Dominic Preziosi
Observed
Phenomena in Domestic Weather
Tornado
It was a ton of
gravel sliding down the roof. It was hundreds of cars in a high-speed pile-up. It
was the walls of my small upstairs bedroom shuddering beneath the blows of an
invisible giant. It’s what I remember waking up to—that and the voices of my
parents, raised not in anger this time but in fear, though how could I be sure
of anything in the chaotic darkness?
Next
morning, my mother and I went out to look at the damage. On the spot normally
occupied by the Lamberts’ house was a half-circle of debris—shattered sheetrock
and splintered furniture topped with a pink meringue of shredded insulation. A
picnic-table umbrella shorn of fabric, its exposed ribs mangled, was fused to the
twisted stop-sign, hundreds of yards from where it belonged on the Ryans’
patio. The sycamore in our side yard, stripped of its leaves as if this wasn’t
July but January, bore in the crook of two heavy boughs a yellow-and-white
push-mower. The steeple-like fir tree that had always stood beside it was gone,
save for the white pulp of stump rooted in the furrow.
The
insurance man was on the scene. It felt like a hundred degrees, but he wore a
hardhat and a windbreaker. The gnats shifted in a gray net around us. “If I
didn’t know better,” he ventured, tapping his thigh with a white plastic
clipboard, “I’d say tornado. Except that New Jersey doesn’t usually get tornadoes.”
My
father, grim-faced but eager, had wheeled his chair into the hallway to meet us
when we came in.
“Well?”
he asked, awaiting our report.
Tornado,
I said, embroidering the insurance man’s hypothesis with my own certainty. My
father looked appropriately impressed and a little scared. I described some of
the damage, and then he moved to the front window to get a look for himself.
“Thunderstorm” was
the official explanation. Two people down the road were killed when the limb of
a century-old oak crashed through the roof of their garage-top apartment. Three
homes were flattened, in addition to the Lamberts’, along a two-and-a-half-mile
path of destruction straight as a Texas highway. Four million dollars in total damage—that was the estimate, never to
be confirmed or refuted.
In 1977, the
technology that could have conclusively determined what happened didn’t yet
exist. No one saw a funnel cloud, and at eleven-thirty-six p.m. it might have
been too dark to see one anyway. Which maybe was a good thing, given the
outcome of the retrospective research in the two decades that followed: A
tornado with a rating of three on the Enhanced Fujita scale—a small behemoth of
a storm, in other words, with three-second gusts of one-hundred-sixty-five
miles per hour, a twisting, tightly formed cylinder more than two miles tall
with a circumference at its peak power of….
Well, what does it
matter after all of this time? New Jersey doesn’t get tornadoes, except when it does.
Thunderclap
My
mother threw shoes when she got angry. Not at anyone—which, even she would
admit, could be dangerous—but down the length of the long hallway that led to
her bedroom. From one floor below it sounded like boulders tripping down a
hillside.
“Go
ahead,” my father would shout from the downstairs hallway, wheeling his chair
around like a fielder circling beneath a high pop, eyes to the ceiling. “Keep
throwing!”
And
she did, for however long it took for her anger to ebb. From one end of the
hallway to the other and back again, pacing the distance between as if she were
playing a game of horseshoes. Sometimes the light fixtures would shake and
sway. I never actually saw plaster fall or dust drift down, but I wouldn’t have
been surprised if it did.
She
would say, some time afterward, “It’s better like this.” She would say, “Would
you rather grow up like I did, where people didn’t talk to each other for two
months?” She would say, “It’s better to get angry than to freeze people out.
Boom”—she made a sound like a thunderclap—“it’s over.”
I
could agree with her in principle, except that it was never really over. One
storm would pass, only to be followed by another, like our house was one of
those remote rocky islands at the bottom of the globe, forever under the
assault of nature, continuously scoured and strafed by the elements. One day,
alone after school, I counted twenty-seven heel- and toe-shaped holes in the
walls of the upstairs hallway.
