by Ken O'Steen
The sound was eerie. It was still dark, but I was awake and listening, before I opened my eyes, and sat up in the bed. It was a whistling sound, a shrill whistling, though voluble. At first, as I sat there, I believed it might be the plumbing or the refrigerator. When I finally looked, peering into the dark through the glass toward the oilrig and the walkway that connected to it, I could see power lines billowing out, sharply arced between poles. Rather than whipping around in the wind, the lines were bulging only in one direction. It wasn’t that the wind necessarily was all that strong, but that it was steady, and continued to blow at the same velocity without the slightest change. I didn’t recall having seen or heard anything remotely like it.
But more than anything what was so conspicuous about it all was the eeriness. Lila and I had never actually gotten into the bed, but had fallen asleep on top it of while watching the late weather, and whatever else we watched on television after that, before falling asleep in front of the screen. One of us must have rolled over on the remote in our sleep, because I awoke not only to the scarifying howl of the wind, but to the scarifying words of a televangelist plotting by the looks of his props, his conquest of numerous nations of Earth, or a severe bitch-slapping of them by the Almighty. There were two wall-sized maps of the world placed side by side, as well as charts and graphs depicting endeavors I could not decipher. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about, but I didn’t like the sound of it, didn’t like the sound of it at all. Eerie.
The first thing Lila said when she awoke was, “What is that?” I didn’t know whether she meant the pomaded man on television or the creepy wind. Before I could ask her, she got out of bed and went to the window to look for herself.
“That’s weird,” she said, describing it concisely.
“Very.”
“That high-pitched sound the wind is making…it’s really strong…they’re no gusts, just a constant blowing. What time is it anyhow?” asking as she returned to bed.
“A little after five.”
“What’s that?” she asked, when she got her first gander of Dr. Divinity, or whoever it was.
“You don’t know from weird, sister.”
She watched for around a minute and a half, then said, “Yeah, too spooky for this situation. Change it. Aren’t you going to get the weather? Or the news?” adding this last before I had a chance to do it, failing as she saw it to flip with the alacrity expected of me.
The Weather Channel was concentrated on the East coast, apprising us of the current temperature in Central Park. In all fairness, at one time in my life this would have been information not at all insignificant to me. But I skipped around the local channels till I landed on the latest installment of Storm Watch, which I had dreamed during the night would undergo the deserved upgrade, to Big Storm Watch.
“The storm is moving toward the coast very slowly, at less than five miles per hour,” we were told. “The National Hurricane Center reported in its most recent bulletin that Giorgio, which remains a strong tropical storm and not quite a hurricane, is beginning to veer northwestwardly. It now is forecasting that the storm will brush the coast of southern California before eventually turning out to sea. The bad news for us is that the storm’s slow movement will keep it churning just off shore for the better part of today and tonight, meaning the storm’s circulating winds will bring what are called feeder bands, squall lines basically, into the Los Angeles area over the next twelve hours, and possibly beyond. Warnings and explanations followed.
“Storm surges may be anywhere from four to eight feet. Remember now, a storm surge is simply water that is pushed toward the shore by the force of the winds swirling around the storm. This advancing surge combines with the normal tides to create the hurricane storm tide, which in certain circumstances can increase water levels 15 feet or more. In addition, wind waves are superimposed on the storm tide. This rise in water level can cause severe flooding in coastal areas, particularly when the storm tide coincides with the normal high tides. Unfortunately for those who have homes or business along the coast, the currents created by the tide combine with the action of the waves to severely erode beaches, and coastal highways.
“We can expect six to eight inches of rain along the coast, four to six throughout the basin and foothills before this mess is gone. We’ve had reports of wind gusts as high as eighty-seven miles per hour in Santa Monica, and seventy- five at Long Beach. Out in Burbank, gusts of sixty miles per hour have been recorded. Sustained winds range from forty-five to fifty-five in the coastal regions, and anywhere from thirty to forty in the valleys. All those speeds are expected to increase as the day wears on, and the storm edges closer to shore.”
