Scary Weather!

I remember standing in the kitchen of my Kansas City home, adjustable wrench in hand, on a hot summer afternoon in the 1950s. I was watching a huge tornado move west to east across a residential area several miles to my south. My plan was simple - sensible or not: if the tornado swung north, toward my home, I would run outside and use my wrench to close the valve on the natural gas line. Then I would come back into the house, pull the main breaker on the electrical supply, and hurry to the basement to sit out the storm.

The tornado did not swing to the north. It just sort of petered out and ended. Later inspection of its path revealed houses in piles of pick-up-sticks, refrigerators and washing machines, sofas, beds, and every other kind of household furnishings tossed about the devastated neighborhood.

That was a scary storm, but not the scariest to make me tremble: that was while on board a U.S. Army Transport - a troopship - on the South China Sea, during a typhoon. I used to try to tell the story of that unimaginable violent weather, until it became clear that every listener appeared to believe it was just another wild exaggeration. Was it? Had the event grown wilder in 65 years of memory?

Yesterday I chanced to meet an old friend on a street corner. I say old friend because he is in his 90s, and I have known him for at least 15 years. He and his wife had just returned from a peaceful little cruise on the Great Lakes. He excitedly described his cruise until I remarked that after spending an aggregate of about six weeks on an Army troopship, I had no hankering for any time aboard a floating vessel.

He laughed and assured me there was a vast difference between the two sailings. Then, typical of an aging world War II Veteran, he began to describe some of his own troopship experience. The worse part, he vowed, was being caught in a typhoon on the South China Sea. He described how the bow of the ship would rise high out of the water, then slam violently down again. Then, as the bow went deep into the trough of the wave, the fan tail would rise high out of the water, exposing the screws, the ships propellers, to the air. They would gain speed and whine loudly, as a huge wall of water broke over the bow of the ship. He spoke of looking out into the violent blackness that surrounded the vessel and the realization that it you went overboard you were a dead man... you could never have been found even if the ship could turn around. All exactly as I remembered it!

I know there are seamen who have experienced this sort of weather on more than one occasion. They could probably top our stories for scariness. But for a couple of old landlubbers, like my friend and I, it was a horrible experience.

Yesterday, however, I found a bit of comfort in having my own aging memories verified.