Whiteout
I
became interested in weather when I was eight, a couple of years before the
tornado. I was in the car with my mother, heading home from the grocery store
with food for dinner. As we reached the ridge that overlooked the shallow
valley where our house was, we found ourselves overtaken by a swirling mass of
snow. One moment we had been looking at the first of the evening’s stars and
remarking on the lights of Somerville visible some twenty miles off; the next,
we were caught in what seemed like the kind of blinding blizzard I’d seen
portrayed in shows about settlers, where livestock vanish and men rope
themselves together to keep from getting separated. My mother brought the car
to a stop and activated the flashers. When she turned on the wipers, they made
a sound like a broken refrigerator and refused to move. She clenched the wheel
and stared at the white curtain that had draped itself over us.
Just as I was
about to get scared, the snow stopped. The stars showed themselves once more,
and Somerville glowed freshly in the distance. The road was gone, though, hidden under an
accumulation substantial enough to sled on.
A cruiser pulled
up alongside us, roof lights flashing. My mother lowered her window.
“Did you see
that?” the officer shouted. Thinking about him now, I realize he was probably
not much older than nineteen or twenty. I remember him as apple-cheeked, with
his hat pulled down smartly to his eyebrows. He looked as excited as I felt,
his face alive in the low green lights of his dashboard console. “I never saw
anything like it! Unbelievable!” He paused, perhaps only now noticing the fear
in my mother’s eyes. “Are you okay in there?”
My mother didn’t
answer; I assured him we were fine. We followed the flashing globes on his roof
and the twin tracks of his tires until we came to clean pavement, just another
mile or so on.
“Really?” my
father responded, after I’d rushed in to tell him. My mother followed behind,
struggling under a couple of bags of groceries. “I’m just hoping dinner is in
there somewhere,” he said, watching from his chair as she tried to balance the
load.
Bolt
from the Blue
I’ve been told I
have a good memory, and I have a vivid recollection of sitting in a rear-mounted
bicycle seat, my father’s broad back right in front of my eyes, a black stripe
of sweat darkening his shirt between his shoulder blades as he pedaled us up
the long, steep hill of our street. The reason I can remember, I think, is
because before we made it to the top, my left foot became caught in the spokes,
and as my father continued the grueling climb, my skin was peeled like the
dermis of a damp onion from the shin down across my ankle and over the top of
the foot to my big toe. It probably looked more gruesome than it was, and it
must have felt more catastrophic than it turned out to be. I was out of the
emergency room and back home in time for a late supper—hot dogs, pretzels, and
vanilla ice cream, is what I’ve always been told, which my mother served in an
attempt to make me feel better.
At the time, my
father was working in advanced delayed-fuse technology at the arsenal, a
forty-minute drive from where we lived. The day after my mishap, at his job, he
took his usual lunch-hour shortcut across the foundry floor. Along the way he
was struck by a forklift operated by a twenty-year-old enlistee from Trenton. The drive train
was later found to have malfunctioned.
My father always
said he never saw what hit him. A monthly disability check from the U.S. government made it unnecessary for my mother to go to full-time at her job as a
classroom aide in the local school’s special ed program. Whether this ever
assuaged my father’s anger, shock, rage, disbelief, depression,
what-have-you—well, that’s less certain.
I was three years
old when it happened. I seem to have many more memories of him
upright—sprinting up stairs, jumping over waves, crossing the room to kiss my
mother—than I do of him planted in his chair. Or, because I was only three,
maybe I don’t. I sometimes think the good memory for which I’d been praised was
nothing more than an active, hopeful imagination, self-nurtured and deployed as
a necessary corrective. For example, I can see my father leaping the evenly
spaced hurdles on the old cinder track behind the church auditorium—torso
snapping down to meet outstretched leg, fingertips of one hand grazing the
extended toe of the opposite foot—although I know for a fact he has never done
such a thing.