Though the briefing had been thorough, I was by now adrenalized, and could not help myself from seeking additional information back at the Weather Channel. The focus there by then had turned to the Pacific Coast, as it most assuredly should have. While no specific information about our conditions was forthcoming, a little more was added to our general education.
“Storm surges are of limited magnitude on the Pacific Coast because of the great ocean depths close to shore. Numerous hurricanes form off the west coast of Mexico, but these tend to move seaward. Only rarely does one of these hurricanes reach the extreme southern California coast, and those that do are weak compared to hurricanes on the eastern seaboard. Their intensity is limited by the cold temperature of the underlying water surface and other factors.” Then, “On up the coast in the Bay Area…” was the signal for me to flip again.
CNN was currently hoping to engage an audience with a health segment clarifying the legitimate and illegitimate claims of the healthful benefits of drinking green tea. Three of the local channels had switched to a colorful apartment fire burning out of control in Hawthorne, and two others, not to be outdone, had the cameras in their circling news choppers trained on the scene of a jackknifed tractor-trailer truck splayed across a lane of the Antelope Freeway.
“What’s on Fox?” Lila asked, referring to the news channel whose name we dared not speak and which we never watched, as the pitch of their programming was somewhere to the right of Australopithecus.
“What’s on Fox? Suppurating pustules would be my guess.”
Snorting, she conceded, “My impatience is out of hand.”
Finally, Channel Eleven gave us Rambo, standing outside, and occasionally latching desperately onto a post in a wind threatening to blow him off the deserted seaside patio at Gladstone’s restaurant in Pacific Palisades. It was the first of a string of on-site “reports” from various windblown and drenched locations.
“It’s seriously windy out here,” Rambo offered, illuminating the situation.
Lila rolled her eyes, sighed, and said, “I’ve had enough. I know I’m not getting back to sleep, that’s for sure. I don’t feel like sitting here charting every inch of Giorgio’s progress on the friggin’ Weather Channel, or every hiccup outside on the friggin’ local channels. I might as well just get up and make the coffee,” she declared, getting up to do exactly that.
“Geez, what a grouch,” I said.
“No, I’m just planning to use the window for my weather updates, and read some stuff online.”
I followed her off the bed, opening the door to pull the paper in, taking a morning shower in the process of closing it, since it remained pinned against the side of the cottage by the gale force winds. Chilled and wet already, I decided to take a hot shower.
When I got out, the gray light insinuating itself at the horizon earlier, now had permeated the western sky. I looked out the window, seeing ocean swells as large as I had ever seen them, a thin yellow line of dry sand between the ocean, and the steps up the small bank to our sliver of yard. Lila was at the computer. I returned to the bed, turned the sound down on the television and read the Times. During this period we were aware of small thuds on the roof at intervals, bangi
ng sounds from somewhere and fairly strong rattling of the window glass. Giant raindrops pelted the windows off and on. There was a noise outside that sounded like a metal chain repeatedly whacking a metal sign.
Later in the morning, sometime before noon, I put the book I had begun to read down, and turned the sound on the television up again. There was no real deviation from what we’d first heard. The storm was moving slowly, but steadily, neither loosing nor gaining intensity. Outside, there was a steady rain at times, which became hard rain; then, after a while, tapered off to soft rain, before starting up the cycle again. The wind had gone from making a whistling sound, to making a howling sound, and then to some combination of howling and a deep, demonic brand of whooshing.
About one in the afternoon, with conditions noticeably worsening, we decided that embarking sooner rather than later on a derangement of the senses was the prudent course. Leaving for Bob’s carrying grocery bags of vodka, and cheese and bread, and Band Aids, we said goodbye to our cottage, hoped that it survived, and we did too, then headed face first into the brutal power of motherfucking Nature.
The rain had tapered off, but what was falling fell almost horizontally, as it was being pushed by the vicious gale; and the sand being whipped up peppered us like tiny pieces of buckshot, with no minor sting. Recalling how eloquently Rambo had elucidated a similar situation earlier, I reported to Lila as we struggled, “It’s seriously windy out here.”
---------------------------------------------------------------------