Nature's Fury

Almost anyone who lives as long as I have (and I’m not really old yet!) has some memories of natural disasters—an earthquake, blizzard, tornado, hurricane, flood, fire, or something like that that makes headline news. I think I’ve experienced a wider variety of such events than normal, and it all started early in my life as a 4 year old boy living on the remote Philippine Islands.

I have a lot of vivid memories from the 18 months our family lived in the Philippines.

Dad was stationed at Clark AFB. A few decades later the US abandoned Clark AFB after Mount Pinatubo severely damaged it in a volcanic eruption, but that’s not the natural disaster I experienced there.

We lived in a little house where we had a maid and a gardener. Dad was only a Master Sergeant in the USAF, but the local Filipinos worked for only a few US dollars and everyone assigned to the base was encouraged to hire locals to stimulate their economy and improve relations with them. I recall making paper snowflakes one day at our kitchen table and the maid asked us what a snowflake was. She’d never seen snow and I don’t think she even had a word in her native language to translate for snow. My mom explained to her how rain can freeze and fall from the sky in little frozen flakes where the climate is colder. As a 4 year old boy I still lived under the assumption that all adults know everything so I was amazed that this adult lady didn’t know what snow was even after mom explained to me that it never snows in this tropical homeland of hers because it never gets cold enough.

I have another memory of playing in the yard and getting stung in the middle of my forehead when I brushed it against a bush. I never saw what stung me, but it hurt and swelled so bad my eyes almost swelled closed. When the pain subsided and I looked in a mirror, my reflection startled me. I had two narrow slits for eyes. Once I got over the initial shock I decided I kind of liked looking like a little Chinese boy.

My recollection of the natural disaster starts in the middle of the night as my brother woke me up shaking my bed. Bruce and I slept in twin beds in the same room so when I woke up in complete darkness to a shaking bed I just assumed he was shaking it for some reason, but as I looked around I didn’t see him anywhere. Then my parents rushed into the room urging us to get under our beds. I responded “Huh, why? There’s spiders under there!” Mom said “It’s an earthquake; get under your bed!” In my bewildered sleepy state I was still looking for Bruce, telling him to stop shaking my bed when I noticed Dad (or maybe it was Mom; everything’s quite confusing at this point) shaking him awake and telling him to get under his bed. At this point my 4 year old brain began to real with confusion. “How can Bruce be shaking my bed when he’s asleep in his bed? Why do my parents want us to get under our beds where the dust and nasty spiders are? Why are they here in the middle of the night? What’s an earthquake?” Then the shaking stopped. Bruce was still fusing that he didn’t want to get under his bed either. Mom and Dad’s panicked urgency impressed on me that something real serious had happened, but I was still tired, confused, and afraid of the spiders under my bed. (The space under our beds wasn’t really infested with spiders. My brother and I just thought it was for some reason.) When the house stopped shaking our parents slowly calmed down and told us to just go back to sleep.

The next day they explained to us that it wasn’t just our bed’s shaking; it was the entire house and they were afraid the house would collapse on us. They wanted us under our beds to protect us from the falling structure. They went on to explain that the house shook because of an earthquake. That sometimes sections of the earth’s surface slide past each other and it makes the ground shake so bad buildings can fall down. At that point I started to understand their urgency in the night and felt a little guilty for not obeying them right away, but it wasn’t until latter when I saw photos in the newspapers of huge buildings reduced to rubble that it really sunk in. More than a thousand people died in that earthquake and I could have been one of them. My parents could have been crushed to death with me while I sat there arguing about spiders that weren’t really even there!

That day I learned that sometimes I just need to do what my parents tell me to do without questioning them. Sometimes urgency demands immediate response. And for the rest of my life I would think about that night when practicing emergency drills. I always took fire drills, tornado drills, etc., seriously because I knew first hand how quickly you need to be ready to respond in some emergencies and how devastating the consequences can be when you’re not ready.

About two years later I witnessed nature’s fury again. Dad had been transferred to Hickam AFB, Hawaii next to Pearl Harbor on the Oahu Island. The Hawaiian Islands seem to be ideally situated in the Pacific Ocean to keep the weather tame. It never gets very hot or cold or too windy and the rain follows reliable patterns. It lies out of the path of tropical storms that often ravage ocean islands.

During the 2 years we lived there we spent a lot of time at the beach. We loved exploring the mountains too, but as I remember it, during most weekends we’d venture to one of Oahu’s many public beaches. One of my favorite beaches had a picnic table situated on a rise overlooking the beach and providing a view further out over the ocean than from beach level. It also had a beach house building that might have been 50x70 feet in size. The road passed by uphill from the beach house which had a flagpole out front and a small parking lot between the flag pole and the road. At high tide I’d guess the beach house was 100 feet from the ocean.

During our short 2 years in Hawaii a tropical storm made a rare swipe at Hawaii, the kind that might happen once or twice a century. Although the storm center was well off shore, the wind, waves, and storm surge hit the islands with quite a bit of power. We drove out to our favorite beach on a high road that overlooked the beach and I couldn’t recognize it. The beach house was flooded with waves pushing against it, but nothing else even looked familiar. The sandy shoreline was no longer visible. The picnic table where we always ate and the coconut trees around it were out of sight. I looked where I thought they should be and saw nothing but huge waves crashing ashore—30 to 50 foot swells breaking and rolling in foam and sprawling up towards us. I felt an intense sense of respectful fear for the power of nature seeing how the water I’d played in so many times could turn so violent. The force of the wind startled me to, buffeting our car, bending the palms trees over and whipping their huge stiff leaves around like rags.

