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"I have rope"
Aug. 22nd, 2021 09:41 amI've been visiting my father, usually on Sundays, during the summer, but this weekend, knowing that Henri was coming, I went on Saturday. When the hurricane came up, he reminisced about the famous (in these parts, anyway) Hurricane of 1938, which he could remember.
My dad was a little boy of seven at the time, living in Lexington, MA. He said that at that time, no one in the region had any experience with hurricanes. His uncle Sal (whom I believe I've mentioned on these pages before: he was part of the team that captured top-recorded** world wind speed in 1934 from atop Mt. Washington) told the family, "A big wind is coming."
He said there were pine trees by the house, and one just snapped, halfway up its trunk, and the top went sailing by the house. Everyone in the family was huddled on the second floor of the house when there was a loud noise from the attic. The negative pressure had caused a skylight in the attic to blow open, and a huge gust of leaves came rushing in and whirling through the house.
He said his father said, "I need a rope; where's a rope?"--he wanted to go tie the skylight closed.
Well, my father's little brother--my uncle--was clutching a brown paper bag full of his precious possessions (my dad mentioned a teddy bear whose head had fallen off), and among those possessions? A length of rope!
"I have rope," my uncle said.
So my grandfather used that rope to batten down the skylight--my three-year-old uncle saved the day!
As for Hurricane Henri, right now it's bringing us the intense but very fine rain that hurricanes do. By the way, do people know the site windy.com? It's fun for looking at storms and wind patterns. (Here's Henri.) You can move the little marker on the far right further up to get the wind speeds higher in the atmosphere (they get faster; it's very pretty).
**The record was broken, as the link says, in 1996 by a wind recorded by an unmanned instrument station on Barrow Island, Australia during Tropical Cyclone Olivia.
My dad was a little boy of seven at the time, living in Lexington, MA. He said that at that time, no one in the region had any experience with hurricanes. His uncle Sal (whom I believe I've mentioned on these pages before: he was part of the team that captured top-recorded** world wind speed in 1934 from atop Mt. Washington) told the family, "A big wind is coming."
He said there were pine trees by the house, and one just snapped, halfway up its trunk, and the top went sailing by the house. Everyone in the family was huddled on the second floor of the house when there was a loud noise from the attic. The negative pressure had caused a skylight in the attic to blow open, and a huge gust of leaves came rushing in and whirling through the house.
He said his father said, "I need a rope; where's a rope?"--he wanted to go tie the skylight closed.
Well, my father's little brother--my uncle--was clutching a brown paper bag full of his precious possessions (my dad mentioned a teddy bear whose head had fallen off), and among those possessions? A length of rope!
"I have rope," my uncle said.
So my grandfather used that rope to batten down the skylight--my three-year-old uncle saved the day!
As for Hurricane Henri, right now it's bringing us the intense but very fine rain that hurricanes do. By the way, do people know the site windy.com? It's fun for looking at storms and wind patterns. (Here's Henri.) You can move the little marker on the far right further up to get the wind speeds higher in the atmosphere (they get faster; it's very pretty).
**The record was broken, as the link says, in 1996 by a wind recorded by an unmanned instrument station on Barrow Island, Australia during Tropical Cyclone Olivia.
