((Excerpted from Livejournal entry, 8/22/2005))

...We turned on all the radios - there IS a dedicated weather channel, but the Severe Weather Alerts were on all the channels, breaking through music and talk shows with impunity. We listened and tried to figure out where the tornadoes were, while the store executives chattered nervously on Channel 2 where WE (the logistics team) could hear them, but the customers couldn't. The whole day we were feather-light on our feet, occasionally glancing out the back door, or slipping outside to pull stock out of the seventeen or so metal trailers behind the building, then skittering back inside quickly - feeling for all the world like ants under the shadow of some great, winged bird.

At the end of my shift, having heard at last that the tornadoes had been tracked toward Stoughton (30 minutes south of us, where J-.'s mother and brother live) I went out to the car and looked around, then started nervously for home. Half of me wanted to drive up to the small rise I'd found - the only place with enough elevation to see any distance - and LOOK for the stormclouds - but worry over J-.'s family kept me headed for home. This ambition lasted until I got out of the parking lot and turned 90 degrees, towards the south.

I've never seen such a cloud. Words fail to describe it. The bulk of it was roils of fluffy, white mashed-potato texture that went up..and up... and up... At the top was a wide, soft-edged dinner-plate expanse of pure whiteness that curved out like a halo. from this fell great white curtains of what I suppose was rain, seen from a distance - but not to the ground, oh no. From cloud to cloud it fell, alternately hiding and revealing layered recesses within. The area around the storm cell was clear and impossibly blue, and sunlight gleamed across the tops of it, filling it with a scrubbed-white brilliance that seemed to bely the path of destruction beneath it.

But the size, the size is what threw me.
Go to a high hill, you who are in the East Bay.
Look across at the sea, let your eye travel from one end of the Bay to the other. Now take that distance and stand it vertically.

That is the height of your cloud.

For the width, darken every place you see city, hidden by torrential veils of rain. Let the cloud spin rapidly past you, and realize that you cannot actually see all the way under it. I saw all this in little snapshot glances over my shoulder, driving home, and finally had to pull over and gaze in awe. I'd changed my radio to the local NPR station, and the music they were playing was "The Shaker Loops", by John Adams - which is composed, apparently, of 730 nervous violins playing over each other endlessly.

When watching an awesome atmosphere-generated juggernaut roll over residential districts 40 miles south of you, this sort of music, while undeniably thematic, is not exactly conducive to mental health.

I reached the house, finally, in a very high-pitched state. No, J- hadn't heard from anyone, but he was sure they were fine. J-. attempted to express to me that tornadoes aren't dangerous. To be sure, tornadoes are flashy and all, but compared to floods, droughts and epidemics they do very little concrete damage - it's just that that damage is so very concentrated in nature that frightens everyone. A tornado fifty miles away won't hurt you. Their paths of destruction are, on a Gaian scale, too precise to be of any large concern. Tornadoes stitch across the face of the earth like the needles of a sewing-machine - the microlife around the seam may be affected, but the garment itself is unharmed.

Despite all this complex reasoning, one man was killed and twenty-one homes destroyed in Stoughton. At my urging, we called his mother the next day. The path of destruction missed her house by a city block. Luck, perhaps. A near thing certainly.

So. It's been a year, now, since I moved out here. All in all, I am reminded of a certain passage in a certain book;
I must have danger.
Be patient. I have promised, and I will perform.