Life on the Road

Yesterday at about 4:30 in the afternoon, the skies around our RV suddenly seemed very, very dark. The rain was coming down in droves, and thunder and lightning was flashing and booming.

After stowing the internet satellite dish (we don’t want to know what happens to a $14,000 piece of equipment when it gets struck by lightning), we turned on the weather radio on our CB. We’re ill prepared for bad weather at the moment, because our weather radio is only attached to our CB radio, so if the CB isn’t on, neither is the weather radio. A good weather radio turns itself on to issue an alert. We had been given one, but gave it back after one night when the unexpected nightly “test” alert made me leap ten feet in the air and shriek “hell no, we’re not keeping that!”The weather radio indicated that there was a tornado watch or warning somewhere in our vicinity. We pondered this for a bit, then packed the cat into the car and headed up to the office building for shelter. I grew up in tornado country, so I know that, while a motorhome is a great place to be in an earthquake, it is the worst place to be during a tornado.

When we arrived at the office, the office staff said “oh, yeah– there was a tornado– it just passed by.”

I replied, perhaps a little snarky, that gee, I was sure glad we hadn’t been hit by it. The woman at the front desk seemed unphased by my remark.

At my mother’s campground, down in tornado alley in Missouri, when there’s a tornado heading for the campground, she sends someone up to the sites to give a good holler, sometimes even doing a door-to-door knock to let people know they should evacuate. Sure, people need to also bring their own weather radio, but the fact is, it’s irresponsible to let people sit out in their screen tents (as we saw some doing) when a tornado is about to hit your park.  The winds of a tornado are severe and, despite depisctions in the movie Twister, you can’t just hang onto a barn pole and survive it.

Our estimation of the park had already been going downhill. There’s this sense of un-neighborliness that has been troubling me. Normally, I don’t give a hoot about what my neighbors are doing, but one of them recently wedged a glass bottle under our front tire. Stupid kid prank, or have we somehow offended one of the nearby residents, and if so, how? The recent storm brought this home– if even the park staff can’t be bothered to show a little neighborly concern, one can’t expect much better from the residents.

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