Tag: windstorm

Shards of Mirrored Light

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photo by Joel DeWaard

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What is this unfolding, this slow-
going unraveling of gift held
in hands open
to the wonder and enchantment of it all?

What is this growing, this rare
showing, like blossoming
of purple spotted forests
by roadsides grown weary with winter months?

Seasons affected, routinely disordered
by playful disturbance of divine glee
weaving through limbs with
sharpened shards of mirrored light,
cutting dark spaces, interlacing creation,
commanding life with whimsical delight.

What is this breaking, this hopeful
re-making, shifting stones, addressing dry bones,
dizzying me with blessings,
intercepting my grieving
and raising the dead all around me?
~Enuma Okoro “Morning Reflections”

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As our region prepares for two wind and rain storms over the next three days, I realize how seldom we are compelled to face a power far greater than ourselves. We must ride it out, hoping the electricity stays on and the roof with it.

As invincible as we think we are, we need reminding we are mere dust, ready to blow away.  The immense power of the breath of God, whether typhoon, cyclone, tornado, or hurricane, or through the gentle filling of newborn lungs or the shriveled emptied lungs of the resurrected dead,  will rescue us from our broken shards of self.

This unfolding, this growing, is restoration of our imperfect reflection of His image.

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A Floral Symphony

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What a pity flowers can utter no sound! —A singing rose, a whispering violet, a murmuring honeysuckle… on, what a rare and exquisite miracle would these be!
~Henry Ward Beecher

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One last floral symphony before the blooms are gone with the wind and burned by the frost.

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Sun and Wind Muscle

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There is a muscular energy in sunlight corresponding to the spiritual energy of wind.
~Annie Dillard

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I tend to think of the wind, not the sun, having all the weather muscle, especially in the midst of a brisk northeaster blow in the dead of winter, far outperforming the meager and anemic sunlight.  Memories of northeast blizzard muscle are still fresh in my mind, even in the first half of August.

But earlier this week, on a warm summer day,  it was both sun and wind competing with their mustered energy.  With all the house windows kept wide open to keep things cool there were frequent door-slamming, blinds-beating, leaf-loosening, windchime-clattering, hay-drying gusts.  Muscle was all around and through us.

There was enough sun to create a shadow tree blending like a holograph projected onto the woods.  There was enough wind to shake the grasses and thistles and scatter their seed.  There was enough sun to dip the evening with orange smoothie and enough wind to clear the haze from the air.

For now there is plenty of energy to spare: spirit-filled muscle to pick me up, bend me over, warm my heart, all bottled and ready to release on that inevitable wintry day that will come,  sooner than I want.

shadow of the lone fir cast upon the woods at sunset

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The Cape Beale Heroine

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Minnie Paterson rocked slowly in her rocking chair, nursing her infant son. She sat near the south window of the lighthouse living quarters, and studied the rain streaming down in rivulets.Wind gusts rattled the window. A lighthouse keeper’s home was constantly buffeted by wind, but this early winter storm picked up urgency throughout the night.Now with first light, Minnie looked out at driving rain blowing sideways, barely able to make out the rugged rocks below.The Pacific Ocean was anything but; the mist hung gray, melding horizon into sea, with flashes of white foam in crashing waves against the rocky cliffs of Cape Beale.

Whenever storms came, it seemed the Paterson family lived at the edge of civilization. Yet these storms were the reason she and Tom and their five children lived on the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island, in isolation at the southern edge of Barkley Sound. Tom’s job was to keep the foghorn blaring and the light glowing above the treacherous rocks, to guide sea vessels away from certain peril. The storms sometimes were too powerful even with the lighthouse as a beacon of warning. In January 1906, the ship Valencia had wrecked off the coast and only a few survivors had managed to make their way to shore, staggering up the rocky trail to the lighthouse where she warmed them by the stove and fed them until rescuers could come.

Eleven months later, Minnie was setting about getting breakfast ready when her husband came down the stairs in a rush from the upper room where he tended the light.

“Mother, it’s a ship! I just now see it. It is battered by the waves, its sails in tatters! I can see a man waving a distress signal from the deck. It will surely run aground against the rocks—I must telegraph the village to send out rescuers.”