When we went back a few days later the water was calm again, but its destructive aftermath was everywhere. The beach house had been lifted from its foundation and pushed up, away form the ocean 30 or 40 feet. It landed on top of the flag pole bending it over across the parking lot. The picnic table and palm trees were gone, washed away without a trace. I couldn’t even figure out where the rise in the beach had been because there was no sign of it. The beach was completely reshaped.

So here I was a young boy not quite 7 contemplating this dangerous world I’d been born into. I’d discovered that the ground I stood on can shake. The water I love to play in could turn monstrous. Even the air I breathe can become violent. I’d witnessed these things myself. I felt a sort of fear mixed with awe—nothing like terror to make me cower or hide, more like a fascination driving me to explore and witness more, but cautiously, with extreme respect.

When my dad retired from the USAF and we moved to Michigan I didn’t know we’d moved to a place where nature was so gentle. Earthquakes are very rare and the most powerful earthquake on record was only a 4.6 magnitude. Hurricanes and tropical storms never reach this far inland except to pull up a little moisture and give us a nice rain. We get tornados every summer, but they are usually so mild investigators after the fact study the direction of fallen trees and argue over whether it was really a tornado or just a strong wind. Verified sightings are rare and damage to man-made structures even more rare. We have no volcanoes either. The only extreme natural event we can boast of is the occasional blizzard, but even those usually don’t compare to the blizzards out west in the Rocky Mountains or up north in Canada.

Since I was unaware of how mild Michigan’s weather was compared to more extreme locations I marveled at what I saw as I was growing up there. I remember my childish excitement over snowstorms that left anything more than 6 inches of fresh powder. Whenever the wind blew snow into drifts they fascinated me like heavenly sculptures. Thunderstorms captivated me. Every time it hailed I thought I was witnessing something tremendous. Lightning totally enthralled me.

I remember witnessing many thunderstorms standing under the eves of our house. We’d watch for flashes and count the seconds until we heard the thunder to guess how far away it was. When bolts struck close by, we would “oh” and “awe.” Only once did I hear the thunder before seeing the flash. That was when thunder woke me up and the long, powerful lightning bolt was still streaking down next to our tent when I jolted upright in terror.

It was just before sunrise during the summer of 1972. Our family of 5 spent that summer living in a tent while we built our new home next door to my Grandma Daisy Deemer’s house. For 3 months we lived in this old canvas tent behind a huge lilac bush. Just outside our tent we had a screen tent with a round spool table in the middle where we ate most of our meals. Next to the screen tent stood a mound of topsoil about 10 feet tall that the excavator piled up from the site where we were building our house.

I loved camping so that summer was great fun for me. Even though we were next to Grandma’s house, we were roughing it. Grandma still got her water from an old hand crank pump and her toilet, which became our toilet for the summer, was an outhouse about 50 feet behind her home. We cooked our meals either over an open campfire or a portable Coleman gas stove—one of those green ones that used to be so ubiquitous.

On the morning of the powerful lightning bolt it had been raining during the night. I had roused a couple times already as my body prepared to awake for the day and fallen back to sleep listening to the peaceful patter of raindrops on our canvas tent. Dad was already up reading the newspaper in the screen tent. He had perched himself on the spool table in the center of the tent to avoid the rain blowing through the screen, but the mist had made him and the newspaper damp.

That’s when it hit. Dad was up reading his newspaper while my mom, sister, brother and I all dozed in the light morning sleep that we have just before wake-up time. It started with the loudest BOOOOOOOOM I’ve ever heard and the intense rumbling continued so long I thought it’d never stop! It probably only lasted 4 or 5 seconds, but in my state of sheer terror it seemed much longer.

All 4 of us in the tent were sitting bolt upright half out of our sleeping bags, wide eyed, staring straight ahead when Dad whipped open the tent zipper and burst inside. He looked around at all of us and asked, “Is everyone okay?” It’s the only time I ever saw my dad with a look of panic in his eyes.

We all responded that we were okay and started blurting out all at once about how close that lightning was and how intense the thunder sounded and how long it carried on and how startled we were, etc. Then dad told us the lightning actually shocked him. As he sat on the spool table reading his soggy newspaper it drooped over against the metal pole in the center of the screen tent supporting the roof. As the blinding flash of lightning lit up everything around him he felt the jolting tickle of electricity running through his arms, down his body, and into the damp table where he sat.

I can only imagine how startling that would be. I’d just experienced the most terrifying moment of my life just being awakened by the thunder. Dad experienced the same thunderous boom with the bright flash of light and a jolting shock of electricity at the same time! It’s a good thing his heart was strong!

Later that morning I studied the mound of dirt towering 3 or 4 feet taller than our screen tent and speculated that the main bolt struck that sod pile with a small side bolt arcing to our screen tent pole. I climbed to the top of the dirt pile to see if it left any visible marks but couldn’t find anything. I wish I’d dug in the sandy topsoil for a lump of fused sand, but I didn’t know about lightning glass back then.

