Home runs from heaven
No, I’m not talking about “Bonds, Barry Bonds” and his new and dubious (or not) home run record. I’m talking about the baseball-sized hail that rained down on southern Manitoba yesterday.
It reminded me of something; another storm. Twenty years ago, I was in Edmonton on “Black Friday,” when, on July 31, 1987, a devastating tornado killed nearly thirty people. We didn’t get any baseballs where I was, but we did get hailstones borrowed from another sport — golf ball-sized chunks of ice. Our car roof and hood needed dimple-reducing surgery, and car insurance premiums went up the next year. I was in another part of the city, away from the main tornado, but there were other funnel clouds around where I was, and the sky was an ominous greenish-yellow colour…something I have since associated with very bad weather. I’d been riding my bike in a nearby park and (as the “tallest thing around” on my metal bike) had to race home as the lightning started crashing all around and great gusts of wind tried to knock me over.
Our dog suffered post-traumatic stress disorder from that “weather event.” Most dogs are afraid of thunder, or perhaps they have some “sixth sense” to pick up low-frequency vibrations or pressure changes or…I don’t know. All I know is that previously he had been a little nervous during storms. Probably a healthy, sensible nervousness, if there is such a thing. After that day, he became neurotic.
At the first hint of thunder, he would begin panting nervously, leaving huge puddles of drool on the floor. He would slink downstairs, to the basement, as far as he could get from the noisy rumbling above. Sometimes, when I felt like having some “fun,” I would put on one of Dan Gibson’s “Environments” records, something along the lines of: “Distant Thunderstorm at Loon Lake,” and watch the poor dog quiver. In my defense, I would actually stroke his fur and hold his head, trying to reassure him: “You see? I’m not scared. Nothing’s going to happen.” A kind of (highly unsuccessful) therapy, you might say. But he was always a total wreck, and it was hard not to laugh. No, I’m not proud of it; but it’s true, and I was young. Cut me some slack: at least I wasn’t pulling wings off flies or tossing cats by their tails into walls of velcro.
Once, when we were at my grandmother’s for Sunday dinner, he was left outside in his kennel. It was a luxurious enclosure my Dad had built — a long concrete pad (easier to scoop up you-know-who’s you-know-what) with a trendy, winter-proofed, A-frame doghouse. The whole facility was surrounded by heavy chain-link fencing (to protect him from other dogs?).
If we suspected it was going to storm, especially once he became neurotic, we’d leave him in the house, but this one took us by surprise. It came suddenly and the heavens flashed and crashed and dumped down their oceans. We returned home to find our “prisoner” had escaped. He was not prone to running away. It seems the storm drove him insane, and he managed to tear through the metal fence with paws and teeth, and ran all the way to…our house. Ten metres away.
He escaped from the dry safety of his doghouse to whimper, drenched to the bone, by the back door of our house, presumably because he felt closer to the protection of his masters. It was awful. When we found him, he was a pathetic, soaking, shivering mess, bleeding from the mouth and paws. He had lost a few teeth and lots of hair on the sharp metal edges that poked from the hole he’d made in the chain-link. Luckily he didn’t lose an eye.
After that, even if skies were blue, when we went out for any length of time we made sure to leave our “plucky little fellow” in the house. I don’t know if dogs can have Generalized Anxiety Disorder, but, by GAD, he certainly did. Unfortunately, it seems that often the worst storms we suffer are literally in our heads.