THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 14, 1996 TAG: 9601120211
SECTION: CHESAPEAKE CLIPPER PAGE: 02 EDITION: FINAL
COLUMN: Random Rambles
SOURCE: Tony Stein
LENGTH: Medium: 79 lines
I had a funny feeling the other day when I read about the struggle to produce last Monday's newspaper after power went out during The Storm.
Part of me was glad I didn't have to get off my semi-retired fanny to slip and slide around the city in pursuit of news coverage. The other part of me missed the adrenalin rush you get when you're part of a team doing a tough job in miserable circumstances.
But then I chased my share of bad weather in 43 years as a reporter. Snowstorms, nor'easters, pea-soup fog, hurricanes and one tornado. And the day I was trying to cover an accident in a driving rain that washed the notes off my pad as fast as I wrote them.
Then there was Hurricane Donna in 1960. I left home at 5 a.m. Half-way to the office in Norfolk, I was trying to cross a flooded intersection when the car started to float. SS Chevrolet, cruising to nowhere. The engine quickly conked out, and I ran aground.
Suddenly, like the legendary cavalry rescue of the wagon train, a guy I knew came along in a Jeep. He pushed my dead car to dry land and ferried me as far as 18th and Church streets. I walked to the newspaper office from there. Funny thing was, the eye of the hurricane was over me and the morning abruptly turned bright and clear. It was like a pleasure stroll on a sunny Sunday. But five minutes after I got to the office, Hurricane Donna was raging again.
I guess the eeriest night of my weather-covering career was when a tornado lashed a street in Evansville, Ind. The street was darker than the sub-cellar of a coal mine and I fell into a 6-foot deep drainage ditch. I bruised me and smashed a company camera. Then I limped along, counting damaged houses mostly by the flashing red lights of police cars and fire engines. I have never forgotten the strange silence and the surrealistic red flickering.
It could have been worse. At least, when I got back to the office, the city editor asked how badly I was hurt before he asked about the camera.
But my worst weather experience came about 30 years ago when I was headed home from work. I was on Virginia Beach Boulevard, creeping along in a snow storm that was beginning to create an asphalt ice rink. I saw a car by the side of the road and a man changing a tire part-way on the pavement.
I gently - very gently - tapped my brake to steer around him, and the car went into a skid. I was too close to miss. I saw the man go down under the front end of my car, and I felt like a horse had kicked me in the gut.
Lady Luck was as kind as Mother Nature had been mean. The street was so icy that the guy just slid away from the bumper. He had no more than a slightly sprained wrist, but we both had a mortal scare. Ever since, I have thought about driving in snowy weather the same way I think about playing patty-cake with angry Bengal tigers.
Then there was a double encounter with Tidewater's instantly changeable weather style. Some years back, my wife and I took her sister for a boat ride in Norfolk's Azalea Gardens. The trip ended in supreme sogginess when an apparently perfect day produced a violent thundersquall.
The next summer, we took my wife's brother and his wife for a boat ride in the gardens. Instant replay. Clear sky. Sudden squall. Lightning. Thunder. Ugly wind gusts. Rain in sheets that soaked us to the skin. In our family, suggesting a boat ride in the Azalea Gardens is like saying ``Go play in traffic.''
We all know bad weather can be dangerous, but sometimes the danger comes out of left field. About 20 years ago, we had three dogs, all terrified of thunder. One day, a sudden loud clap sent them sprinting in search of the comforting touch of my wife. They found her all right. The three of them, barreling in a herd through a door way, knocked her down. She broke her arm.
And, ah, yes, fog. My first flight in an airplane was in 1945, when I belonged to the Civil Air Patrol. A man who had been a bomber pilot took me up for a brief pleasure ride. Out of nowhere came a thick fog and we had to land. I enjoyed the trip anyway, and I wondered why the pilot seemed so tense.
I found out why a couple of days later. To approach the landing strip, he had to fly between a tall factory chimney and a cluster of high tension wires, neither of which he could see in the fog. By guess and by gosh, we made it.
Which is one reason I do not enjoy air travel to this day. If people were meant to fly, they would have been created with little plastic snack trays built into their laps. by CNB