The thought that Dad could have been taken from us in that instant left me in a sober mood. When I first recovered from my horrifying wake-up call I was actually giddy with excitement over experiencing such a close encounter with lightning. But after reflecting on the fact that he could easily have died if more lightning had arced into him my thoughts grew more serious. I’d known since the earthquake in the Philippines that nature could be deadly and should always be respected, but it had never struck so close to home before this. It didn’t diminish my fascination with nature’s fury. I think that day my respect for nature deepened further into my heart and mind. Nature is not a toy to play with or a simple beauty to be admired. Nature is fun and admirable, but she’s powerful and wild and should be approached cautiously with the highest esteem. I decided that just because I know the creator and he loves me, I’m not exempt from the laws of his creation. That’s why I rushed to take shelter from the next extreme weather event I witnessed.

Just a couple summers after moving into our new home next to Grandma’s house I had my first close encounter with a tornado—I think. Michigan’s tornados are pretty mild compared to Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and other places in tornado alley, but we do get them. Even our class 1 tornados topple trees and rip the roofs off buildings.

My experience started with a warm, humid, mostly sunny day that had a chance of severe thunderstorms in the forecast. I hoped to watch some impressive clouds and lightning displays. Sure enough, late in the afternoon some beautiful, giant thunderheads rolled in. When the rain started I stood under the eves of our house with members of my family watching for lightning. We didn’t see a lot of lightning, but the wind was blowing raindrops on us no matter where we stood. The air couldn’t make up its mind what direction to blow, so we went inside and watched through the windows.

As we watched the wind grew stronger and seemed to be coming out of the southeast. The rain drops grew larger and more dense. The sky grew darker. I thought maybe we’d get to see some hale when suddenly the rain started to fall like I’d never seen before. I was looking westward toward my grandma’s house amazed at the amount of rain pouring off her roof when the color seemed to change. In the dim light under the dark clouds it looked as if the rain took on a yellowish tint. I was commenting on this when we heard a roaring sound as loud as a train but without the metallic clunking. Dad yelled, “Everyone get in the basement right now!” He didn’t need to tell us twice. We were all thinking “Tornado!” even though no one said anything.

We were only in the basement a few minutes as the roaring sound quickly faded. We could here the wind and rain letting up and the light through the little basement windows grew brighter. It wasn’t long before the rain stopped and the sun peaked through the clouds again so we went outside to check for tornado damage. At first we didn’t notice anything dramatic. Some small tree branches had fallen; our rain barrels were all overflowing, but nothing seemed to be damaged. Then someone noticed the storm door that Dad had recently removed from our house was gone from where he’d left it leaning against the woodshed.

We looked around and found a huge gash in the sod a dozen yards or so west of the woodshed. We walked further west and found another gash. Following the gashes lead us to Uncle Frank’s vacation trailer about 100 yards away. There the door lay in the grass with an incriminating slash in the metal siding of the trailer exposing the insulation underneath.

The next day we found a stretch of trees along the road about a quarter mile east of our house where many trees were toppled in various directions. Dad was sure it was a tornado at that point because the most intense wind of the storm was consistently out of the southeast. Only a tornado would push trees down in random directions and roar like a train. We figured it touched down where the fallen trees were and lifted before passing over our house.

I think that was my closest encounter with a tornado to this day even though I never saw it. In Colorado I watched a small tornado skirt down the mountainside southwest of the cadet area at the USAF Academy. I stood outside our academic building, Fairchild Hall, with a bunch of other cadets staring in awe until command post announced for everyone to take shelter. The leaves and tree branches whipping around the funnel shaped vapor cloud seemed unreal. They moved so fast my mind had trouble accepting what my eyes were seeing.

In Florida I saw a few small water spouts and in New Mexico I saw tornados whipping up pillars of dust, snake-like into the sky. Those were miles away and I never knew if they qualified as legitimate tornados or just powerful whirl-winds. Still, they were impressive enough to make me stand a gawk.

Though I never actually saw a tornado in Michigan I did see plenty of the natural danger most commonly associated with Michigan—snow. Every winter Michigan gets major snowstorms that would qualify as a disaster down south, but up north they are just part of life. Sometimes ice or heavy snow or wind can pull down trees. We clean them up. Sometimes snow piles up so deep it threatens to cave in our roofs. We shovel the snow off the roof. Snow and ice makes driving very dangerous. We have trucks to remove the snow and spread salt mixed with sand on the road. When it’s too treacherous we stay home until the road commission gets the roads cleared.

The next morning the wind and snow hadn’t let up and it just continued all day again. This was by far the longest blizzard I’d ever experienced. I think it was my parents’ longest blizzard too. Normally when I went outside after a blizzard there would be drifts a foot or two deep and bare spots where the wind had blown all fresh snow away. This time I ventured out and the troughs around our house, cars, trees, etc. where the snow was shallowest had more than 6 inches. There were no bare spots. The drifts were over three feet high and still growing! I was very impressed, but if I had known what lay just down the road I wouldn’t have been.

After three days the storm finally let up. The news reports were full of warnings to stay home, but we couldn’t go anywhere even if we wanted to. We had 5 food drifts across our driveway and no snow plows had ventured down Fewins Road for the entire 3 day storm. If my parents were worried they didn’t let on. They seemed fascinated with the epic snow, but my memory could be clouded by my own excitement. Sharon, Bruce and I were elated. After 3 days of cancelled school and only venturing out for short walks we were ready to explore. Strapping on our snowshoes the 3 of us headed out. I had my camera loaded with fresh film to record the most massive snowfall of my lifetime—the biggest snowstorm anyone I know had ever experienced.

