My shored-up interior. How much wind does it take to blow out a plexiglass window?
On May 21 in the little town of Wall I was reminded of the price I pay for the spectacular clouds/skies here in South Dakota. My rig and I were pounded with more precipitation than… than in the past few years in total… maybe since I hit the road almost seven years ago…
Rain, more inches than I can estimate, plus sleet, hail the size of mothballs, and even some snow. The wind shook the rig, sheet and bolt lightning galore, plus wildly varying temperatures.
And that was balmy compared to the night before, May 20th, while perched on the cliff at Nomad View, just outside Badlands National Park. I’ve experienced some serious natural forces in my life… my mid-Atlantic freighter sinking during a hurricane in 1979 comes to mind, as does the night of December 6, 1969 on Oahu’s North Shore, when an ultimate storm wave came ashore and demolished my house with me in it (both described in my memoir, In Search of Captain Zero)… and this night was up there with any of them…
I nearly lost my new plate to the insane wind.
As in Hawaii, the peak came around midnight when the back window blew out (as did the side window by the door) and I found myself stretched out on my bunk, my dog curled up whimpering beside me as I tried to keep the wind and rain out by bracing the heavy screen with both forearms as the interior lit up like an overexposed photograph from the continuous sheet lightning. Had you been there and had I spoken to you in a normal voice you would not have heard me over the roar of the wind and the booming thunder.
Listen: My surfboard was torn from its roof rack and blown 50 yards to prairie-leeward so — given that I’ve often created 70 mph highway winds without a problem — we must have been hit by gusts of well over 100.
But what genuinely scared me was the vibration, the sound and the feel of it. The word ‘Armageddon’ comes to mind.
Again, this is the price I pay for the skies out here at the South Dakota Badlands:
To be blessed with clouds like the above you have to expect some occasional extreme conditions.
Allan
I’ve also been blessed with some great new acquaintances.
Addendum: As of today, Rand Paul is demanding that Anthony Fauci testify under oath about having funded the Wuhan Lab for ‘gain of function’ research that may have led to the COVID pandemic. I’ll have something to say about this in my next blog post.
13 comments for “Prices We Pay”