When the Storm God Rides

As I write this it is Saturday morning (I'll be driving all day Sunday) and Hurricane Ike is pounding Houston, Texas. My good hopes and best wishes go to those in the path of this storm. It has already wrought great damage to Cuba and Haiti on its way to the United States. Fay and Gustav had already brought considerable damage to those nations. Now Ike has left them in a desperate situation. What Galveston is going to look like remains to be seen.

Since I live in Florida I already know a fair amount about hurricanes. We were personally visited by three storms in 2004. I was not home when Charlie struck my house; however, I did get a unique look at the storm while flying at 30,000 feet over the Gulf of Mexico. It was around 9:30 PM and the storm was in the process of demolishing both my home and the city I live in when the pilot of the plane I was in came on over the intercom and told the passengers to look out the left side of the plane. What we saw he called “the veil of the hurricane” -- it was like looking at a giant fog; I could see a massive cloud formation, but it was all soft and fuzzy looking, unlike what was being experienced on the ground.

So far this year there have been ten named storms. Dolly, Edouard, Fay, Gustav, and Ike have all impacted folks living in and around the Gulf of Mexico. If you would like information on the storms this year, check out this hurricane information site. The National Hurricane Center has excellent satellite imagery and storm track information, but they don’t have any historical information for 2008 yet. If you live anywhere visited by hurricanes, you might want to add this site to your daily ‘to-do’ list.

About the title to this blog:
The title for this blog comes from a collection of Native American legends collected by Bessie M. Reid and published by Florence Stratton in 1936. Many of the stories in the book are from the Tejas, or Hasinai tribe as they called themselves, located in the area that would become Texas. Tejas in the Hasinai language means friend and it is from that word that we got the name Texas. The book may be read on-line here. If this year is anything to go by, I suspect that they had considerable experience with storm gods.