It was difficult to guess how deep the snow was. The drifts were huge, but even the valleys between drifts were full of deep snow. We could tell the drifts around our house and cars were 4 or 5 feet high because we had a reference point to measure them, but as we ventured down our driveway into the road our reference frame became confused. It felt surreal.

The snow had completely covered all the snow that had fallen before. It was January 27^th. We’d been under snow for over 2 months already with deep piles from shoveling our sidewalk and driveway. The piles along the road were 3 or 4 feet high before this snow fell, but you couldn’t even tell where those piles were now. Deep, fresh snow covered it all and the wind had sculpted the new snowfall into a pure white sea that suddenly froze still, capturing the wave action in 3-dimentional stillness.

It was cold and still a little windy, but we ventured on, exploring this strange world that was our front yard. It was eerie trudging out across the spot where Fewins Road should have been. Our snow shoes held us aloft in the sea of white, but we couldn’t tell how many feet we floated above the road’s gravel surface. I crossed the road and found our mailbox rising a few inches above the snow. Comparing the height of the mailbox to the general level of the snow I guessed that the road in front of our house rested under an average depth of 3 feet of snow. Some places appeared to be only 2 feet deep, but the drifts were close to 5 feet.

We decided to hike West toward County Road 669. We trudged over wave after wave of snow. Lifting our snowshoes over each mound with exertion and straining to keep our balance while tumbling down the other side. About 3 quarters of a mile from our house we found an exceptional drift that rose about 4 feet above its base in a breaking wave. It curved sharply up at its base until it formed a vertical wall. At the top was an overhanging lip defying gravity. It seemed to invite me to climb up and surf the rising front on my snowshoes. Instead I took my snowshoes off.

We took some pictures of the huge drift and our snow caves then decided it was time to head home. We spent the majority of the rest of that day shoveling snow but made little progress. It takes a long time to move snow 3 feet deep and packed dense by 50 mile per hour winds. We knew it would take a long time and we wanted to be ready to go when the snowplows finally made it down our road so we just chiseled away at it pushing the white wall in front of our cars closer and closer to the road. Dad shoveled snow off the roof of our house until we could walk up the snowbanks directly to the eaves that are normally 10 feet above the ground.

It was Friday when the snow stopped falling. We spent our weekend shoveling, exploring, playing games, fixing puzzles, etc. Monday school remained closed and the snowplow still hadn’t made it down our road. We continued shoveling and entertaining ourselves, enjoying the extended vacation. We were thankful that we had electricity and plenty of food. Tuesday started out the same. We had reached the road on Monday so Tuesday we continued shoveling out into the road. We had nothing else constructive to do and knew the plow would throw that snow into our driveway anyway.

Once the wind died down the outdoors grew very quiet and peaceful. You’d think we’d grow stir crazy after a week of being snowbound, but we didn’t mind at all. It felt like having a second Christmas break without all the gifts and church programs. Just knowing we were in the middle of a storm of historic proportions kept me feeling a little bit excited. But late Tuesday afternoon something broke the stillness. Bruce and I were out in the road shoveling when we heard a muffled roar coming from the west. Soon we could see two of the county’s biggest plow trucks pushing giant V-plows.

I ran into the house hollering, “The plows are coming” and ran back out to watch. I think the entire family made it out before the plows reached our home. We stood in the road watching the huge machines strain against the deep snow, sending white clouds flying in their wake. As they approached our house we retreated down the driveway then walked back out into the road and watched them continue to the east. About half a mile past our home the lead plow ground to a halt. We watched as the two plows backed up about 50 yards. The lead truck roared its engine and sped toward the white wall of snow that towered taller than the giant V-plow. It collided with an explosion of white dust that obliterated the truck from sight. The roar of the engine faded and soon we saw it emerge, crawling backward down the road. The trucks backed up a little further and the lead one roared ahead again with a little more speed this time only to grind to a halt in another explosion of white powder. I don’t know how many times this repeated, but we stood there amazed at what we were witnessing. Finally the trucks gave up and retreated backward until they found a place to turn around. We stood in our driveway waving as the snowplows passed our house headed back to the west where they came, thankful that they at least made it past our house.

By this time the sun had settled to the horizon and daylight was fading, but the next day we eagerly walked up the road to see the snow drift that stopped the powerful V-plow truck. It formed on a gentle sloping hillside with clearings on both sides of the roads. The nearby forest seemed to funnel the wind, concentrating it along that spot but allowing it to slack enough to drop snow. We estimated the drift to be 15 feet high, but the plows pushed the banks considerably higher than that. They had approached the spot from the other direction and failed to break through there too. Fortunately no one lived in the stretch that remained unplowed. A few days later the county brought in huge loader trucks to clear a path through the drift, but on this Wednesday we still had work to do.

The blizzard of 1978 was the most extreme snow event I ever witnessed, but the most extreme cold I experienced happened outside of Michigan. I think it was the winter of 1982 when an extreme cold air mass dropped down from the arctic forcing thermometers at the USAF Academy in Colorado to register temperatures as low as 42 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, which happens to be -41 degrees Celsius. Those may not have been the official temperatures recorded in the weather records, but I’m sure the official temperatures were close to that. Being from Michigan I’d experienced temperatures well below zero but never this cold. Even though I knew it was a new extreme for me I didn’t think it would be a problem. I bundled up in my USAFA issue parka and scarf and headed out for my optional Saturday morning breakfast at the dining hall which we affectionately called “Mitch’s,” short for Mitchell Hall, named after the famous military air power pioneer Brigadier General Billy Mitchell.