Minnie went to the window again but could see nothing in the mist. Surely this could not be another Valencia disaster! Tom went to the telegraph in the corner of the room and tapped out the urgent message to the fishing village of Bamfield, five miles away inside Barkley Sound. He sat impatiently waiting for a reply, drumming his fingers on the desk. After ten minutes, he sent the message again with no response.

“The lines are down. I’m certain of it. The fallen trees pull them down in this wind. We’ll be unable to summon the rescuers. This ship is doomed, just like the Valencia. There is no way we can reach them in this weather and they can’t come ashore here in lifeboats. They’ll crash on the rocks…”

Seeing the helplessness Tom felt, Minnie knew immediately what she must do.He could not leave his post—it was a condition of his job.She would have to run the six miles for help, through the forest.She kissed Tom and the children goodbye, donned a cap and sweater, and as her feet did not fit in her boots, she put on her husband’s slippers. She ran down the long stairway down the hill taking their dog as a precaution to help warn her of bears on the trails.

Minnie first had to cross through a tideland inlet with water waist deep. She quickly stripped from the waist down, held her pants and slippers over her head and crossed through the icy water, her dog swimming alongside. Shivering on the other side, she quickly dressed, and started down the narrow winding forest trail, scrambling over large fallen trees blocking the way. She waded through deep mud, and crossed rocky beaches where wild waves drenched her. At times the tide was so high she crawled on her hands and knees through underbrush so as not to be swept away by the storm.

After four hours, she reached a home along the trail and with a friend, launched a rowboat to go on to Bamfield. The two women notified the anchored ship Quadra, which set out immediately for Cape Beale. Within an hour, the Quadra had reached the Coloma which was taking on water fast, and drifting close to the rocks on shore.

Minnie walked the long way back home that night, clothing tattered, muscles cramping, exhausted and chilled. Her breasts overflowing, she gratefully fed her baby, unaware for days that her efforts rescued the crew of the Coloma. Tragically, her health compromised, she died in 1911 of tuberculosis,  forever a heroine to remember.

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Minnie Paterson

Source material: Bruce Scott’s Barkley Sound and Lighthouse Digest

This is a story Dan and I were told while staying in Bamfield on our honeymoon over thirty years ago. On a bright September day we walked the trail to the Cape Beale lighthouse, a most challenging and beautiful part of the world. The trail was so difficult, I was sure I was not going to make it to the lighthouse and back, so how Minnie managed in a December storm, in the dark, is beyond imagining. Her bravery captured me and I honor her sacrifice with this rendering of her story. EPG

Leaves and Bounding Fruit

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My mother and I debate:
we could sell
the black walnut tree
to the lumberman,
and pay off the mortgage.
Likely some storm anyway
will churn down its dark boughs,
smashing the house. We talk
slowly, two women trying
in a difficult time to be wise.
Roots in the cellar drains,
I say, and she replies
that the leaves are getting heavier
every year, and the fruit
harder to gather away.
But something brighter than money
moves in our blood – an edge
sharp and quick as a trowel
that wants us to dig and sow.
So we talk, but we don’t do
anything.

What my mother and I both know
is that we’d crawl with shame
in the emptiness we’d made
in our own and our fathers’ backyard.
So the black walnut tree
swings through another year
of sun and leaping winds,
of leaves and bounding fruit,
and, month after month, the whip-
crack of the mortgage.
~Mary Oliver from “The Black Walnut Tree” from Twelve Moons

 

We bought this old farm twenty five years ago:
the Lawrence family “Walnut Hill Farm”~
a front yard lined with several tall black walnut trees
brought as seedlings in a suitcase from Ohio
in the ought-1900’s.

These trees thrived for 80 years on this hilltop farm
overlooking the Canadian mountains to the north,
the Nooksack River valley to the west,
the Cascade peaks to the east,
each prolific in leaves
and prodigious in fruit.

The first year we were here,
a windstorm took one tree down.
A neighbor offered
to mill the twisted trunk for shares
so the fallen tree became planks
of fine grained chocolate hued lumber.

This old tree lines our kitchen cupboards,
a daily reminder of an immortality
living on in a legacy left behind~
sturdy while imperfect,
so beautiful to the eye and the heart.

 

 

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Called to Make a Comment

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And that is just the point… how the world, moist and beautiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. “Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?”
~Mary Oliver

Some mornings it is impossible to stay a silent observer of the world.  It demands a response.
The overnight wind and rain have pulled down nearly every leaf, the ground is carpeted with the dying evidence of last spring’s rebirth, the dropping temperatures robing the surrounding foothills and peaks in a bright new snow covering.