“What are you,
crazy?” he said when I first mentioned it to him. His hands gripped the arms of
the chair. “I mean, for God’s sake.”
Electrical Storm
At some point my
mother decided I should play baseball. It probably had something to do with my
father’s disability; he couldn’t do anything with me, she must have figured,
but there were other fathers who could. In spite of the refitted van with its
wide front seat and sensitive hand controls, my father was reluctant to be seen
out in his chair. So she ended up having to ferry me back and forth to the fields
on the other side of town. All I will say is that I played to the best of my
ability.
There were always
a lot of fathers at these games; at the time, the mothers—interested in the
sport or not—seemed mostly to stay at home. Many of these men were, for
whatever reason, handsome, or at least seemed so to me, based on covert
appraisals I made from the quiet of the empty bench, peering through the spaces
between the fat fingers of my brand new glove while gnawing on the rawhide
laces.
Whenever I recall
my mother sitting in the low, sagging stands like a bright flower surrounded by
hovering bees, I smell the tang of leather and taste the stiff, salty strings
of that glove, which I never used again after that single eight- or ten-game
season. I also think of the night when the proceedings were brought to an early
end by the teenaged umpire who (accurately, it turned out) predicted the
arrival of severe thunderstorms. Standing amid the parked cars while black
clouds piled up like volcanic ash in the west, my mother accepted the smiling
goodbyes of the men who’d joked with her during the game. At some point, her
hair—which she wore short but full on top, in the wedge style popular at the
time—stood up as straight as teeth on a comb. People stopped where they were to
look. A few miles distant, a silent flash lit up the sky. The air was still,
and I understand now, quite literally electric.
“Don’t you think,”
someone finally said, “you should get into your car?”
“What?” she asked,
smiling obliviously.
“Rubber tires.
They ground it. You look like you’re about to get struck by lightning.”
Her hair stayed
like that all the way home, the finer, longer tendrils touching the gray fabric
stitched across the interior of the car’s roof.
“What happened to
you?” my father asked when we came in. He’d wheeled his chair to the window
alongside the front door, as if anticipating our arrival. He was slick in
sweat, from his hairline to his toes, an occasional effect related to the
injury’s toll on his autonomic functions. He seemed less scared by his own
condition than concerned by the appearance of my mother. Her hair had settled
back onto her head in a suggestively tousled way, and her face was flushed. A
suppressed smile undermined the visible effort she made to work up worry over
what he, trapped in his chair, was going through.
“What do you
mean?” she asked, with an unconvincing lightness of tone, coming close to undo
the top two buttons of his shirt. “Oh, I’d better get you a washcloth and a
glass of water.”
While she ran to
the kitchen, I took the handles of the chair “If I didn’t know any better,” he
said as I turned him around to follow her, “I’d say she was up to something
other than a Little League game.”
At that moment,
the sky broke, making everything outside look like the bottom of a pond.
Inside, in the dim light of the front hallway, I could see through my father’s
sweat-dampened hair to his scalp. “So how’d you do tonight?” he asked.
It was the first
time he’d ever inquired, and I was so surprised I caught one of the wheels
against the doorjamb. “A double and a single,” I lied, repositioning the chair,
“with a couple of runs batted in.”
Ice
Jam
One February, we
took a trip to the Massachusetts coast. It was a way to get a vacation without having to pay summertime prices.
The motel faced a double-barreled strip the locals used as a speedway, but it
was only a short drive from the inlet whose name graced just about every
business in the small town, most of which were closed for the season. Holiday lights—strung across the main street from utility
poles—were still illuminated, even in daylight, nearly six weeks after
Christmas.
My father’s chair was
too wide to navigate the passages trenched out along the snow-covered
sidewalks. But he could still drive, and this seemed to give him some solace.
