Growing up in Kansas City, without mountains, ocean or wilderness, I developed a fondness for the raging thunderstorms that lit up the Midwestern skies. So when I moved to Redding, I was disappointed to learn that the rains took place in the winter, when the absence of extreme temperature clashes meant very little violent weather. Boring storms, in other words.
Well, that was OK, I told myself. Who needs wild storms when you have mountains? And not just mountains, but volcanoes! And wilderness! And cougars and bears! And people who live next door who build replicas of Civil War cannons and shoot them off when you least expect it! And for the first few years that I lived here, the storms tended to be rather mild-mannered. At their worst, days of pouring, sodden, vertical sheets.
Soon, though, I learned that no two years here were ever the same. And one year my husband and I decided to splurge and spend a romantic weekend in a B&B on the northern California coast, paying extra for a room with a view of the ocean. And we decided that it would be fun to wind our way to the coast on one of those hair-raising tertiary highways that unfortunate, unsuspecting city people are always somehow getting themselves onto during the worst winter storm of the century. As we drove, we noticed a lot of downed limbs. Gee, we said, there must have been some really high winds come through here! Then we drove past a car on the side of the road, its front windshield smashed in by a fallen tree limb that measured about three feet in diameter. Wow, we exclaimed—really really high winds!
We finally arrived on the coast and began looking for the sign to the B&B. Dusk was settling and the landscape beginning to darken, but oddly, no lights appeared in any of the dwellings we spotted. Richard decided that we had missed the turn-off and so turned around and took the road he deemed most likely. And as we turned, we saw the sign for the B&B lying in the grass.
Arriving at the inn, we learned that a hurricane had wandered up the coast from the South Pacific and that all the power was out for a hundred miles up and down the coast. The storm had bounced off the coast back out to sea, but it was expected to return in the night. All the restaurants were closed so the owners served a cozy dinner of bacon and potato soup, crusty bread and red wine. And when they sent us off to bed with a snifter of brandy, things were feeling snug.
However. In the middle of the night, the hurricane did indeed return. The storm shutters had been fastened, and this inn had successfully occupied this spot for almost a hundred years. Even so, the minute the hurricane made landfall, I never slept another second. The wind roared. It whined. It whistled and screamed like a banshee. It beat on those storm shutters like a possessed ax-murderer. I fully expected the storm shutters to blow off into the night and the wind to explode through the windows, spraying us with a slurry of water and broken glass.
This storm, hands-down, was absolutely the most exciting storm I have ever experienced!
And we made it safely to morning, when we headed back inland as soon as the eye of the hurricane gave us an opening.
Of course, since then, I have experienced several exciting storms. There was the storm that hit in the wee hours of the morning and tore the rolled roofing off our guest house. There was the storm that wrenched the cap off the stovepipe to our woodstove, our sole source of heat, sending torrents of water gushing down the creosoted innards of the stovepipe and into the fire itself, extinguishing it immediately and filling the house with a stench like rancid ham burned to a crisp in a skillet. As anyone might have predicted, this happened at midnight on a Saturday night. And then there was the time we got caught on I-80 when the levees broke.
So, now I realize I get to have it all; mountains, cougars, wilderness and exciting storms. It’s paradise here, isn’t it? Aren’t we lucky?
