Aftermaths and Fire Ants

This flying siding could have literally cut someone in half. This was one of the most beautiful cedar elms in the meadow. Twisting winds took it down. Photo by: Suna

When flooded, fire ants build these necrotic islands and float their colony to a new location. What a difference a day makes!

Anyone knows an ant, can't.

Move a rubber tree plant.

—Sammy Cahn

I didn’t originally intend to post these pictures, but then it hit me. I’m trying to be as honest as I can about our move to the ranch, and that means talking about scary stuff, too. I know I already did that by talking about yesterday’s tornados and floods, but I thought these two pictures would drive my point home.

UnIdentified Flying Objects

First, I mentioned the flying siding yesterday. I’ll be brief. Just look how far that piece of siding buried itself in the ground when it hit. Now imagine if it had hit somebody. It would be like when I worked in Houston, and a gust of wind blew a sheet of plywood off the roof of one of the skyscrapers. It cut a lawyer in half.

Now some of you will say, “Lawyer…no big loss.” But it could have been anybody. This siding, too, could have cut someone in half if it hadn’t landed harmlessly in our woods.

Fire Ants

Living underground, fire ants are particularly susceptible to floods. They have evolved a cutthroat survival strategy. As their mound floods, the ants flee to the surface.

If water continues to rise, they build floating islands on the corpses of their siblings. The islands are attached to the original mound by a thin string of dead ants. If the water rises enough to break that “string,” the island floats away. It has everything it needs to rebuild the colony where it lands. Notice the princess ant is at the very top of the island in the picture.

The big problem comes when the island floats into an animal or maybe a person. The ants swarm all over that refuge, sometimes millions of them. And they’re not happy. Stay as far away from them as you can.

 

Seeking Shelter From the Storm

The new pond crested the dam that doubles as the entrance to the property. Where the water spills into the arroyo, it is at least eight feet deep.

That X sticking up above the water is the top of the fence. The creek bed is a quarter-mile away.

  Try imagining a place where it’s always safe and warm

  Come in, she said

  I’ll give ya shelter from the storm

—Bob Dylan

We found out why we have a storm room this afternoon—the one I have always joked is our “zombie apocalypse room.”

A severe storm blew up—heavy rains, gusting winds, tornados. It dumped almost three inches of rain in less than an hour. Given that the ground was already saturated and the ponds were already full to capacity, there wasn’t much hope to avoid a serious flood.

The house is on one of the highest points of the ranch. So I wasn’t worried about the flooding. The tornados were another matter. We all—Suna, me, Jaime’s family, Grillo, and Stella—all crowded into the storm room and locked the metal doors. Rose insisted on running upstairs to hide, but she and the house came through without a scratch.

The winds were strong enough to blow Jaime’s wet saw off the front porch. We also found a 4x8 sheet of metal siding buried six inches in the ground just on the other side of the gate. The siding was the wrong color to have come from any of our buildings or any of Ralph’s.

Ralph stood on his back porch taking pictures until he realized pieces of his hay barn were flying over the house. He was uninjured. In fact, the only injury sustained on either property was a small cut on one of the horses.

Our neighbors in Pettibone weren’t so lucky. The tornado touched down in that area several times. It destroyed a huge swath of trees and phone lines. It also took out at least two houses. And, yes, there were fatalities reported there. I don’t have the details.

As bad as the storm was, I’m glad we, our neighbors, and most of the country came out fairly well.

 

The creek hardly ever floods the bridge, but it did this time. Suna is fast enough to be on both ends of the picture.

Storms always make for the best sunsets—when they don’t occult the sunset.

Tornadic Dream

Beautiful pictures like this belie the destructiveness and horror of tornadoes.

Photo source: National Severe Storms Laboratory

I dreamed last night that I was working in a high-rise office again. Everyone was in a panic because a tornado was visible from one of the windows. We were looking for a place of refuge inside the building. I found a white-painted two-panel wooden door. Ah, the staircase! I thought it would be safe. But as I looked down to the next wooden landing, I realized that the stairs were lit by windows. The one at the landing had peeling white paint and was tilted open. I decided to go down the stairs, thinking that the ground floor would be at least somewhat safer than the upper floors.

