WAIT FOR IT .....

It’s counter intuitive.  I know this.

Sane people would simply hang out in the basement, just in case.  Or maybe they would decide to take a drive to the north, maybe about 100 miles.  Oh heck, make that 200, just to be on the safe side.  Sane people keep careful watch on their weather apps, hoping all the while that predicted storms would dissipate and the warnings would be withdrawn.

People lacking a fair bit of their sanity keep watch on their phones too, but it’s not in hopes of calmer skies.  It’s for the tiny little adrenaline rush we get out of knowing that we’re ‘in the zone’.

We are a crazy bunch, we prairie people.

‘Tis the season, here on the prairies.  June and July can brew up the most impressive storms, and these days the technology of predicting the weather is getting much more refined.  We can enjoy a full week of anticipation out of ‘favourable conditions’ as the pre-storm days tick by.  The sane people pray for calm; the rest of us get a bit of a buzz as we watch the potential storm models expand.  And an elite few actually make a living out chasing after storms all over the continent.  Hats off to the Tornado Hunters – they capture some amazing photos of Mother Nature at her most fearsome.  They are out and out crazy. 

Most prairie folks occupy the middle ground of staying put and dealing only with the storms that come to them.

Over the past two weeks we have been under two watches.  The first one was a lot of wind and an inch and a half of rain but really nothing to write home about.  As soon as the sun came out though, and we were dealing with feelings of let down, we were told “just wait till Thursday!”  The excitement percolated back up.

Building a really good storm is a lot like making the perfect cake: you need the correct ingredients and they have to be stirred in at the exact right time: our local kitchen was fully stocked with everything that was needed.  Tornado hunters from far and wide turned their trucks for southeast Saskatchewan.  They even named a few towns most likely to be involved and ours was one of them.  It makes a person sit up and take notice when they get that personal.  Those storm hunting guys know their stuff.

Thursday was a different day, alright.  I don’t know that I would use the word ‘ominous’ if I hadn’t known the forecast, but the suspense was palpable.  There was heat and humidity; dead calm interspersed with windy intervals and then back to breathless calm.  The cloud formations were not necessarily threatening, but definitely weird.  I decided the best thing I could do was walk around the yard and take ‘before’ pictures; provided a tornado didn’t wipe out my camera too, we would have a reminder of what we had lost.

Mid afternoon found us sitting on our deck pondering why you always feel you have enough insurance until a time like this.  Everything we could park under a roof was parked under a roof.  We had discussed, at length, which was the correct corner of the basement to head to and I had ‘called’ the mattresses on the beds down there for the extra cushioning safety.  There was nothing left to do but wait.

It missed us by about 30 miles.  The air went cold but the hail that caused this was wrecking trees, cars, and houses to the south.  The power was off for 10 hours because the storm flooded our main source of electricity in Estevan.  We put on jackets and barbequed smokies and ate out on the deck, texting and checking Facebook for news of how friends and family had fared.  The storm had lived up to its billing, but everyone was safe.

We Saskatchewan people love our “Land of the Living Skies” reputation.  We all live with our eyes to the horizon and revel in the feelings of both being puny in the face of Nature, and strength and self reliance in ourselves at the same time.  This prairie philosophy inspires a spirit in us as big as our skies.  Maybe that’s why, even though we know it’s a little crazy, we’re already wondering when the next storm will brew up.  We’re already waiting for it.