(Un) Fair Weather Friends
Meredith Phillips tries not to be scared of Texas’ bugs.
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The preferred method of dealing with a scorpion is to ignore it. It is said that they won’t attack unless you touch them. So if you spy one on your cheek out of the corner of your eye, just pretend it isn’t there and you should be fine. But keep your other eye out for its traveling companion.
You also don’t want a brown recluse spider to bite your face. My landlady’s boyfriend and her previous boyfriend were both bitten by this special kind of treacherous spider while sleeping. Both are alive and well, although one almost went blind and the other developed the telltale black line running up his arm toward his heart that can only mean one thing: blood poisoning.
In short,if you’re in this state and anything with teeth comes near you, hide. If it finds you and bites you, go to the doctor. And if it’s a snake, take your time. Walking fast will just distribute the poison through your bloodstream more quickly.
THREATS
Threats from the Sky
People say that the sky,like everything else, is bigger in Texas. That’s convenient; it takes a sizeable sky to accommodate the golf ball-sized hail that we live in the shadow of every spring.
The only natural disasters from which Texans seem to be exempt are earthquakes and tsunami waves. Our vast geographical diversity means we are in the perfect position to host flash floods, tornadoes, sandstorms, hurricanes, and starting this spring, a new kind of hazard from above: smoke attacks, springing from our typically friendly neighbors down south.
But in this climate, even fair weather can be threatening. People of my pigmentation and temperament (pink and non-pioneering, respectively) simply would not have settled here, certainly not before the advent of Freon and SPF 50. What probably happened is that the early settlers were simply too hot to leave once they arrived, and they decided to embrace the climate of Texas, for better or for worse.
Fair Weather
It was 10 degrees below zero on the day I left Connecticut four-and-a-half years ago, thinking I wanted to be warm. As it turns out, I’m the wrong color to be warm. The opposite of a steak, I begin at a medium pink and become rarer when heat is applied; after four minutes of Texas sun, my natural rosy glow progresses to a feverish hue.
And if memory serves correctly, it was 102 degrees every single day during the summer of 1994. A weather obsessor, the heat was my primary topic of conversation that year, and I couldn’t understand why others wavered from the sweat stains topic in their own conversations.
While it made perfect sense to have black vinyl interior and no air conditioning in a car up north, in Texas it has been the inspiration for prolific cursing and gnashing of teeth. Before I discovered steering wheel covers, I was forced to drive home from work every day in a pair of purple polarfleece mittens; they were the only thing that made steering the car a feasible option.
Finally, the first summer shriveled to a close. When the second one rolled around two months later, my attitude was much improved. I had begun to acclimate. Now, even when it’s over 100 (which is every day, in case you hadn’t noticed), I am a trooper. A damp, crimson, angry trooper, but a trooper nonetheless. I have learned to focus my negative energy on what the meteorologists call “severe weather.”
Unfair Weather
In Texas, if it’s not fair, it’s unfair.
Hurricanes
Several years ago, a friend from Houston called me in Connecticut—he was flying in the next day and needed a ride from the airport to the coast, about 60 miles. Whereas I normally would have been happy to do it, we had a hurricanescheduled for that day, so I was reluctant to commit. Plus, I tried to explain, his flight would most likely be canceled anyway.
He insisted that it’s perfectly all right to drive in a hurricane, it’s even acceptable to fly in a hurricane, and Texans did these things all the time.
At that point, I might have known. Anyone advising a good friend to “just drive around all of the felled and falling trees” is accustomed to a low quality of life, weatherwise.
I had a lot of things to learn, but one of the first was that as long as I live inland, hurricanes are the least of my problems.
Tornadoes
It has always been this way; the first thunderclap strikes and I’m in the fetal position: kneeling down, face on the ground, hands over my ears, butt in the air. In Texas this is called The Tornado Position.
In my world, “Yep, looks like a funnel cloud over there” is not a sentence to be uttered nonchalantly, and yet here I am, in the nether regions of tornado land. We’re still seeing the effects of El Niño, and La Niña is looming. Because of these unsavory siblings, tornadoes are the hottest things on the horizon this year, and tornadophobia is probably about to become really fashionable. In this, if nothing else, I am on the cutting edge.
The tornado problem started the day of the Jarrell incident, when everyone in the building where I worked was huddled in a stairwell. I had never noticed before that the building was nothing but hundreds of squares of glass, welded together with tiny strips of steel. While high winds unravelled a building next door, another glass block that was still under construction, I mentally ran through the safety essentials:
• During a lightning storm, stay in the car. During a tornado, get out of the car and get out of its way.
• If a tornado in the distance looks like it’s standing still, it’s coming straight for you. Run perpendicularly to the path of the tornado. Do not run in a circle; this behavior is only appropriate in the presence of alligators.
• In the event that a tornado is going to strike, get into a basement if possible, or in an interior room on the ground floor. Assume The Tornado Position. If a bear is going to attack you, it is also appropriate to assume The Tornado Position. Other bear safety rules do not apply—ringing bells and singing loudly are not storm deterrents, although these things may make you feel better.
• Right before a tornado there is a drop in barometric pressure. So open the windows. No, close the windows. There are different schools of thought on what to do with the windows; the only thing you really need to remember is to get out of their way.
During a tornado, more people are killed by flying debris than by . . . than by what? I don’t even want to know what the other options are.
People who don’t hide in the tub all the time tend to have a hard time understanding why I do, and it’s no wonder. The bathtub in my second floor apartment is plastic, wobbly, and probably aerodynamic, but after scouring the neighborhood in vain for ditches, culverts, or a free-standing basement of the Kansan variety, the tub seems like the safest place. Chances are I’d be better off crammed into the kitchen sink or the toilet. At least those things have enamel coatings.
Because the world’s worst tornadoes have typically transpired in May, I require intense coddling during the fifth month. Every time the sky darkens or the wind turns, I can be found gazing up at the clouds with a stricken look, but this May there was nothing to see. The sky may have been green, black, and funnelish, but it was hard to say, because all weather activity in Texas was effectively blocked out by smoke.
Smoke
In the winter and spring of 1998, huge fires raged out of control in Mexico, Honduras, and Guatamala, producing smoke cover over much of Texas.
Austin was almost unrecognizable. Visibility was poor and our sunsets became the shimmery pink of those in dirty cities. The sky was completely white and instead of being several hundred feet up in the air, it started at about 10 feet off the ground.
The best thing about the smoke is that it seemed to ward off tornadoes. But other than the fact that large portions of Mexico were being ravaged, the greatest downside may have been the health warnings Texans were often placed under.
Being told not to exercise, spend time outside or open the windows is such severe advice to give a whole state, especially at the best time of year to do those things. For a healthy breathing person, the smoke turned out to be more of an emotional threat than a physical one. Austin is famous for the high quality of life, and not exercising or spending time outside combined with the deprivations of never seeing the sky made for a city of mopes.
Reports that the smoke would stay through the summer were greeted with long drawn out sighs and impromptu vacation plans, but before long the smoke had blown from our midst, only to be replaced with 100-degree days and the promise of no rain for the rest of the summer.
Come to think of it, a drought should contrast nicely with the flash floods of last summer.
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