Downstairs, everyone was pouring out of the office building into a candy store across the street. The candy store was an old one-storey structure with canopies and fruit stalls in front of it. As we crossed the dirt street (It hadn’t even started to rain yet!), I asked someone why we were all running into the candy store. “It has a basement,” he yelled. Then he shoved his hat down tighter on his head and ran.

“It’s dropping!” someone nearby yelled.

I turned and got my first good look at the “high rise.” It covered about half a block and stood three stories tall. It was cased in stone and a short, square minaret graced each corner—they looked more like battlements, but minaret is what I remember thinking of them as. Centered between the two visible minarets and about a quarter mile beyond the building, a tornado snaked down from a slate cloud. I woke up then. My heart was beating fast, but it wasn’t racing like it has been after several less eventful dreams lately. I remember thinking that at least I had a reason for an elevated heart rate.

Another odd thing about this dream is that the perspective was different. I was shorter in the dream than I am in this life. Could it be a memory of a past life? If so, it wouldn’t be the first such for me. Or is it more likely to stem from reading a book in which the main character remembers glimpses of past lives? There’s no way to tell.

I have had a number of dreams lately (undocumented here) that were no more threatening than the one about Rose breathing. I would awaken from these dreams with all of the symptoms on an anxiety attack—that is, all the symptoms except for anxiety. As an experiment, I stopped drinking diet soda for a few days, and they seemed to abate. Too much caffeine?

Friday’s Feast

Appetizer: If you could live on another continent for 1 year, which one would you choose?

For a year? I would probably enjoy anywhere except India or Africa for a year. Oh, not Antarctica either. I would be much pickier about a permanent move.

Soup: Which browser do you use to surf the Internet?

Firefox 2.0.0.14. But now that 3.0 is out, I will probably be upgrading to it soon. I tried 3.0/RC1, but it was still too unstable. There have been several interim releases since then.

Salad: On a scale of 1-10 (with 10 being highest), how much do you know about the history of your country?

I’d guess about a six. That means I consistently scored in the 99^th percentile on standardized tests.

Main Course: Finish this sentence: Love is…

I would simply change the elipsis to a period. But if that’s too much of a cheat, I’ll paraphrase the song by 10cc: “Love is a rollercoaster that we all ride.”

Dessert: Have you ever been in or near a tornado?

Twice:

• In Houston, Trackgrease and I steped out on the back poarch to enjoy a thunderstorm. At one point, he said, “Dad, that sounds like a tornado!” I thought it was too quiet, so he and I stayed outside watching the storm. The next morning, we went to breakfast only to find a large swath of destruction cutting through the neighborhood and starting only a couple of blocks from the house.
• A few weeks ago, we came home from choir rehearsal in a thunderstorm. I got out of the truck and heard that familiar sound from the previous paragraph.

Big Storms Last Night

MacGillivray’s Warbler Photo Source: Wikipedia

I met this little guy this morning. We had some terrible storms blow through last night, and they must have pushed him along with them. He was at least a hundred miles east of his normal migratory path from Central America to the forests of the American and Canadian West.

I’m sad to say that he didn’t make it this year. The storms were just too much for him. I found him on the front porch. I said a few nice words over him and buried him in the flowerbed where I hope he rests well.

He was a truly beautiful bird. He had a brilliant yellow underbelly. His head and cape are supposed to be slate gray, but his head looked almost purple (as seen in the painting). The gray cape had almost a greenish tint.

Other than the little MacGillivray’s warbler, we came through very lucky. A funnel cloud was spotted in our neighborhood about the time we were coming home from choir practice, but it didn’t touch down. Beccano is terrified of tornadoes, so he had a bit of a rough patch. I am proud of the way he handled himself. Not being afraid is stupid. Learning to work through your fear is what courage is all about.

We had a lot of wind and hail, but no downed branches on our block anyway. (Suna says the University campus took quite a bit of damage.) And the hail at our house was apparently small. It didn’t even stay on the ground long enough for me to measure it after the second wave. I didn’t see any hail damage or even any shredded leaves. Other places in town reported hailstones up to 4”—the largest ever recorded in the Austin metroplex, according to News8.

We did get about 1.5” of rain over night. (That’s on top of about .6” the night before.) I am worried that one of our plants is so top-heavy from the rain that it may have damaged its stem. I’ll check it out when I get back home.