Tornado Traffic

My pool has been closed for repairs. This is annoying, because I've just now been starting to feel better.  I always, always go back to the pool at least two days before I actually should.  It's some kind of weird quirk. And here I am, actually feeling healthy enough to go to the pool, and I don't have a pool to go to.  No word on when it'll be opening back up, either, or even what's wrong with it.  This kind of midyear closure is pretty unusual, so it must be something serious.  Sometimes they close up for a week or so to give it a drain and a good scrubdown, but there are always signs up for weeks and the swim team arranges for extra practices and everyone just kind of takes it in stride.  Not so this time. We got a text message on our phones that the pool was closed, and then there's been like one text message a day since then, letting us know that yes, it is still closed.  The mind boggles. Maybe they found an octopus living in there or something.  

So I've been swimming in the evening, after work, at SMU's amazing pool.  This pool is the size of a small city.  50 meters long, 25 meters across with a 17 foot diving well and the minimum depth is 7 feet.  It's also cold as all get-out (well, it's probably hard to heat that much water).  The first time I was there, I jumped off the side and darn near drowned (that gasp reflex when you jump into cold water).  So now my brain won't let me jump in.  I get to the side and it just goes, "Nope."  I have to climb down the ladder, like a little kid.  But hey, I get to swim.  

And how do I get to the pool, you might ask.  Especially as I have to pick up Joan from work, you might ask.  Well, she comes with me. She sits in the lobby (it's a nice lobby) and does cross stitch while I do battle with cold water and 8 50s in 1 minute 30.  People, I may not have the nicest house, and I may not have the nicest car, but I have the nicest wife on the planet.  Not many people would consent to sitting in the lobby for an hour and a half after a long day at work (and before dinner) just so their significant sweetie can splash around in cold water.  

I was gonna write this cool thing about how your actions influence others even when you don't know it, and so it's important to be nice, but the situation deteriorated before I could finish the blog post again.  On the last day of the American League championship series, which is much more important than the day of the week or even the date of the month, a tornado ripped through Dallas.

Actually, there were ten (!) of them, according to the people that keep track of these things.  They started off over near Love Field and came to their disorganized end somewhere near my office, leaving in their wake mangled road signs, a collapsed Home Depot, lots of downed trees and such, and monks with chainsaws. I'll get back to that in a second.

Joan and I were watching the game, as we're wont to do this time of the year, when a siren went off.  It was not the usual siren, which is to say, the one we're used to hearing when there are tornadoes; this was a high, sharp, annoying buzz like those signals they use on TV as a test of the Emergency Broadcast System.  It was our cell phones.  We both have them set to get emergency alerts, which means every time two drops of water fall in Dallas, they go off (because it might possibly flood, you see).   And of course we get Amber Alerts and such, and so they're kind of handy to have, just in case some kidnapped child passes me on the freeway in a vehicle and I happen to be close enough to read the offending vehicle's license plate. But this was the first time they've ever gone off and said,"Tornado Warning." 

So I asked Joan, "That's the bad one, right? The one we don't like?" (I sometimes get confused between watches and warnings.)  She allowed that it was, and we were both a little puzzled because as far as we knew, there wasn't a cloud in the sky (though we wouldn't know, because it was dark).  We stood there for a second, trying to hear the sirens, and then we pushed the office chairs into the hallway and closed all the interior doors and sat there with our cell phones while confused cats, who couldn't figure out why they were blocked off from part of the house, milled around and looked at us like we were crazy.

One of the beautiful things about the modern age is the ability to immediately see whatever disaster is about to break right over your head with help from GPS and the National Weather Service.  We had this lovely map, with big blops of red and purple on it, mapping out the tornado (es) (which were clearly visible because they were round, and also where they were on the map, there was just nothing there; a black spot, a void).   And the big red and purple spot was, as they often are, headed straight for us.  