Not that there was that much to see: The winding roads to the west of the
town—“the countryside,” my father said hopefully—offered cramped, bleak
glimpses of locked-up cottages and, farther on, the municipal garages, propane
farms, and ramshackle taverns that supported the population through winter.
One morning, after
eating breakfast in the small, help-yourself kitchenette in the motel’s lobby,
we went down to the inlet. Looking out over the whitecaps from behind the
windshield, my father lifted his chin as if to gesture toward the distance. “Nova Scotia’s that way.”
The wind shook the
van. Sand spun across the asphalt of the empty parking lot and gathered against
the plowed-up snow-banks at its edges.
“Newfoundland,” my mother said.
“What?”
“Newfoundland.” She pointed in the same
direction. “Newfoundland is that way.”
“The hell it is.”
I could hear my
mother breathing through her nose. She tucked up some of her hair beneath the
blue knit hat she wore in those days, a hat she knitted herself. “I saw it on
the map,” she said.
“You must have
misread it. You’re not exactly good with maps.”
That was it for the
rest of the day. There was silence at lunch, silence at dinner, and then the
three of us watched television silently in the room until we were nearly
asleep. In the middle of the night I woke up to hear my mother helping my
father with the plastic bag he emptied his bladder into. Neither of them said a
word, and a few minutes later I could hear their light snoring. What was it
she’d said about people not talking to each other for months?
After breakfast,
we went down to the inlet again, only this time the view was much different.
Ice floes had jammed themselves up against the shore, thousands of them, one on
top of another, so that there appeared to be a glacial walkway out to the open
ocean, which looked like a deep blue river in the distance.
My father, again
behind the wheel of the van, cleared his throat. “Must have come down from Nova Scotia.”
A long minute
passed. The blue water out beyond the ice seemed to be racing by, harried by
Arctic winds. A few people had come down to look at the floes; one or two now
ventured out on top of them, reminding me of mountain climbers tentatively
seeking toe-holds. A pair of seagulls drifted into the view, and as they
hovered there—spreading their wings to hang on the hooks of the gale—I could
also see my mother adjusting the blue knit hat on her head. I waited,
motionless as those gulls, for what she’d say.
The van shuddered
under the assault of the wind. Finally, she turned around to look at me.
“Want to walk on
the ice?” she asked.
This was something
my father couldn’t do, of course, and I suppose I knew that’s why she asked me.
Yes, it had to be obvious by the look I could feel spreading across my face
that I wanted to go out on the ice. And no, I didn’t think it was fair to leave
my father behind like that. I sat on my hands and stared out the window.
“Well?” my father
shouted. I turned and managed to catch his eye in the rearview mirror. “Why
don’t you go? It’s not every day you see something like this.”
My mother didn’t
join me on the ice, which was much harder to navigate than it looked from up in
the parking lot. There were sharp, upturned edges that appeared capable of
severing a limb, and deep crevices through which swirling seawater was visible.
It was like jumping boulders in a streambed, except that there were no leafy
branches to grab hold of or smooth, rounded surfaces to land on. I caught up to
one of the mountain climbers, a woman whose face peeked like a new berry from
inside the fake-fur trim of her parka’s hood.
“Amazing!” she
shouted. “Isn’t it?”
I nodded, too cold
to answer, and looked back at the shore. My mother was huddled in the lee of a
dune, identifiable by the tiny flower of her blue hat. Farther away, and up on
the bluff, the van looked like an abandoned shed on the prairie: my father’s
lonely outpost, buffeted by winds and blowing sand.
We came back to
the inlet again the next morning. The floes were gone, having vanished as
mysteriously and quickly as they’d appeared. Once more we were met with only
the cold blue sea and the heaving crests tossing strings of white froth. We
were back to New Jersey in time for dinner.
