Why the Weather?

“So, what are you majoring in?” It is a common enough question for college students. What am I choosing to devote the next four, or more, years of my life to? But when I divulge that I am a student in Stony Brook’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences major, I get a range of confused responses. I have been met with polite inquiries, stuttered ignorance, and a few exclamations on how they cannot wait to see me on television. As someone who is often very uncomfortable being in public view, that last one usually causes me to cringe so bad I worry I might pull a muscle. Usually I end up explaining that I want to study weather for a living, and my disinterest in a media career. Then the conversation will turn to what made me choose such a specific, even obscure to some, science. So I tell them this; my life has been ruled by the weather for as long as I can remember. Likely it always will be, but there was one experience that I think began the interest, and this is the story that I give.

I was nine years old, it was late summer, and my parents and I were at the beach as usual, Great Gun beach on Fire Island was our favorite place to go. It was the last few days of summer, I was returning to school in a few days, and the air was beginning to cool and smell of autumn. A light scent of leaves was always on the breeze, the heady smell of hot pine sap and baked sand was long gone. It was a perfect day by my standards because I was not sweating when I wore clothes over my bathing suit. I was reading a book, one of the more recent Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, I am not sure which one because I had a habit of bringing multiple volumes with me. My beach bag next to me on the dock was overflowing with novels, notebooks, sketchpads, and enough pencils and charcoal inside to stain my fingers a shiny graphite black. I left powdery fingerprints behind on anything I touched, smearing the black into a dirty grey that refused to wash clean unless it was scrubbed off.

The fabric mesh of my beach chair was cool against my back, but the splintering wooden dock was still hot under my toes. It was a pleasant contrast, complimented further by a light breeze. I frowned whenever a seemingly random gust of wind made my loose my page in my book. I was not paying much attention to this wind since it was a common enough problem on the water. Across from me was a dock that stretched parallel to the beach, but then veered off towards deeper water for the massive boats. Small yachts is a more accurate description, they were crafts a person could live in for over a week. The shore itself curved away from the bay, jutted out where I was sitting, and then curved back. I heard the tall grasses on the dunes shaking with each gust, and only when the rustling became a constant sound did I take notice of what was happening around me. The sky was growing dark and my parents were talking as my dad gestured to his cell phone. It was a new model, an additional feature from his job so they could call him and interrupt our weekends ever more frequently. But now it was chirping alerts out with a sharp sounding ringtone I remembered was for important messages. My dad switched the sound off and pointed to a few spots on the screen to my mother, presumably using the radar I enjoyed watching at home on tv.

I asked if I could see the radar, I was curious as to what could make my mom and dad look so concerned. Rain at the beach was not a new thing for us after all. My main concern was just getting all the paper I had under cover. My dad passed the phone to me and pointed to Great Gun on the map when I asked, humoring my poor map skills. West of us was a cluster of red, orange, and green splotches, the colors of heavy rain and thunderstorms, moving frame by frame towards us. None of those pops of color had been present that morning, so they had formed quickly during the day. In front of it all was a sharp line of red and green that I never thought would be significant.

My parents asked if I would be okay riding part of the storm out in the boat at the docks. The idea of being caught in violent waves with no land nearby scared me, so I nodded my head in agreement. After that our focus was on getting all of our gear back into the boat before the rain started. That was not an easy feat with my family. We brought so much junk to the beach it bordered on the ridiculous; changes of clothing for every possible temperature, double the food we ever ate, a flimsy grill that rattled whenever we moved it, an entire box devoted to my mothers plastic dishes and utensils, garbage bags, blankets, the list never ended. The majority of it ended up on the dock in the course of the day, so it all had to be hauled in, except the beach chairs would not fit in the cabin with all three of us. So we piled the heavy coolers on them and left those outside. It was late in the beach season so there were less than twenty boaters total at Great Gun that day, and they were all doing the exact same thing. A few left to try their luck in getting back to their home docks before the storm hit, but they all lived to the East. Our home and dock was to the West and leaving would mean heading straight into the rain, and that was not a pleasant idea.

We could not have timed our packing any better, because just as we were finished organizing everything, as my dad fixed the lines so the boat would move with the waves, the sky changed. The clouds had grown darker and lowered as the minutes passed and now they had an unhealthy green tinge to them. The dark sickly color was accompanied by an even stronger wind. It nearly removed my hat and forced my jacket off my shoulders. You could smell the moisture in the air, not the smell of the salty bay, but of fresh water that was almost metallic. Thunder began to roll in the distance, but the lightning was still beyond sight.