I remember noticing how cold the air in the stairwell was as I descended to the terrazzo from my 3^rd Squadron dorm location, but I opened the door, striding out into the cold as I’d done thousands of times before. Then I tried to breathe. My lungs said no way. I felt my throat close involuntarily and my gut lurched as if getting ready to vomit. My body rejected the air it needed to survive because it was so extremely cold so I retreated rapidly back into the stairwell, gasping as if I’d just had the wind knocked out of me.

This was quite shocking for me. I had no idea -42 degrees F would cause my body to reflexively stop breathing and gag. It was kind of a scary feeling. For the first time I questioned whether or not I could actually handle the cold. I decided to wrap my gray scarf over my mouth and nose and give it another try. I opened the door slowly and took a shallow breath. It was uncomfortable, but this time my lungs accepted the air. I still felt a strong urge to force the stinging air out, but I suppressed the urge and continued to breathe shallow and slow. Then I returned to the stairwell to consider what to do. I had tested the air and found that I was capable of breathing it, but I wasn’t sure I could make it across the terrazzo to Mitchell Hall for breakfast. I envisioned myself gagging and passing out half way there because my lung’s reflexes had taken over again. I decided to give it a try.

Leaving the stairwell was tough. My body was revolting against the frigid air but I willed myself to breathe and press on. Fortunately, my respiratory system acclimated a little as I walked and it grew easier. Still, entering the warmth of Mitch’s and the welcoming scents of breakfast never felt so wonderful! When I left to return to my dorm I was prepared. This time I avoided strolling out boldly and taking a deep breath. By repeating the shallow breathing through my scarf I soon found myself back in my room reflecting on another encounter with nature’s extremes.

Two years later I had similar brush with extreme cold. This time I was driving home for Christmas break in my brand new Nissan Sentra. My first two years as a USAFA cadet I flew home for Christmas on commercial airlines. I road with an upper class cadet who lived in Traverse City the third year, driving straight through, taking turns napping. Now I was a first class cadet with my own car and another cadet 2 years behind me was helping me drive straight through to get us home for Christmas.

Another cold air mass had pushed down from the arctic. It brought extremely cold air and high winds, but not too much snow. Only a thin layer of snow covered the road surface but it was so cold no amount of salt could melt it. Blowing snowflakes only reduced visibility enough to slow us down a little, even at night. We could see tail lights nearly a quarter mile ahead, but my driving partner didn’t see an ice chunk in the road until it was too late to avoid it.

One of the hazards of winter driving comes from the way snow packs up around vehicle tires. Cars frequently have a hundred pounds of packed snow and ice caked in their wheel wells and undercarriages, most of it behind each tire. Occasionally chunks of these masses will fall off so as drivers navigate snowy roads they need to watch for and dodge ice chunks.

I slept soundly as we passed through Iowa. Temperatures plummeted through the dark night. The last weather report I heard on the radio before falling asleep said it was 33 F below (-36 C) with a wind chill of 66 F below (-54 C)! A loud thud and bounce of my car jolted me awake. My friend told me he’d hit an ice chunk in the road and as he spoke the car began to veer to the left, slow down, and vibrate lightly. The left front tire had gone flat.

We pulled well off on the highway shoulder, but took time to bundle up with our hats and gloves and coats zipped up high before getting out. We had our coats on in the car because it was so cold the heater couldn’t warm the car enough to make it comfortable without coats on. When we saw the flat tire my heart sank. The wheel rim kinked in sharply where the ice chunk had bent it. We’d only been outside for half a minute and both of us were shivering already in the extreme cold. I told Brian to get back in the car and I’d work on getting it jacked up. In a couple minutes I swap places with him. By the time I got the jack placed under the car my hands were so numb I couldn’t feel a thing. I turned the crank a few times just to get it secured in place and rushed into the car asking Brian to take over.

It seemed like no time at all before he was back in the car shivering and complaining about the extreme cold and how he couldn’t feel anything in his hands. Neither of us had experienced a wind chill remotely this extreme before. Reluctantly I lumbered out to take another turn. It was painfully cold! I don’t know how many times we rotated back and forth before we got the spare time mounted—too many to keep track of! Neither of us could endure that agonizing cold for more than a few minutes at a time.

Eventually we made it safely back on the road, both of us watching intently for ice chunks now. My Nissan Sentra had a good heating system, but it wasn’t powerful enough for that cold. I don’t think either of us really got warm again until we were in Michigan the next morning.

I had another experience with ice chunks of a different sort while I was a cadet at USAFA. As part of our summer SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape) training we spent 10 days in the mountains west of Colorado Springs. For 7 days we survived in 6 person groups with little food and nothing but a parachute for shelter. We had sleeping bags, rain ponchos, parachute cord, knives, and a few other survival items that military pilots might have in their survival gear in case they had to eject in a remote area.

After that week of survival camp we split into groups of 3 for our evasion training. For 3 days we navigated through the mountains with a compass and USGS topographical map trying to find “friendly” checkpoints while “enemy” soldiers hunted for us. We had to get to our safe locations without getting captured. At the start of our evasion “trek” we tied our sleeping bags and other meager survival gear into backpacks using parachute cord. Our survival instructors pretended to be friendly partisans near a combat zone. They told us enemy soldiers were advancing on our position and gave us latitude and longitude coordinates to meet up with another partisan who could help us escape to friendly territory.