This took us a little while to figure out. Joan kept saying, "Is that where we are?", pointing to a section of map, and I'd say, "No, lower than that."  "Well, how about there?"  pointing to a different map. "No, higher than that."  (These maps are great at showing vicious, angry weather but not as good at telling you where the streets are; they sometimes have helpful dots that say things like "Garland" and "Dallas").  Anyway, wherever we looked, there were the big swirly voids.  And yes, they did look like they were headed right for us.  

So we sat there, and we wondered if our 69-year-old sheetrock was strong enough to fend off blown branches and pieces of somebody's fence.  And we wondered if we were going to get sucked off the ground, though really, that hardly ever happens. And we both listened very intently for a freight train, but if there was one, it was drowned out by the tornado sirens, which had finally started to sound. Our phones beat them by a good five minutes, which is a little worrisome. What happens if you don't have a phone in a tornado?

Anyway, after a while the swirly voids on the radar map started to move to the north. They were still, of course, headed right for us, but maybe less right for us.  Now they looked more like they were headed toward my office.  Which wasn't good either, because, you know, having a job is a good thing and if the firm suffered a direct hit from a tornado I'd definitely be unemployed for a while, but I'll take unemployment over a big swirly void parking directly above me on the NWC map, I can tell you.  

Well, obviously we are okay.  The tornado warning was canceled, and we crept out of the hallway to see what had happened.  Answer:  Essentially nothing.  There were no branches down.  There were no roofs lying in the middle of the street.  There were no damaged road signs.  There were no rain puddles, even.  (Well, maybe a few small ones.)  Somehow, our little piece of trendy Gaston Park had completely escaped notice from our local swirly void.  What's more, nobody had been killed, or even badly hurt (I think three people went to the hospital with minor injuries).  That's really not bad for ten tornadoes hitting a major metropolitan area on a Sunday night.  

Well, it wasn't all cheery.  I have a friend who has a restaurant, Arepa, and it took a direct hit from whatever roared up Preston Road at Royal.  She's going to have to close for a couple of months.  One of our favorite bookstores, Interabang, is also out of commission and probably for the same amount of time.  My boss's roof, part of it, is still in his swimming pool, and he didn't have electricity for, like, a week.  (That's got to be fun with three young kids.)  Our friends Kellum and Suzie were right under one of the big swirly voids and they lost a couple of trees.  But no damage to the house.  And again, nobody seriously hurt or killed.

Traffic has been a consummate nightmare since then.  I drop Joan off downtown, then go north to Richardson, which is right where most of the tornado damage was.  Streets are closed at random, emergency personnel are running around with live wires and you don't want to be anywhere near the freeway because it's at a standstill.  Monday it took me an hour and fifteen minutes to make the 20 minute drive. Yesterday it took an hour and ten. Today it took 55 minutes. So there's hope.  And some of this may just be Dallas, not tornado traffic at all.  Hey, we had 100,000 people move here in 2016.  That's a lot of humans and cars to cram onto your average six-lane freeway.  

Oh yeah.  Back to the monks with chainsaws.  The Thai Buddhist temple suffered significant damage, and on one of my sojourns north to my place of employ, I went right by it.  Running around in the yard, cutting trees and moving large pieces of debris, were monks with chainsaws. And not one or two. This was about twenty monks, wearing monks' robes, running around with chainsaws. I mean it was like a mashup of a horror movie and a really weird Broadway musical.  I wish I had a picture, because it's really hard to explain how completely surreal this was.  Monks with chainsaws. Truly, I was amazed.

Anyway, if you want to send a donation to the Buddhist temple, they could really use it right now.  The Buddhist Temple of Dallas, 8484 Stultz Road, Dallas, TX 75243.  I'd direct you to their Web site, but it's in Thai, and I don't know which of the ten major dialects of Thai it's in because I, uh, can't read Thai.  (I did, however, have to find a Thai interpreter once, which is how I know there are ten major dialects.)  Stay safe and avoid tornadoes, kids.  Cheers.