LIVING IN CIN BY JAY GILBERT
Freak of Nature
LIFE CAN BLINDSIDE YOU IF YOU’RE NOT PAYING ATTENTION. SO CAN THE WEATHER.
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SEPTEMBER 14, 2008, HAPPENED ONLY 13 YEARS AGO, BUT LOOK AT HOW DISTANT WE ARE today from then. The most popular mobile phone in the world was made by Nokia. “Social media” was a term that needed explaining. America was possibly about to elect John McCain and Sarah Palin. Mad Men was the big thing on cable TV, and cable TV itself was a big thing. In Cincinnati, September 14, 2008, seemed to be just an ordinary late-summer Sunday: comfortable temperatures, blue skies, and a sun that never stopped shining. Really, the weather was just beautiful—except for the thousands of downed trees, the tens of thousands of homes losing power for a week or more, and the five people killed. Other than that, it was perfect. I was at home. Maybe your mind went through the same denial mine did as I saw the afternoon get more aggressive and windy. This can’t last. I mean, the sun’s out! Any min2 6 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M O C T O B E R 2 0 2 1
ute now, this will literally blow over. Instead, what started blowing over were people’s trash cans and backyard furniture. Then branches, big ones. Eventually trees and utility poles. I didn’t hear the crash of a huge tree right around the corner from me, because I had my headphones on. I was in the zone, deep into editing a video project, surrounded by consumer-grade, pre-TikTok technology. My project had to be delivered (uploaded) by evening. I’d left it to the last minute, as usual, so I was concentrating. Puny distractions like gusts of wind weren’t about to get in my way. Besides, the usual threatening signals that tell us to prepare for danger— dark clouds, vomit-colored skies, John Williams music—weren’t there. If you happened to be outdoors that afternoon, maybe at the Bengals–Titans game, you saw stuff blowing around, but you’d seen that plenty of times before—just like you’d seen plenty of Bengals losses (24–7). The danger increased slowly over several hours. Cincinnati became that mythical frog in the pot of boiling water. A REASONABLE AMOUNT OF STRONGERthan-usual wind was expected that day. Hurricane Ike had just clobbered Texas, and its leftovers were on their way north. What happened to Cincinnati, though, was exponentially more than expected. Weather patterns coming from other directions converged with Ike, creating something called an “adjacent frontal boundary.” I have no idea what that means, but the conflicting warm and cold fronts helped produce an “extratropical cyclone.” OK, at least the word cyclone starts to suggest something bad. It wasn’t Judy Garland/Helen Hunt bad, but the day turned out to be pretty gruesome, mostly because it caught us by surprise. As the noise of both wind and flying debris increased outside my window, I did finally realize that a truly scary thing was about to occur: power failure. For some reason my street is always eager to go dark during storms. There was no way I could afford to stop my project or, worse, have my files corrupted and lost. I was already clicking “save” every 30 seconds, but now it was time to implement Plan B: my Cincinnati Reds. No, not those Reds. You’ve probably noticed in places like hospitals, tech firms, ILLUSTR ATIO N BY © B O M B O L A N D, 2 02 1
