Summer: A Disaster Story

When I was 5, I tried wearing a two-piece to the lake. It was one of the ones for little girls, with the little crop top. No bikini nonsense or anything like that. I think I thought that this was what girls were supposed to wear. I’m still not sure why my mom bought it for me.

I wore it once.

The problem is, little girls also want to play. We want to jump off of docks, practicing our cannonballs and our dives and our can openers and all of our other fun, fancy ways to get in the water over and over and over again.

The problem is, when you jump in the water, and you don’t have boobs, and you’re wearing a two piece, the top just goes up, up, up.

For a five year old, aware enough to know that girls always wear shirts even when boys don’t have to, the panic and embarrassment of my top riding up every time I jumped in the water was too much. It ruined a whole day of swimming, and ruined two-pieces for me for the next ten to fifteen years.

I don’t have the riding up problem anymore, but please don’t look my way when I dive in, because I spend the perigee of my in-water trajectory frantically pulling my bottoms back up.

One day at the lake, not the day of the two-piece fiasco, a field near the parking lot caught fire. Apparently someone had put a piece of paper under a curve of a glass bottle, and it caught fire in the hot sun, and started a small wildfire. Like how you might, allegedly, burn ants. This was the east coast, so wildfires weren’t all that common, at least not to a five year old. I could never understand how they knew the fire started that way; the paper must have burned, and surely there were multiple pieces of glass around? How could they know?

I was very relieved that our car did not burn. I am not sure if this was a realistic thing to be concerned about, but it was my main concern. I was hot, and tired, and I wanted to go home.

One summer, out west, a canyon near me burned. Fires are common in the west, in the same way that poison ivy is common but it never really constitutes a direct threat to my well-being. Fires were not common, to me, so proximate to my home. I monitored it constantly, refreshing websites and keeping track of every acre gained and lost by the firefighting crews.

This fire was started by someone at a gun range, firing a weapon expressly prohibited at said gun range, due to its propensity to spark. Not being a gun person, I don’t remember the details. But I am fairly sure that firing a weapon that emits sparks in a field of dry brush in the high alpine desert of the Rockies in mid-summer feels like an obvious way to start a forest fire. And lo and behold, a forest fire did start.

Fires were not, and are not, unknown to the county, but with so much uninhabited land for them to burn, and the Forest Service’s diligent controlled burning, a fire so close felt extraordinarily threatening.

In the years since, fires there have become bigger, more common, and closer to town. A few years ago, a large wild fire was licking the edges of the yards of people I consider friends. Instagram was flooded with haunting, surreal pictures of places I knew shrouded in unfamiliar catastrophe.

I don’t know if the cars were okay; it seemed like that would be the least of everyone’s worries.

I was glad I wasn’t there. I am not a big fan of (un)natural disasters.

Another summer, I was working in a tall building, surrounded by short buildings. One afternoon, a funnel cloud appeared, sirens went off, and we all got emails telling us to, well, maybe not be in the tall building anymore.

I thought I was being quick, beating the storm — but I also had to go to the bank on the way home. So I drove ten blocks north to the bank, listening to some sick jams to drown out the sound of heavy rain and hail and wind, missing nearly entirely the city-wide sirens letting everyone else know to get inside and take shelter.

Even if I had heard them, I wouldn’t have known what they meant.

I’m not from somewhere with tornadoes.

I made it to the bank, which looked closed, even though it was only 2pm. With my car parked in the parking lot, I could finally hear the sirens, and realized I had probably just done something very, very stupid. I debated for a minute whether sitting in my car would be safe enough, or whether I should try to go into the bank. Thinking of the scene from Twister when it just lift up entire trucks and cows, I thought maybe inside the building was best.

I opened the car door — I don’t know if you’ve ever opened a car door on the edges of a tornado but it’s not exactly a controlled swing. So now in addition to worrying about getting sucked up into a funnel cloud I was also worried about busting the driver side door off my car. Not that that would matter, I realize in retrospect, if the whole car was twistered away.

I ran (or rather, huddled quickly against the multi-directional precipitation and swirling winds) to the door of the bank, and I don’t remember if I knocked or someone saw me coming. A woman let me in. There were a number of other people sitting in the bank, all looking at me like I was crazy. I guess I was. At some point we were let into the “tornado shelter”, which was really just a back office. I recall there was some conversation about whether to open it and let more people in — but this was all happening in Spanish, which I don’t really speak.

Everyone was trying to figure out what the current status was: was the tornado still happening? Were the sirens still going off? Did we need to be in the shelter or could we come out? Eventually we left the “shelter” and just sat around the regular bank lobby — it was still raining but not like crazy anymore. I got my banking done, which felt oddly surreal in that moment.

It became clear that the danger had passed, and people started to trickle out of the bank. I don’t think the tornado ever touched down anywhere, and as I drove back home and the sun was coming out, the only reminders of the storm were the accumulated balls of hail slowly bouncing off the car, some debris on the road, and a new commitment to myself that I would never, ever live anywhere with tornadoes every again.

So I moved to a volcanically active tectonic fault line.