As my two partners and I oriented our map and found the heading and distance we needed to walk to our checkpoint we could hear gunfire drawing closer from the east and rumbles of thunder approaching from the west. The sky overhead grew dark and an early dusk settled into the deep mountain valley. I wondered if we should pull our rain ponchos out of our make-shift backpacks, but didn’t say anything because it seemed much more urgent to get moving at this moment. So we put away our map and compass and began trudging up the mountain side to our north, angling off in the direction of our checkpoint.

We hadn’t gone very far before white balls started bouncing down on the ground around us. It was like someone was bombarding us with golf balls from higher up the mountain, but they were slightly larger and not quite spherical, more like hard, white tangerines. I looked up to see white balls bouncing off branches in the tall pine trees that towered over us. It was surreal and a little comical watching pure white balls streaking down toward us, many bouncing around in the maze of limbs overhead. By this time we’d each picked up one of the balls that had landed nearby and discovered they were made of ice. We were caught in the biggest hail storm any of us had ever seen. It was laughably bizarre because it wasn’t raining and there was only a little wind. The steep mountains surrounding us and tall trees must have been enough to deflect the storm’s currents and the updraft over our heads must have been powerful enough to hold up raindrops. The only things gravity managed to pull down to our level were these huge ice balls. And this fascinating natural phenomenon happened to manifest itself just as we were starting our evasion trek with enemy soldiers on our heels!

As I pondered the ironic rarity of my situation one of the hailstones struck me on the shoulder. Ouch! That stung. My two partners had also felt the sting of tangerine-sized hail grazing their bodies at or near terminal velocity. The ice-balls that penetrated without hitting a major tree branch on the way down struck with dangerous momentum, enough to leave a major bruise. I worried what could happen if one hit my head.

There was a distinctly huge pine tree nearby so the three of us moved quickly to shelter under it. I set aside my fear of getting hit in the face for a second and gazed up the tree at the labyrinth of huge limbs reaching out from the massive trunk. This tree must have been 3 or 4 hundred years old—so tall and thickly branched that the odds of a hailstone finding a path to the ground without hitting a limb were near zero. That brief gaze upward, only a second or two long, is permanently etched in my memory. Dozens of pure, white, balls of ice bounced crisscross in every direction as they descended toward me; I’d never seen anything like that. I felt like the target in a child’s marble game—the kind where kids drop marbles in the top hoping to score points by landing them in pockets at the bottom but the marbles have to bounce over so many pegs on the way down that it’s hard to predict where they’ll end up landing. But in this game the marbles aren’t dropped gently into the top. These ice balls were entering the treetop with speeds well over 100 miles an hour!

The hailstones ricocheted down through the branches like little cannonballs at the end of a high ballistic trajectory striking the ground around us at unpredictable angles. My two partners and I huddled near the tree trunk where we seemed most sheltered and leaned our heads against the tree Charlie Brown style. Every few seconds one would strike my backpack with a forceful “thud!” Occasionally one of us would get hit on an arm or leg and you’d hear an exclamation, “”OW!” Even after bouncing off tree limbs the hailstones packed a wicked punch, but the situation was so hilariously bizarre that when we weren’t exclaiming “OW! We were in stitches with laughter. In spite of the fear that one might hit us in the head and there were supposed enemy soldiers advancing to capture us, we just couldn’t help but laugh at our situation. If someone could have observed us at that moment I’m sure we looked like 3 young men who’d all lost their sanity.

I don’t know how long we stood there like that—I’d guess 10 or 15 minutes as the frequency of falling hailstones slowly decreased and eventually stopped. The sound of approaching gunfire reminded us to get moving so we took a heading and started trudging up the mountainside, melting white balls of ice covering the ground making it more difficult to walk. By the time it really grew dark most of the hail had melted and the sound of gunfire had stopped, but we crept through the forest with a sense that people were out there all over trying to catch us.

Before long the darkness was making it difficult to navigate. We decided to look for a place to spend the night where we’d be hidden from the aggressors who were looking for us. We found an old fallen tree where my partners settled on spots partially obscured by the dead branches. My choice was a nice level trough along the uphill side of the tree trunk. The tree completely blocked me from view on the downhill side and I cut a pine branch with the saw blade on my Swiss Army knife to hide me from view on the uphill side. (Normally I wouldn’t cut live tree branches out of respect for nature, but this was serious combat training so I decided it was okay.)

I felt quite proud of myself because I had my handy pocket knife with its saw blade among many other useful tools, and because my sleeping spot was so well hidden nobody could see me even if they walked by just a couple feet away. Also, it was a rare spot of level ground on the side of a steep mountain slope. There was only one problem. A couple inches of ice covered the ground there. Hailstones had rolled down the mountainside and piled up alongside the log. Even though they had melted away in the open areas, this spot where the hail had piled up deep still had a lot of ice left.

Now I thought I was pretty clever so I laid my rain poncho down over the ice to keep me dry and figured my military down sleeping bag rated for supper cold weather would keep me warm enough, even on ice. As I settled into my sleeping bag and pulled the pine branch over me I felt snug, safe, and warm, for about 5 minutes. That’s how long it took for the ice to begin sucking heat from my body. I quickly realized that my body compressed the down on the bottom side of my sleeping bag reducing its insulating effect. But the cool sensation wasn’t terribly uncomfortable so I just laid there. The excitement of the hail storm and navigating through the wilderness with aggressors chasing me had me mentally keyed up, but I was so tired I eventually drifted off to sleep.

