Heavy Weather
Of late I've been struggling with living in Sioux Falls, but tonight was a small reprieve. Rain came, accompanied by thunderstorms. I remember talking to a friend of my parents, an old missionary originally from Iowa (not too far from here), who had moved to Portland, Oregon, and never come back. I asked her what she missed about Iowa, and her response came without a pause for thought:
"The storms - the lightening, the thunder..."
And really, I've yet to experience something like it elsewhere. Cool air from Canada does battle with warm air from the plains here, and the result is unpredictable, gripping weather.
Last night we woke up to the sound of hail coming down on the roof - like emptying a bucket of marbles on a wood floor.
People here take it in stride; although weather is a source of most small talk here, it goes without saying that life consists of a battle against elements. Perhaps it's the farming in their blood. They grin, bear it, and use it in place of what would otherwise be silence between acquaintances (and friends - and relatives too, for that matter).
A little over a month ago I was driving north when it began to snow. The highway soon became a sludgy mixture of dirt, gravel, oil, and snow. I drove on, tightly gripping the steering wheel, too far from home to turn around and too far from my destination to feel anything but a foreboding distraught building in the pit of my stomach. I don't know if it was my slightly turning the wheel or if my tires hit excess sludge; I began spinning and found myself pointing towards oncoming traffic from the ditch at the side of the freeway. I called K, too confused to really explain myself or tell her where I'd crashed. Not 10 minutes had passed when a True Dakotan pulled his Chevy pickup a few feet up from where I was stuck. He emitted a single sentence before reaching in his cab for some tow rope. A minute later I was righted, facing north again, from the side of the interstate. I unfastened his tow rope and stumbled with a thank you. He shrugged, the way a True Dakotan might if you stated the obvious, perfunctory, or stupid. Before leaving, in his second and final sentence, he said something that meant "good luck."
It's hard to explain how, in California1, the wind doesn't blow your car around the road as you drive it, how snowstorms can't thwart any plans you've made, how there are never any weather-related power outages, and how nobody really cares about the weather report.
In this place we, like the Babylonians and Jews on top of Mt. Carmel, pray to God about weather.
1Granted, this year was exceptional for some.
8:28:41 PM 
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