In Case of An Emergency

When the North Carolina Tornadoes of 2011 were bearing down on me, I had to figure out the best space in which I could hide. Y’all have heard the familiar words of wisdom when the tornadoes are coming:

• Get in the basement.
• Get to an interior part of your house.
• Get to a room without windows.
• Get in a first-floor bathroom with a tub and cover yourself with a mattress.

I have an open floor plan with a ton of windows, no basement, and no full bath on the first floor. So the ideal options of laying low in an interior room with no windows or a bathtub weren’t really practical. The only tubs are upstairs – believe it or not, taking a 15 foot ride downhill in one of those bad boys was not on my Bucket List (even considering that I could take a mattress along for the plunge).

As in other storms, I would settle on the pantry in the kitchen as the place to ride this one out. The pantry is an intimate space in the middle of the first floor. The pantry has a couple of things going for it:

• It is the only truly interior space on the first floor.
• It is located under the steps leading to the second floor. I am thinking that additional framing members can’t hurt, right?
• It is also surrounded with some major plumbing structures that run from the crawlspace to the upstairs including the main sewage stack. On second thought, maybe proximity to the main sewage stack is not really an advantage in a tornado?

On the downside, there is loose (not secured or nailed down) wooden shelving in the pantry. The pantry is also partially stocked. I chuckled to myself thinking about surviving the structural damage from a tornado only to be done in by a can of projectile Corn or Green Beans hitting the right (or wrong) spot on my noggin. Oh, I forgot to mention that there is also a home gym with 160 lbs of weight about 12 feet from the pantry.  So much for the safety afforded by those extra framing members.

But beggars can’t be choosy – the pantry was my best option and that is where I decided where to hang out. But first I would go through some last minute preparations. In retrospect, apparently one will do some weird things when faced with incoming natural disasters. Here is what I was running around doing as the moment of truth arrived. The Chin famously asserted once: “Adversity doesn’t build character – it reveals it.” I have no clue what this reveals about my character.

• I briefly considered clearing out the pantry of the canned goods, but where to put all that crap and is it really worth it? I’ll just have to put all that crap back later – hopefully. Laziness prevailed.
• I dragged the inflatable mattress down from upstairs, but couldn’t fit it in the pantry without releasing a significant amount of air, which would sort of reduce its effectiveness. So I guess you could say that was kind of deflating and I settled on the protection of sofa cushions instead. Where is a football helmet when you really need it?
• I grabbed my file of folders of Really Important Documents (insurance, birth certificates, deed of trust, etc) and locked it in the trunk of the Civic in the garage – as if the Civic was somehow indestructible.
• I secured my IBM-supplied-and-owned ThinkPad T61p in its leather case and stored that in the Civic trunk as well – God forbid that would become unaccounted for! Strange what soon-to-be 27 years with the same company will do to your thought processes.
• I am not sure what router I was planning to connect to with that T61p after the shit hit the fan. I guess I couldn’t fathom being without a connection to the Net.
• I also secured my cell phone and charger and loaded up the pockets in my jeans with those.
• I filled up both tubs with cold water  - we are on well water with electric pumps. Previous natural disasters have taught me that having water with which a toilet may be flushed can come in handy. So this was done with the assumption that I might lose power, but not the rest of the house, when it all went down (literally and/or figuratively).

At 2:36 PM in the middle of all of this scrambling and right before things got a bit sketchy, youngest son Chris sent me a text that read: “Watch out strong thunderstorm heading yall way.” At that point in time, I would have been thrilled to just have to deal with a strong thunderstorm. As it turned out, that is all it was.