'On Fear'"Do one thing every day that scares you."
-Eleanor Roosevelt
The day starts out friendly enough.
Pleased with the work of yesterday, in the early hours of this Monday morning I take in the considerable development of my self-portrait at age twelve. And as the day lightens, Chester and I go for a long leg-stretch around the village, ending at the coffee shop.
A medium coffee (with room for cream), a newspaper, a couple of dog cookies for Chester from our friendly porch guys, and a vacant stool in a little patch of sun.
As I work at the daily crossword, I can just make out the conversation at the other end of the porch, in which, alarmingly, I think I catch the word 'tornado'.
Well, nothing so new. There is often weather talk on small, exposed Ocracoke Island - the ceiling, the swell, the sets, small craft warnings. And sometimes even the reminder of shipwrecks along the coast (hundreds), fishing boats late coming in, and unsettling phrases like 'lost at sea' and 'washed up on the beach', all reminders of the restlessness and unpredictability of the sea.
Still, as we walk home, there is a certain humidity and haze which weren't there even two hours ago.
I begin my morning drawing session, but the weather is on my mind. I flip through the 'Virginian-Pilot' to the weather page, and yes indeedy, the weather for the entire Outer Banks area looks extremely unsettled. I look out the window. Can this be?
Not knowing how, exactly, these things work, we stick close to home. And it does cloud over. And there is a breath of a breeze now.
Lunch.
Windy now. Quite windy. And the sky is funny. Not exactly darkening but strangely tinted somehow. It is becoming sort of a greyish... well... a sort of greyish-green.
I turn on the TV, (breaking the rule of no TV until kick-back time). There is a wide band of red crawling across the bottom of the screen. It appears to be mid-message, and I catch the words '...take immediate cover...' just a few moments before the message repeats, beginning with,
'EXTREME WEATHER ALERT'.
Oh god oh god oh god. Not that I'm panicking. I pull myself together, and consider bundling Chester and me into the car and heading for, (where?), the community centre. But as I read the message again, it gives advice on what to do, and (very kindly) gives a window of half an hour in which this tornado could happen.
I have 10 minutes.
I find my battery-operated radio, water bottle, blanket, flashlight. I lure Chester into the bathroom, (at the very back of the cottage), with a cookie. We shut the door and wait.
When nothing happens, I creep out and check the TV again. The red warning has changed the time to, beginning right now.
The wind, quite shockingly strong now, is shaking the bathroom window, and I try not to think about the spindly stilts which the cottage sits upon. But it is when I see, what looks like a snowball fight, outside the window, (big big hail), that Chester and I shift to plan B, and get into the closet.
I keep the door tight shut for fifteen minutes or so. As I am sitting on the floor, Chester has his head in my lap, wondering what this new game is all about. I'm wondering that too.
I creep out after twenty minutes. All is quiet. Birds are twittering. A glimpse of sun from the breaking clouds.
The cottage is standing.
Again to the TV, as mercifully the power hasn't been effected. Yes, they declare, it is all over. Having missed us to the north, we just caught the tail end.
I give myself some time to adjust before heading outside, (wishing I had a bottle of brandy, my mother's cure for all that ails you). And that my heart rate would return to normal.
Later, as Chester and I head for the sea in the late afternoon, it is like a different day. Still, sunny, warm.
We pass the hotel run by our friends, and she is outside waving cheerfully at us.
She tells me, with a chuckle, that she and her son were outside chatting when the 'snowball fight' hit, but otherwise seems completely at ease about it all.
I, on the other hand, wish my legs would stop shaking.
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