couldn’t escape the tsunami that Abby was getting ready to unleash fuelled by the vodka, which had reseted her to default settings, any trace of her being the image of calm under pressure gone. Right when we could have done with a bit of that.
“Why do you guys think Tom hasn’t given me a ring yet?” her voice was already a bit slurry, the gaze fixed on her ringless left hand, which was now up in the air moving slowly in front of her face, while her right hand firmly secured the neck of the plastic bottle, which she lifted up to her lips one more time in a mechanical movement.
“And don’t give me bullshit this time.” she said after gulping, turning her body to us, and leaving the bottle on the table.
Romy and I exchanged a quick look.
Oh no. It’s coming already. Brace yourself and lie flat.
Abroad is an independent publication about identity and belonging, living in between cultures and languages, the love of books, music, films, creativity, life in London, and being human in the age of artificial intelligence.
“What’s going on with Sahil? He obviously is bored and wants us to freeze our asses out because he’s never seen the snow. Well, if he looks through the window he can also see the snow from there.”
“Did no one watch Twister in India? Or the Wizard of Oz at least. Can you believe he was just walking about campus? Hadn’t even noticed there’s no one around! Qué pelotudo (this is just too good to be translated)”