One of the wonderful things about living in this hellhole lovely state of Maine is that we hardly ever get the extreme weather so prevalent in the rest of the US. Hurricanes we got, but they give us plenty of warning and by the time they’ve navigated the whole length of the Eastern seaboard they’re usually pretty pooped out. Even if they aren’t, we’ve had time to board up the windows, take in the chickens and buy every roll of toilet paper and loaf of bread on the shelves of every convenience store in the state. (Why do people do that when a storm is predicted? Do they think they’ll need more toilet paper? I don’t get the connection, myself.)
Anyhow, outside of the occasional hurricane and a blizzard or two in the winter, extreme weather leaves us alone and concentrates on the population centers of the midwest and south where it can really get itself on CNN and the Weather Channel. The only time we see Jim Cantore is when he’s standing in front of Maine on the weather map and pointing to California or New York. All of the weather mavens seem to be just tall enough to obscure Maine with their heads. Why is this?
I guess I should say that extreme weather HAS left us alone in the past, because apparently it’s just realized that we’re here and is starting to flex its muscles with a few preliminary mini-tornadoes. (We had one a while ago that tipped over a bike and damaged our neighbor’s garden shed. True, the shed was one of those cheap metal ones that shakes when you blow on your soup to cool it off, but still.) No doubt, it’ll find out that working up to a real tornado isn’t as easy in mountainous Maine as it is on the plains of Kansas, but it’s giving it a shot.
Yesterday’s Bangor Daily News reported on one such incident up in Aroostook County. I read it and knew that I had a blog post. It seems that there was a sudden windstorm, with hail, that blew in a straight line through the Happy Corner Rd community. Residents there said that the storm emerged from Baxter State Park via the north side of Mount Katahdin. Unlike most Baxter Park tourists, it didn’t just toss a beer can in the ditch as it left, but instead let loose with a barrage of hail, thunder and lightning. Then the wind picked up. Literally.
It picked up two 150 lb pigs and a 50 lb Gordon Setter. The paper doesn’t say whether the pigs survived, but the dog managed to run back to its owner, after “swimming through the air” two-and-a-half feet off the ground for 50 to 60 ft. The dog’s name is Delaney, rather than Toto, by the way.
The dog owner, Sean Kelley, says it was “a tense 15 to 20 minutes” as the storm concentrated all of its energy on the small area of Happy Corner Rd (wonder if they’ll rename it?). “Delaney got blown through the air; plus, this was true – pigs could fly,” he said. Not content with juggling next fall’s bacon and hams, the storm also destroyed gardens and reduced Kelley’s pumpkin crop to green goo.
The forecast for our area today is for thunderstorms, possibly severe. I’m in the cellar, because that’s where my office is. The dog is lying on the couch and the cats are upstairs in varying postures of laziness after being out all night dodging the coyotes we heard howling in the backyard around midnight. Two of them are suspiciously rounder than usual which leads me to think that a couple of rabbits don’t have to worry about tornadoes picking them up anymore.
We don’t have a pig to our name or any other livestock, so the only thing we have to remember to bring in before long is the deck furniture. Our garden doesn’t include pumpkins, but we do have some small tomatoes that wouldn’t survive a hailstorm, so I hope we don’t have a “Happy Corner Rd” experience. I’ll keep you posted.
Oh, and if there was anything you said you’d do “when pigs fly”, you’d better do it.
You know, those weather mavens also stand in front of New Mexico–and since New Mexico is lower on the map than Maine, they block the whole state. Of course, they don’t actually know that New Mexico is a state. They probably think it’s a foreign country. Remember Hands Across America? Some Hollyweird person with long arms said that he’d be standing between Texas and Arizona.
But then, other than the occasional slippage on the Sandia normal faults–very gentle quakes–we get very little in way of natural disasters here. And the wildfires we have are always upstaged by California. I mean, what would the national news outlets rather film, fifty people dispersing to relatives houses along the backside of the Manzanos in Torrance County, New Mexico (population 2000) or the rows of dome tents in the Wal_Mart parking lot in Los Angeles county? You understand.
in the early 90′s a tornado path picked up the pool across the street, dumped it, took our 65 yr old tree sucked it between the two houses and went on it’s merry way – my son and I watched with great intrique – goodness – what kindof mom watches a tornado with her kid?
hey lill, email me will you – i seem to have lost your email address