Across the water I saw a swath of pale gray that covered the entire western horizon. My dad kept me outside in the back of the boat and pointed to the gray, and then I realized it was not just fog, it was the rain getting closer at an astounding rate. It was a literal wall of water, the rain pelted down in sheets that had a clean divide somewhere up the clouds. If you could get it to hold still you could stand underneath with half your body dry and the other half drenched. The sound was like the rustling of the reeds I had heard in the deceivingly calm wind before, but so loud it became a roar. I watched it rush towards me, and the wind stopped for just a few seconds. The liquid wall moved so fast it looked fake, and all of a sudden it was on top of me. It felt like being hit with a box of needles as the drops stung my face, neck, and even my hands. The wind returned with a vengeance that wanted to send me overboard, but I braced myself and leaned into it. In one second the feeling of the storm had gone from ominous to exhilarating. My mouth dropped open and I laughed as I was soaked to my skin with cold rain. Although it was raw, and a little dangerous, I was not scared as I stood there. In a few more seconds, visibility dropped to a few feet, and I could not see past the boat. The dock was a faint dark splotch, and the other boats down the way were impossible to see. We had been cut off completely by the weather.

The storm wanted to follow us as my dad and I rushed back inside, I had to zipper the canvas door closed while my parents tossed towels down to keep the water from rushing in. The bottom of the cabin became a little pool, and the deck of the boat was so slick standing on it was impossible. Inside the cabin with the wind and waves tossing us around, I was a little scared of sinking or of getting seasick, however the lighting lancing through the sky was more than enough of a distraction while I dried myself off. Somehow we could see the flashes light up the sky through the mass of water that was all around us. Although being stuck in the cabin was the worst part for me, we got through it perfectly fine, and once the waves let up we were able to move out of the cabin, and then back to the dock.

The chairs and coolers were fine, despite being shifted by the wind, our boat had only suffered a few scuffs from contact with the dock. Unfortunately, not everyone made it out so well. A few of the small yachts had been shoved into the dock, cracking the wood planks, a few had the mooring poles fall across their boat, and others were forced onto the poles themselves. At least a quarter of all the poles in the entire dock had been knocked out or loosened and were now listing in the water. Everyone chipped in to help those people get out safely, but it was insane how much damage that little squall line had done. These were boats that weighed as much as a small house and were just tossed around like shells in the surf. It was shocking, but since no one had been hurt, it was also really impressive. I’ll be honest; since I was young I was just walking around marvelling at what had occurred.
          The beach itself had taken a hit too. There is a small ‘C’ shaped part of the beach, and it had been carved deeply by the surf. A lot of sand had vanished as erosion had apparently worked overtime. Shells from the deeper parts of the bay had been washed up, there was mud everywhere, and the plants were all bent in the direction the wind had been blowing. Despite the minor destruction, however, there was something clean about the beach now. The air smelled fresh, the water was calm once more, and there was a feeling of freshness the rain had left behind. All the impurities had been scrubbed away and all I could sense that some change had happened here, as if the sand was a slate, this cozy beach I called my second home had been wiped clean.

It was still drizzling every now and then and a stiff breeze remained a constant as we worked. This was because there was more of the storm to come. The system the squall line had preceded was heading towards us, and while it wasn’t a hurricane or a nor’easter, no one wanted to ride out more rain in such an isolated location. So once everyone was safe and sound we rearranged our things and started on our way home. We clipped the rest of the system on the ride back but only got rained on lightly in that encounter. When we got to our house we discovered that a fair bit of damage had been done to our neighborhood as well, consisting of minor flooding and fallen branches every few blocks. A hefty branch from a dead tree in our yard had snapped loose and fallen on our shed, which really brought home how strong the wind had been. We had also left our windows open, in the hopes of not to return to a sauna of a house, so half the house was more waterlogged than I was. Cleaning that all up actually was really frustrating after such a long day. All the water had to be wiped up, destroyed papers had to be tossed, more loads of laundry got put up than I bothered to count since all our beach clothes were wet and the folded laundry in my parents room was saturated.

The rest of the storm hit about a half hour later and continued for most of the evening. We ate dinner at home and watched the news as the rain clattered against the shingles and our backyard became a pond. We kept a few windows cracked open for the fresh air. Hours later I still couldn't stop watching it, I couldn’t stop talking about the power I had experienced in the weather. I needed to know more about what made this spectacular event happen, about these systems that dictate our coastal existence. This incident followed me through time as a story I told to my friends, until I reached my junior year of high school. A time noted for anxiety due to college applications and concern over future majors. We were asked to write a mock resume in Italian, much to my chagrin since my Italian vocabulary was limited compared to English, and out of all careers in the world I decided to apply for the position of a meteorologist. Something clicked that day; I had never considered my casual fascination with the weather as a career path, but it made sense, and from then I was committed to making it happen. I recounted this tale to my friends in the class as the idea sparked the memory once more, and I always return here when I wonder why I’m so in love with weather and its systems. I was hooked for life, as this experience began to define my interests for years to come.