We’ve had a spell of very windy weather, and it looks like there finally might be a storm coming. For 3 days now, we’ve had high, warm winds blowing steadily from the West. Until yesterday the skies were clear, but today it’s steadily gotten greyer, and the clouds are starting to pile up on one another and look like something’s about to happen.

We haven’t had much rain, so I haven’t put out the other two rain barrels; I need to get some blocks to raise them up abot a foot or so, and also they would just fly away, empty as they are.

The new plants are not flourishing; I watered them this morning before leaving for work, and the dwarf hollyhocks don’t look like they’re going to make it. However, I’ve been surprised before, so water them I did. The columbine are the exception to this rule, because they both look pretty happy and are putting out new leaves.

Also, the expensive batch of perennials I planted in the kitty garden look suspiciously cut along the sides and top; I’m pretty certain that one of the lawn crew guys got a little freehand with the weedwhacker. I’ve got a bit of wire fencing I can place around the bed in order to make it clear that they need to back the hell off when trimming.

I’ll water as much as I can in the beds before we leave, but I’m expecting more rain while we’re gone and hoping that I won’t come back to dried up dead plants. On our return I’ll be able to get going on the rain garden project, too.

If there is a storm, fine by me. I wish it would come tonight so I could listen to it beating against the side of the house. In fact. I could go for a good loud thunderstorm. It would relieve the sense of something impending. It’ll be good to get on the road AFTER a big storm has cleared the air, not during.

Drivers In The Storm

Storms and road trips make for good stories after the fact, but driving in a heavy storm when you’re far from home is another matter.

One time, for example, Mom and I were making one of our many trips to Steamboat Springs to dig my cousin and aunt out from under some financial or medical crisis. These crises happened every few months – they weren’t too responsible for reasons mostly beyond their control, and so Mom would wade in, with me in tow, and we’d clean or paint or balance their checkbooks or talk to the local merchants about not extending them any more credit. The work we put in on these rescue jobs was not fun, yet I loved the 6 hour drives between Salt Lake and Steamboat, and the town itself was fun to hang around in. They were almost always in summer, so there was a relaxed “off-season” air about the place.

We drove in a torrential downpour one summer day when the rain came down so fast and heavy that Mom pulled over at a rest area, because the wipers couldn’t keep up with the cascade of water coming down the windshield. So we watched the storm while eating our sandwiches in a picnic shelter, in the company of a very large and very wet man who had parked a huge Harley at the end of the picnic shelter. We chatted for a while about the road and the weather, and later my mom and I talked about how scary he looked at first and how surprised we were when he turned out to be a normal guy who happened to have rather Gothic taste in riding leathers. “Any old port in a storm” led us into an interesting conversation that day.

I’ve been reminded of that particular storm a few times since moving to the Midwest, since dam-busting downpours are much more common out on the Plains than they are in the Intermountain or Pacific West. David and I were headed up to northern Wisconsin for a family wedding a few years ago and thought for a while we might have to pull over and ride out a series of huge, violent thunderstorms. After a while, we started to pretend it was fun and not hairy-eyeball scary, and after that we stopped pretending because it really WAS fun. We drove for hours like that, and finally outran the northern edge of the storms. It made the return journey disappointingly tame, but it was a lot easier to spot the roadside fiberglass wildlife, which abounds in Wisconsin.

But that’s another blog post – probably an entire photoblog – since I’ve been wanting to document the various kinds of fake plastic moose, deer, cattle, food items, and seagoing creatures that people in Wisconsin feel compelled to display in front of restaurants, hostelries, and private homes.

I wouldn’t mind if we get to hole up somewhere on this trip and watch a good storm — for example, it would be totally awesome to watch a good storm from a vantage point high on the edge of Mesa Verde. And it wouldn’t be all that bad to be driving through another storm sometime during the trip.

I just hope I’m not the one driving. 😉