I’m always a bit torn on what to do when the sky darkens, the wind howls, and the rain cascades in horizontal sheets.
From March through May, I keep careful watch on the clouds, and living beyond the decibel borders of any working tornado siren, feel some trepidation when the trees bend beyond a thirty-degree angle. Sometimes I flip on the TV for up-to-the-millisecond reports, which inevitably results in (A) being told to adopt an annoying doctrine incessantly referred to as “Weather Awareness,” or (B) semi-hysterical admonitions to dive into the basement or take shelter in an interior room.
There’s a problem on both fronts. For starters, if I wasn’t already “weather aware,” I wouldn’t feel compelled to watch a moderately condescending, “certified TV meteorologist.” Blissfully ignorant, I’d be strolling the back forty, getting beaned and/or decapitated by golf-ball sized hail, shingles, limbs, sheets of tin, and smallish, airborne livestock. Such patronizing advice accomplishes little, save to make me “weatherperson aware,” defined as an epiphany that said weatherperson is of zero help, and that I should have just gone online and found a radar map.
As for the remainder of their advice … TV meteorologists have obviously never seen my house. There’s no such animal as an interior room, and every wall is exposed to the onslaught of the elements. Hoping for safe harbor in my joint would be a fool’s errand. In the event of a twister, you could expect a thorough pummeling by guitars, whittling knives, and an ever-growing selection of canned vegetables, which I continue to purchase but will never open because I dislike canned vegetables.
This leaves the basement, or as I lovingly refer to it, the snake hole.
This house, built in 1966, was constructed on the footprint of a structure that predates cars, phones, electric lights, aspirin, and Joe Biden’s parents. The basement retains its original character, with the unpleasant embellishments one would expect of a glorified cave dug out of the rock 150 years ago. It’s wetter than the Amazon rainforest (a humidifier runs 365 days a year), with cracked walls and a Minoan maze of pipes and wires that lead to nothing and nowhere. It holds a furnace, water heater, sump-pump hole, and an uninvited rodent population that is held somewhat in check by the equally uninvited serpent population.
I hate the snake hole. I never go down there without carrying a flashlight and machete. I’ve dispatched maybe two snakes over seven years, but that’s because my machete skills are subpar—and it strikes me as distinctly unwise to fire a shotgun around a propane furnace.
Inclement weather of the extremely dire and terrifying sort has sent me fleeing to the snake hole only a couple of times. On both occasions, I sat on a plastic garbage bag with the machete, flashlight, and an off-brand weather radio. Water pooled around the bag, while my dog growled at the sounds of skittering and slithering. On these occasions, I took the opportunity to escape into philosophical reverie, pondering whether it is better to meet one’s eternal reward via tornado or multiple copperhead bites.
I’m thinking that’s probably a tie, but suspect I will go chicken and once again descend into the bowels of the snake hole should Mother Nature pitch another one of her frequent fits.
Thank heavens I’m weather aware.
This column was originally published in the May 2020 issue of Missouri Life magazine.