Soon I woke again, shivering. I had no idea what time it was and I felt exhausted. I did not want to get up and move even though I knew the ice under me was sapping my heat and making me very uncomfortable. I thought to myself that there wasn’t that much ice on the ground—it’s got to be about melted by now. So I just lay there, hoping to warm up as soon as the ice melted away, but it never did. I spent the coldest night of my life sleeping on a bed of giant hailstones! I was dismayed in the morning when I finally got up to find that a thin layer of ice still covered the ground under my rain poncho.

I began day 2 of our trek tired and very much sleep deprived. Fortunately I was in excellent physical condition so we made it through that day okay and I slept very soundly the second night. My teammates and I actually did very well on the trek. We found all our partisan checkpoints on time and only got caught once. The time we got caught our point man walked into a trap where they were waiting to catch people. The aggressors knew we traveled in groups of three, but we were so well camouflaged and stealthy that they never found me or my other partner. After about 10 minutes of searching they forced us to reveal ourselves by calling an academic situation and were very impressed that we’d stayed hidden even though they’d walked by each of us only a few paces away.

By the time I turned 20 years old I had experienced a broad gamut of weather. I’d been through blizzards, powerful thunderstorms, and tornados. I’d seen the effects of many ice storms and heavy, wet snow that rips down trees, and collapses roofs. But I had only heard about what I imagined to be the most deadly storm of all—the extreme high-altitude, mountain blizzard that kills even experienced, well prepared mountain climbers. I loved hiking in the mountains, but I had no intention of ever getting caught in that kind of blizzard.

After I graduated from the USAF Academy I took a week long back-pack hike with my sister and a friend in Rocky Mountain National Park near Denver Colorado. We summited some small mountains and hiked along the continental divide, spending quite a bit of time above the tree line where the views were spectacular. In the first week of June, Colorado weather is usually gorgeous—lots of deep blue sky and intense sunshine. Snow storms are rare but still possible in the high altitude tundra. The areas where we hiked still had a lot of snow pack that hadn’t disappeared in the spring melt-off. One day when we’d really pushed ourselves and had to hike down a steep mountainside after exhausting our energy we wrapped our rain ponchos around our backpacks and road down at least 1000 feet altitude sledding on our backpacks across long streaks of wet snow-pack. What a blast—exhilarating!

The last night of our adventure we camped just a little below the tree line in a field next to a huge snow drift. It was about 6 feet high and 30 feet long. The last thing I saw as I zipped our tent door shut and felt the cold mountain night chill setting in was this 6 foot wall of snow.

A few hours later a loud rushing and whipping sound woke me. I lay in complete darkness listening to an angry wind, huddling in my sleeping bag against the cold. I could hear something hitting the wall of our tent but it didn’t sound like rain. Snow? It didn’t seem likely, but it sure sounded like it and I knew it was possible at this altitude. It had been almost a week since I’d checked the weather forecast at the start of our trip. Then I felt something touch my face. It startled me because I couldn’t see what it was in the darkness, but it felt like the nylon fabric of our tent. Was the wind blowing our tent down?!

I reached my hand out of my sleeping bag and found the wall of the tent pushing down just a few inches above my face. Without the wind the wall of Sharon’s tent rose steeply up about 4 feet high. The fiberglass poles are designed to bend in the wind, but I didn’t think they could possibly bend so far that the wall of the tent would touch my face. Then a surge of wind pressed the wall against my hand until it touched my face again.

Now I was scared. The wind seemed so intense I was afraid it might shatter the tent poles or rip the fabric. Slowly my fears shifted as I lay there listening to the howl of the wind and the pelting of tiny particles on the tent. My confidence that the tent would hold up grew, but I started wondering about blowing snow. It sounded like we were caught in a major mountain blizzard! I mentally calculated that we’d have to struggle through 7 miles of drifted snow to get back to my car. That alone could be very difficult physically and we’d be at risk for hypothermia because he hadn’t packed winter gear. And if we made it to the car, would we be able to drive out? What would we do if the road was drifted and impassible?

I knew I couldn’t do a thing in the middle of this dark, cold night so I tried to put all thoughts out of my mind and sleep. Sleep would be the best thing I could do until daybreak. Unfortunately my mind wouldn’t allow me any more sleep that night. It seemed like I’d lain there for countless hours trying to relax and sleep when a dim light made the walls of the tent visible. The wind still raged outside, but not quite intensely enough to press the wall of the tent against my face any more. I suppressed a nearly uncontrollable urge to stick my head out the door and see how much snow had fallen because I didn’t want to wake the others and worry them yet. Let them sleep in peace a little longer I thought.

When the light grew bright enough to fully illuminate the colors of the tent I couldn’t hold back any more. Struggling out of my sleeping bag into the cold I reached for the door zipper and pulled. Sticking my head out into the light jolted my face with cold wind, but that palled against the shock of what I saw. There wasn’t a hint of fresh snow anywhere! I felt confused. What was all that pelting against the tent that I’d been listening to for so many hours? Was it just sand? I felt kind of stupid now for spending so many hours worrying.

My sister interrupted my thoughts as she sat up and asked me how it looked outside. I confessed to her that I’d been worried about snow and she said she’d been awake for a long time with the same worries. We’d both been laying awake worrying but being still and quiet to not disturb the others. Now I didn’t feel quite so dumb for over-reacting to the sounds of the night.

