Essays: Storms

Storms are unadulterated beauty, awe filling, obedient to natures law, raw unconstrained power, destruction, and some end with a death count. They spawn fear and hope in the human psyche as they develop. Storms are the single most powerful and destructive force in nature, only surpassed by a nuclear explosion. Yet they are Mother Nature's beautiful dance.

I have watched as a wall of billowing white caped thunderheads grew until they block heaven from my sight as they advanced towards me. The air thickened turning into a thin pea soup as lightning bolts exploded hurling earths debris high in the air. The sound of the thunder reverberated in my ears as kettle drums in a great Beethoven symphony. I knew the destruction and power advancing towards me yet my senses were filled with the great beauty before me.

Storms as I have described are massively destructive to nature and communities as lightning bolts ignite fires and the wind wipes the face of the earth clean. Then once the storm has past the grass and trees become sharply green and manicured of the deadwood and soon the new growth sprouts. Lightning fills the air with nitrogen which stimulates new growth and the rain washes away the thatch and litter as it becomes as an embryonic fluid for the newly fallen seeds.

Mans love affair with storms is inherent, we look forward to the next great drama of nature. Once the curtain opens on act one we hope the destruction will miss us as we look into fears eyes. I believe human beings are more fearful of an F5 tornado (the finger of God) or a hurricane than they are the threat of a nuclear bomb exploding. You can't see a nuclear bomb approaching as it bares its teeth before the flash of light ending everything and all life.

Civilizations technology has invented and is continually improving whether forecasting stations and satellites in the hope of predicting the approach of developing storms. We study storms and the prevailing whether patterns which nurture, giving birth to them. The "Whether Man" is now called a meteorologist and may have a doctrine in meteorology. We have become fixated on better whether reporting replacing the cute blond whether girl with the learned professional. There is even a whether channel reporting the whether in every country of the world which broadcasts twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Although whether prediction is now a constantly expanding science becoming more and more reliable it will be many years before reliable predictions are the norm.

Regardless of all our educated efforts storms are still a formidable foe. Our technology may develop to a point where we can even control an oncoming storm. But in the end Mother Nature is and always will be the one force which humanity will play second fiddle to regardless of the technology.

Learn more about this author, Jim Huckabee.
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