Today, being as I wasn't in the hurry I usually am to get to work, I decided to forgo taking my daily Pop Tarts to the park with me when I took the NDT Mascot for his morning squirrel perimeter patrol and potty run, and instead chose to peruse the Dallas Morning News for a few minutes while I enjoyed breakfast.
Growing up in the Midwest and Southwest as I did, I've had more than enough exposure to tornadoes and the devastation they can cause, and as a result have developed a healthy respect for them. Kind of like going to seeing the dentist -- not exactly fear, but not something I'd do for kicks. You can thus imagine my surprise with today's front-page story about tourists paying thousands of dollars to ride along with storm-chasers -- for the sole purpose of seeing and experiencing a tornado.
Then again, as I thought about.....we do tend to get blase towards the natural phenomena with which we live on a daily basis. I daresay that most people on the East Coast wouldn't walk across the street to experience a hurricane or nor'easter, but I must admit it would be a secret thrill for me to see and experience what I've only gotten on TV or in the movies -- wind whipping the trees, howling, surf roiled and dark, rain sheeting by horizontally....that sort of thing. There is enormous grandeur in a Texas thunderstorm as it boils up from the horizon, the sky darkening, the hush of anticipation....then the crashes of thunder, the first big drops of rain, lightning shooting fireworks across the sky, the wind swirling, blowing everything in its path.....but more often than not, I'm thinking, "Damn, I just washed the car".
On the next page, though, was a story about natural phenomenon which I have not really experienced, but to which I will soon be very exposed -- earthquakes. It's hard to avoid the topic in a situation where, when friends ask you to describe the house to which you're moving, one of the big points is "it survived the 1906 quake". On my trips to Alaska, I've seen the effects of the Good Friday earthquake of 1964 -- entire towns demolished or submerged, tsunami scars hundreds of feet high on cliffs, you name it. The regular warnings that come out about "The Big One" -- especially for those of us who, prompted by the warnings concerning the New Madrid earthquake zone -- don't particularly help. At the time, I can't particularly imagine the grandeur that can be found in a devastated city -- even though I realize that San Francisco wouldn't be nearly as beautiful without the seismic forces that shaped the Bay, the Golden Gate, and the peninsula.
However, I will go out on a limb here and say that my first experience with an earthquake will be a lot like the first time I was kicked by a horse......the anticipation was worse than the actual event.
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