In spite of the frigged cold we packed up our gear and hiked down to my car with a pronounced sense of relief that morning! We didn’t have to struggle for our lives against a high altitude blizzard after all. The blizzard of ’78 which prompted the governor of Michigan to declare a state of emergency continued to reign as the biggest weather disaster of my life.

But in 1985, I found myself in the middle of a disaster serious enough to move another governor to declare a state of emergency, but this time it was a tropical emergency. I was a second lieutenant serving as an astronautical engineer at Cape Canaveral AFS in Florida. During my first month there, surgeons removed 12 inches of my small intestine and diagnosed my chronic abdominal pain as Crohn’s Disease. In August the air force flew me to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Mississippi for a medical evaluation to decide if I was fit to continue serving in the USAF.

It had been over a year since my surgery and I had worked my body back to an exceptional fitness level so I was confident the doctors at the Keesler Medical Center would find me fit to serve. All the medical tests they did were a nuisance and the expense of taxpayer money bothered me, but I decided to make the best of it by reading, exercising, relaxing at the beach, and spending time with Ivan McKnight, and old friend from the USAF Academy now stationed at Keesler. I also made myself useful helping the hospital staff in any way I could.

As the bureaucratic gears of the USAF medical evaluation process ground slowly on, the month of August was drawing to an end and tropical storm Elena had drifted in to the Gulf of Mexico. By the time it reached hurricane strength it was headed straight for Biloxi. The hospital staff shifted into high gear as if they were preparing for a combat mobilization. I helped out by taping windows and whatever else they asked me to do. (Taping a big X across the windows helped to prevent the glass from shattering under the force of wind pushing against them.)

Elena continued along an almost straight path headed toward us until her sustained winds exceeded 100 miles per hour on August 30. Then she made a sharp right turn toward the Florida coast north of Tampa. Elena followed a fairly straight path to Florida for 2 days, but it was just a bluff. About 50 miles off the of the Florida coast she turned right again, very sharply, and continued turning until she’d made a 400-degree loop. By the time she stopped turning she’d grown to a Category 3 hurricane aiming once again for Biloxi.

Unfortunately the hospital staff had removed all the window tape and settled back into normal operations. Now they had to go through all the severe storm preparations a second time. My main job was taping all the windows again, but tape had become a precious commodity. The hospital used most of their tape preparing the first time and stores were running out because folks all over Biloxi and a costal region several hundred miles long had also been taping their windows. With a bit of scrounging and scrambling we found enough tape to X all the big windows, but some of the smaller windows that we’d taped a few days earlier would have to go without.

By the afternoon of September 2, 1985, Elena was battering Biloxi with sustained wind just under the 130 mph mark for a category 4 storm. Gusts were well over 150 mph. Everyone was supposed to stay away from windows, but my fascination with nature drove me to look outside. The rain fell in dense sheets that reminded me of the tornado I’d weathered in Michigan but without the yellow tint. Everything was gray. Trees bent sharply as if praying for mercy while leaves and other debris whipped by so fast, I couldn’t distinguish what items were.

I didn’t stand too close to the glass windows because I could see them flexing in and out with the wind gusts. A small decorative glass panel in the crawl space above the ceiling shattered and the wind caused the ceiling tiles to bend down in the hallway. I helped some nursing staff members shore up the ceiling with IV poles and other improvised materials so it wouldn’t collapse.

I spent a lot of time in the hallway, but couldn’t resist the urge to sneak into my assigned room and peak out the windows periodically. Elena raged on relentlessly for hours until the eye arrived.

The hurricane’s eye was relatively calm, but not perfectly still like I’d imagined it would be. She settled down into gentle, shifting breezes for a while then the breeze organized itself into a consistent wind coming from the opposite direction as before. It wasn’t long before the scene outside returned to gray sheets of whipping water, bent trees, and blurred debris. Overnight the fury slowly declined and in the morning it just looked like a heavy rainstorm.

Elena knocked out electrical power all over the area, but the hospital’s emergency generators kept things running in our building. I’d seen news featuring buildings destroyed by wind gusts estimated at nearly 180 mph. They said the most severe damage had likely been caused by tornados within the hurricane.

After 2 days confined inside the hospital I put on my running cloths eager to get out for some exercise, fresh air, and exploring. I actually had difficulty running because so much debris littered the sidewalks and road edges. Trash and tree branches were everywhere. Most of the buildings suffered only minor damage—broken windows, missing shingles or siding, etc. I found the most surprising damage in the hospital parking lot. It seemed that about half the cars parked there had shattered windows. I thought car windows were so strong that every window in the hospital would blow out, even with tape on them, before car windows began to shatter. But there I was, jogging around the parking lot seeing nearly half the cars missing windows, glass chunks everywhere, and the insides of the car soaked. I still don’t know why so many car windows broke while only a few on the hospital building did.

I couple days after the hurricane I received the all clear to return to unrestricted duty. I boarded another C-9 aircraft which flew me back to Patrick Air Force Base. I carried with me vivid memories of another brush with nature’s fury.

I’ve witnessed many more powerful thunderstorms, blizzards, ice storms, a couple more hurricanes and even another earthquake in Japan, but none of these events match the experiences of my first 23 years. Even though extreme natural events seem to be getting more common in the news, I experienced my personal extremes decades ago. I’ll be happy for it to remain so.