January
Thaw
In high school, I read
the weather report every morning over the PA system. Meteorology was not part
of the curriculum. Even if it were I’m not sure I would have taken a class in
it. I had begun to realize I was less interested in the science than I was in
the observable phenomena—perhaps, even, the poetry. And when I finally did get
around to taking a real meteorology course at the community college, I found I
had little faculty for the facts and figures. The science made it cold, distant,
and unreal. Concepts like hypertrophic convection and thermal occlusion
appealed to me, but on a different level than they did to my classmates, who
joylessly crammed and committed to memory the textbook definitions of these and
other concepts. Flash cards for cloud classification? Why not wait for the sky’s
own serendipitous samples—the crenellated towers of cumulonimbus or the flaky
pie-crust layers of cirrocumulus?
But that was
later. In January of my senior year of high school, we endured what I referred
to in my morning announcement as a “brutal stretch of winter weather, not about
to release its tenacious grip.” Two days later, I awoke to what sounded like
the same barreling winds from the west that had battered us all month. I
imagined the gales prying loose the topmost layers of snow to send it skittering
through the crevasses and fissures of the month-old drifts, or torturing the
skeletal forms of the bare trees. Yet when I raised the shade I saw that it was
raining outside. The icy piles had dwindled to soft melting mounds, mostly gray
in color. The bare pavement glistened. The trees stood straight and tall,
luxuriating, it seemed, perhaps even budding, beneath the steady showers.
The tenacious grip
had loosened, perhaps for the season. My memorable phrase lived on, though, with
some classmates and a teacher or two invoking it facetiously now and then until
graduation.
Hard
Killing Frost
My first and only
job has been with a midsize radio station serving the state’s central and
northern counties. For a while I made an effort at becoming a reporter. But I
lacked the necessary mix of ambition and curiosity the job called for. There
were car accidents and sewage bonds and the installation of a new computer
network at the community college; there was once a murder, and also the
resignation of an alderman. I worked up the necessary energy to turn each of
these into passable stories. But I did not develop a beat. I did not land
scoops.
I spent most of my
time reading the wire reports from the National Weather Service. The station already
had a weather “correspondent,” an older woman with gray curls whose job it was
to turn the bulletins into golden oratory when warranted, or to comment on the
indicators of seasonal shift and how these affected farming and crops. Her
interest, however, seemed mainly to be the fall foliage and spring gardening
seasons, when she turned out florid streams of what sounded like a dowager’s
idea of lyric verse—it was all “ochre tunnels” and “verdant carpets.” Winter
storms did not interest her, nor did the pavement-buckling heat waves of July.
Only grudgingly did she speak about a September micro-burst—three inches of
rain in fourteen minutes—that had sent a tributary of the Raritan River over its banks and into the business district of the surrounding town.
One day the
station manager noticed me pulling the weather bulletins, and he asked if I’d
like to fill in for the woman, who’d taken a vacation.
It was the chance I
needed, and I took advantage of it. The woman was within a couple of months of
retirement anyway, and when she came back she seemed more relieved than upset
about my taking over. Finding the bulletins more dry and uninformative than I’d
realized when I’d only scanned them surreptitiously, I convinced the station
manager to the double the time allotted to the spot. There was more—much
more—to talk about than those terse, disembodied lines indicated.
I worked much
harder than I’d worked at being a reporter. It didn’t happen overnight. But
then, one morning in late autumn, it came together. I spoke into the black
microphone mounted before me. “Tonight, a hard killing frost will mark an effective
end to the growing season.” The words hung there a moment. It was the first
phrase that really felt like my own, the first I was truly proud of, and in the
three-minute reports I gave each day, I stacked more bricks onto the foundation
I was building. Since that time, I have not missed filing an item, and—from the
letters (and later, e-mail) received—I’ve even won a loyal if small following.
My father has
become one of my most ardent listeners. He says I’m better than the Weather
Channel. He’ll call a couple of times a week to commend me for a particular
line or two, or to take issue with how I’ve characterized the appearance of
contrails in the late morning sky. Since the death of my mother, he’s taken to
listening to radio online, as well as keeping up with a number of newspapers,
using the computer I bought for him.