There can be no complacency in witnessing this startling transition in progress.   It blusters, rips, drenches, encompasses, buries. Nothing remains as it was.

And here I am, alive.
Awed.
A witness.
Called to comment.
Dying to respond.

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The Brows of Morning

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“The narrow bud opens her beauties to
The sun, and love runs in her thrilling veins;
Blossoms hang round the brows of Morning, and
Flourish down the bright cheek of modest Eve,
Till clust’ring Summer breaks forth into singing,
And feather’d clouds strew flowers round her head.

“The spirits of the air live on the smells
Of fruit; and Joy, with pinions light, roves round
The gardens, or sits singing in the trees.”
Thus sang the jolly Autumn as he sat;
Then rose, girded himself, and o’er the bleak
Hills fled from our sight; but left his golden load.
~William Blake from “To Autumn”

 

For northwest native webfoots like myself, this has been an atypically tough summer: no rain, full-out heat and humidity, melting glaciers, dust, drought, fires, smoke and water restrictions.  When the string of three plus months of overwhelming sun finally broke in a devastating wind and rainstorm this past weekend, I for one celebrated, despite no power and no water for a couple of days.  Since then the rain has poured and snow has fallen on bare rock in the mountains.  This morning the fog returned with moisture rising from spider-webbed soppy ground to meet the roselight of the dawn.

Praise God this Morning for a blissful relief
found in furrowed brows of Morning,
of foggy feather’d clouds;
we move from clust’ring Summer
to the golden load of jolly Autumn.

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Prepare for Joy: Blown Away

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It has been a relatively warm wet week in the northwest, so it seemed reasonable after finishing up farm chores last night to leave the large rolling north-south doors wide open in the barn where the horses are housed.  Then I woke suddenly at midnight hearing powerful gusts of a southerly wind buffeting the house.  Knowing what havoc a wind can do inside an open barn, I went out in pajamas and muck boots to roll the doors closed before the storm could reach inside, a true barnstorming as has happened here before on Holy Week…

 

An unexpected southerly wind hit suddenly late Sunday night, gusting up to 40 miles an hour and slamming the house with drenching rain as we prepared to go to bed. Chores in the barn had been done hours before, but as we had not been expecting a storm, the north/south center aisle doors were still open, and I could hear banging and rattling as they were buffeted in the wind. I quickly dressed to go latch the doors for the night, but the tempest had done its damage. Hay, empty buckets, horse blankets, tack and cat food had blown all over, while the Haflingers stood wide-eyed and fretful in their stalls. A storm was blowing inside the barn as well as outside it.

It took some time to tidy up the mess after the doors were secured but all was soon made right. The wind continued to bash at the doors, but it no longer could touch anything inside them. The horses relaxed and got back to their evening meal though the noise coming from outside was deafening. I headed back up to the house and slept fitfully listening to the wind blow all night, wondering if the metal barn roof might pull off in a gust, exposing everything within.

Yet in the new daylight on Monday morning, all was calm. The barn was still there, the roof still on, the horses where they belonged and all seemed to be as it was before the barnstorming wind.

Or so it might appear.

This wind heralds another storm coming this week that hits with such force that I’m knocked off my feet, swept away, and left bruised and breathless. No latches, locks, or barricades are strong enough to protect me from what will come over the next few days.

On Sunday he rode in on a donkey softly, humbly, and wept at what he knew was coming.

Yesterday, he withered the fruitless tree and overturned the tables in his fury.

Today the plans are made to betray him.

Tomorrow, he teaches the people to prepare them, then rests in anticipation.

On Thursday, he kneels as a servant, pours water over dusty feet, presides over a simple meal, and then, abandoned by his friends,  sweats blood in agonized prayer.

By Friday, all culminates in the perfect storm, transforming everything in its path, leaving nothing untouched.

The silence on Saturday is deafening.

Next Sunday, the Son rises and returns, all is calm, all is well, all set to right.  He calls my name, breaks bread with broken hands, my heart burns within me at his words and I can never be the same again.

Barnstormed to the depths of my soul. Doors flung open wide, the roof pulled off, everything I was before blown away and now replaced, renewed and reconciled.

So shall his spirit storm within us as he has said, again and yet again.

 

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