Twister!

OMG, OMG – I can’t believe it!. Dad just woke me up to say there was a tornado forming down the road in the direction of Twister Diner! Have tried to ring Dom to see if him and his mom are okay, but the lines are down and my mobile isn’t working. Dad reminded me they’ve got a state of the art storm shelter and told me they’ll be fine. I’m just praying he’s right.

Anyway, right now I’m in our shelter with Dad, and writing this blog entry on my laptop… To be honest the real reason is I’m doing this is I’m trying to keep myself distracted. Between you and me, I’ve never been so scared in all my life! Once the internet is back online, I’ll post this…if we survive the night – which right now I’m not so sure about. It sounds like all hell is breaking loose outside! 

Okay, deep breaths, Jules, think happy thoughts…  Mustang, that will do. Finally finished the rocker cover and presented it to Dom earlier today. You should’ve seen his face. He looked like a kid at Christmas. Great to make his day like that, and even better to see that great smile of his come back. That’s been missing for too long.

That didn’t work for long – the rain is now pelting down so hard, I can’t think about anything else. It sounds like someone is trying to smash up the roof of our shelter with a hammer. But trying to think positive, at least it’s rain – you can bet a few farmers are probably dancing in their fields right now. Please, let this be the end of the drought.

Dad is arranging buckets around the shelter at the moment. Water seems to be getting in everywhere. If the storm doesn’t let up soon, this place is going to be resembling a swimming pool— Jeez, something in the yard just crashed over. Even if the twister itself doesn’t directly hit us, you can bet it’s going to take days to clean up all the mess outside. I go cold knowing what a twister can do – smashing up houses like they are made out of matchwood. And if a person gets caught up by one… *Shivers* 

I know you’re not here, can’t experience this like I can, but I want to try and capture what it’s like to be here right now. There’s a really damp, earthy smell in the air and listening to the howling wind and the storm siren in the distance, is raising the hairs on my neck. It’s hard not to imagine it as a living creature, something alive that’s angry and tearing everything that it can… Okay, I’ve just had an awesome idea – I’m going to record the storm so you can at least hear what I can:

I told you! Scary or what! Hang on, the wind is starting to die down – the twister is running out of steam! Yep, Dad, thinks so too…

…Okay, another five minutes and it’s gone real quiet out there. Dad’s cracking the hatch open. I’ll report back in a moment…

…We’re back in the house! The sky is clear again and that’s really odd. I know tornadoes can disappear quickly, but the storm clouds that go with them don’t just vanish like that. If it wasn’t for everything scattered all across our yard and the ground still being soaked, I wouldn’t be able to quite believe a tornado had almost hit us. Strange, really strange.

Dad’s just come into my room pointing out it’s 2am and I need to sleep. He’s also promised that we’ll head over Twister Diner first thing in the morning. If there’s any damage to the diner, I’ll do all I can to help them fix it up. Know Dad will too.

So I guess for now this is your storm-chasing reporter, Jules Eastwood, signing off. Take care, everyone.

Black Blizzards!

So much for hoping things might get better…around here it’s been getting worse – much worse! The weather reports have been filled with forecasts for black blizzards and they’ve been striking right across the mid-west. Seems we’re not alone in this party in Oklahoma. Turns out Mr Mathews was right – this is like a replay of the dust bowl of the 30s. It’s all because the farmers have been ploughing their crops back in. The problem is when you also have no rain for months on end, that means oven-baked topsoil. Throw in a bit of wind and jackpot, you’ve won the dust storm lottery. 

Everybody is hoping, praying, for rain, and everyone seems to think it’s all the weathermen’s fault. Talk about shooting the messenger! All I know is that farms are going bust real quick. A few are still managing to ride it out somehow, but they are barely making enough money to cover their costs. Of course the price for things like bread have gone through the roof. Now we have to import a lot of the wheat we use from abroad. Some people say, and I think they may be right, if things carry on like this for another year, we’ll see people fighting for food in the supermarkets. Now in this country with so many people owning a gun, rioting and personal firepower make a pretty bad mix. So like I was saying, for all sorts of reasons it’s gotta rain or it’s going to start getting ugly, fast.

Things are grinding everyone down. I’ve even picked up on Dom’s habit when I visit Twister Diner. They have an old barometer there that he taps every time he walks past to see if the needle moves. I’ve found myself doing the same, but that stupid needle keeps pointing to fair, like it’s been glued there. All the pictures of twisters they’ve got plastered over the walls of the diner, seem an impossible memory now. But of course they were real, much too real. This vid reminds me reminds me just how scary tornadoes can be in real life.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e6JL1W9wZHg

Hard to believe that people like the Sky Hawks would deliberately go chasing after them. Brave and crazy all wrapped up together. Of course Dom’s dad was the bravest of them all…Sigh. Let’s just say is there’s been far too much suffering around here – and this drought is making it just worse. For all of us caught up in this, here’s praying there will be some light at the end of tunnel soon. Keep the faith, people.

Dust Storm!

A photo of the dust storm hitting from the 1930s!

So the big news this week is an actual dust storm hit school today! It all started when Miss Malory was droning on about compound fractions in math, when the kids near the window started hollering to come and see. It was instant chaos, with Miss Malory shouting at us to keep away from the windows (which was just as well)!

The entire horizon, which to be honest, is pretty boring with its endless baked cornfields, had been replaced by a huge cloud of dirt rolling towards us like a tidal wave. I managed to capture this brief vid of it on my phone. 

I mean, how awesome is that! One minute we were in daylight and the next that dust storm hit and it was like someone had turned off the sun. Luckily there was no one near the windows when they blew in, but there was glass everywhere. Of course Clara (the cheerleader who makes my life hell) screams her head off. I also heard a few tough-guy jocks whimpering, one doing the full-nine-yards, falling to his knees and praying. I have to admit that dust storm howled loud enough at one point to make me think the school might be ripped off its foundations. Then as Miss Malory was telling everyone to keep calm, it blows over and it’s all blue sky again outside. But as the dirt storm swirled away you should have seen the car lot. It looked like somebody had gone mad and decided to give every vehicle a brown paint job. Had to admit it put a smile on my face when the jocks-with-wheels, were the first out of the door to examine their scratched-up paintwork. Seems mother nature has a sense of humor after all.

Of course after the dust storm everybody was excited and wondering if this meant the rain would come back next. But that hope didn’t last long. Mr Mathews told us during English, that dust storms like that had hit during the Great Depression. Apparently, the drought back then had gone on for so long that the wind blew up the topsoil into the awesome sounding black blizzards. Mathews said that the book, Grapes of Wrath, by Steinbeck, is all about the  people who had to live through it all. Will have to give that a look sometime. Anyway, check out Wikipedia about it all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dust_Bowl

So trying to lighten the note (yet again), here are my favourite ideas of yours for the two songs to and from school. 

For heading to school: Rebel Rebel by David Bowie:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U16Xg_rQZkA&feature=player_embedded

And escaping home: School’s Out by Alice Cooper:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cMe0P_DqmCg

You guys have an ironic sense of humor and have obviously been talking to your parents! ;o)

Here’s to better times ahead.