Record
Low
When my mother
died, we had to delay the graveside ceremony. The priest, a tall, plainspoken
man with a bullet-shaped head and thick, black-framed glasses, explained it with
polite candor. “It’s been so cold, the ground is frozen solid. Happens every
couple of years.”
I
wheeled my father to the edge of the parking lot, where we could look out over
the small cemetery at the far end of the church’s property. My parents had
purchased side-by-side plots many years earlier, soon after his injury. The
ground fell away gently at first, and then, just beyond the last row of
headstones, much more steeply.
From atop this
small mountain, you could on clear days see all the way to Pennsylvania, and this was a clear day, so
cold and bright that it seemed the whole thing might shatter at any moment,
like pieces of glass falling from a frame. The muscles in my father’s face were
slack, so that everything was hanging as loose and useless as the legs I’d
piled blankets over. I don’t know how I looked, only that the wind raking
itself over us made it even harder to breathe the cold air in.
“What’s going to
happen now?” my father asked. At first I didn’t know what he meant. I was about
to tell him we’d still have the funeral mass, we’d still go ahead with what we
were supposed to do. But he spoke again before I could. “It was supposed to be
the other way. I was supposed to go first. What’s going to happen now?”
Meteorology
When I visit, he
asks me to take him outside if the weather is warm. But he insists that, before
pushing him back up the ramp he had built, I wipe the wheels of any leaf debris
and gravel they might have gathered. He even sometimes has me sweep a path
before him in the backyard, so that there’s a better chance of things remaining
clean.
“It’s something
your mother never did,” he says, “no matter how many times I asked her. That’s
why our floors were always so dirty.”
I don’t remember
the floors being dirty, but I never say anything about it. Instead, I define
for him the words that sometimes appear in my radio spots that he doesn’t know. Fractus: Ragged, detached cloud
fragments. Virga: the fine
particulate matter, usually snow or ice, that’s visible as mist in the skies
but that evaporates before reaching the ground. Graupel: Pellets of ice often mistaken for hail. I still rarely
make use of the overly technical vocabulary of the science of weather, preferring
to stick with the words and concepts that paint themselves as pictures for me,
or that make the hair on my arms stand up or that hasten my breathing. I still want
to hear gravel on the roof and get stuck in a snow squall.
If it rains or is
too cold, we sit in the kitchen, where the humming computer keeps us company.
He sometimes dozes off in his chair, at which point I’ll pour out whatever
remains of the single glass of wine he allows himself. He continues to defy the
odds. Even the home attendants comment on it; save for the occasional misfiring
of a respiratory or glandular or other autonomic function, he remains robust
and lucid, and his appetite’s good too.
My mother proved
to be an outlier of a different kind—stricken as she was, suddenly, before the
age of sixty. Now and then, before she died, she would talk about the
electrical storm and how her hair had stood on end, but never when my father
was nearby. She would get a strange, distant look on her face that I sometimes
thought approximated the look she wore that night—and that I imagine she might
have worn the morning she suffered her stroke, upstairs, caught in a different
kind of storm and far from my father.
Did he circle
beneath her then, as he used to whenever she launched shoes down the hallway?
Did he shout up through the ceiling, mistaking the thump of her collapse for
another of her cyclonic outbursts?
I never ask. I just
want to believe that he did. I like to think the climate of the house remained volatile
and thunderous, the kind of environment my mother said was healthy. The storm
builds, and boom—it’s over, at least until the next one.
I like to think of
that instead of the alternative. I prefer that to the slow fall in temperature
and the silent gathering of ice on crops, plants and lawns, over the course of
several long hours in the night or the many years of a marriage, so gradual it
might not be noticed until it’s too late, when there’s nothing to do but gather
the blackened vines and wonder, winter long, why you didn’t pay attention to all
the signs around you.
©2010 by Dominic Preziosi
