Mother Nature

I don't get scared. I'm the girl who walks home in the middle of the night after the bar without a care in the world (I wouldn't recommend this, I've been lucky). I'm the girl who follows people in Times Square to the Church of Scientology and gets shut inside a room to watch a movie and then calmly leaves afterward (that's a story for another day). I'm the girl who leaves everyone she knows while in a foreign country without a phone to go exploring, the shadier (and more interesting) an alley looks, the better. I don't get scared.

But you know what's scary? Mother Nature.

On Friday night at 1am, I was awoken to a bright sky full of lightning flashes and incessant thunder while I was in Atlantic County, New Jersey. The 75mph winds were whipping everything in my room around, so I shut the window, thankful for my fan because it was about 100 degrees in my bedroom. This isn't an exaggeration either, we were in the middle of a heat wave. Then the street lights flickered. Once. Twice. Then they just didn't come back on. The gentle whirring of everything you did not even notice, air conditioning units next door, the knocking of the fridge, and my poor, poor fan, slowed and a hush fell over the entirety of South Jersey on this 4th of July weekend (part one). The only noise was the thunder, the only source of light the lightning. I don't get scared, but that was scary.

My smartphone had some battery power left, so after wasting some of it checking Facebook and Twitter (I have a problem), I checked the weather radar. I have never seen such a large red area on a map. Especially one where the epicenter was my bedroom.

But overall, I did not have it so bad. I was hot without my fan and bored without the television. I woke up without electricity and could not open the fridge for very long while grabbing water before heading to the beach all day. My phone eventually died and I could not stalk all the people who barely matter to me. The most inconvenience I faced was having to drive through a few South Jersey towns sans street lights and traffic lights before eventually finding a Wawa running off of a generator that would feed me (and the other million people inside who were acting like it was the end of days). So yeah, I was in the middle of a state of emergency, but I didn't have it so bad.

But it did make me reflect on how little control we have over Mother Nature. We can do amazing things with technology and we can express ourselves in amazing ways with words. But we cannot stop a devastating tornado. We cannot do anything about an earthquake that kills millions and causes a tsunami that kills a million more. We are powerless to stop a hurricane that knocks trees down on top of innocent camping children (Aftermath of the storm).

In Colorado this past week (and continuing), forest fires are destroying homes, though thankfully not many lives. One of my good friends lives in Colorado, and he wrote a really great post today when he was finally allowed to return to the home which he and his family had to flee as the fire approached. You should really read it here.

There are so many diseases that can kill people. There's so much murder. There's so much famine. Suicides. Car crashes. War. But technically, that's all preventable.

But what if you live on the west coast, and an earthquake causes a vanishing act on the ground beneath you and you fall toward the earth's core? What if you live in the mid-west and a tornado rips through your home and flings you into the air? And what if you live on the east coast, and a hurricane causes the 100-year old oak tree next to your house to crash through your ceiling and crush you beneath your covers? Seriously, how can you prevent that?

You can't. You just can't. And you know what? That's just downright terrifying.