We went to Michael and Laura's wedding in North Carolina, and afterward Mom and Dad came up to Minneapolis to visit Marilyn and me at home. We had a great time, though we all got pretty exhausted from all of the sightseeing we did. We did more sightseeing in the space of four or five days than Marilyn and I have done our entire time living in Minnesota.

That's not my harrowing Midwest experience, though (even though it did involve going to the Mall of America). That came yesterday, as we decided to go up and visit Pat and Emily up where they live, which is about a 45-minute drive from the Twin Cities. As we drove, we started to notice angry black rainclouds lining the horizon. It was one of those storms you see from a distance on a sunny day and marvel at how dark it is. If you've ever driven cross-country in Arizona or New Mexico in August, you've probably seen that sort of thing.



Then the highway turned toward the storm. We had driven for about a half-hour, I think, and so we were well out of the city. All around us was flatland, with groves of trees along the side of the road and the occasional telephone poles. The clouds loomed larger and darker overhead, and Marilyn and I started discussing how we should be looking for Bad Tidings: a greenish tint to the sky, a cloud formation they call a "wall cloud", etc. Marilyn turned on the radio and began flipping through stations, hoping to hear weather alerts - this would easily be a severe thunderstorm. There were vast hollows within the black clouds where the sky, I thought, looked a bit bluish-green-grey - very much like the sort of light you would expect to filter down through an arctic ice floe: chilling and not reassuring in any way. I had the sort of feeling I got when we went to the Science Museum during Mom and Dad's visit and watched a preview for a film about mountain-climbing in the IMAX theater* - a sense of vastness and power to which a mere human is little but a dead leaf tossed on the wind. I had troubling mental images of tornadoes, of actually seeing signs and trees and cars lifted up and tossed in fantastic winds, and found myself wondering what it would feel like to be in our truck, hurtling through the stormy air, the ground far, far below us. Then I tried very hard not to think about that. It began to rain, very hard. Then there were flashes of lightning - though we couldn't see the bolts thesmelves, only flashes, one or two of them were uncomfortably close, near enough to leave a burning afterimage on my retina. I kept scanning the oncoming line of cars in the opposing lane returning from the holiday weekend. They were Minnesotans, so I figured that if they started freaking out, then I would start the "what-do-we-do-to-keep-from-dying" train of thought; in the meantime, I'd just keep my grip on the steering wheel, try not to drive too fast in the rain that was pelting us mercilessly, and start looking for an underpass so we could take cover from the worst of the storm. Marilyn found a station that made mention of the storm - we weren't sure what county we were in, but we were pretty certain the severe thunderstorm they were talking about was ours. They mentioned that there had been softball-sized hail reported in some places (oh, joy), but we hadn't yet seen any. The station switched back to music, playing old '80s tunes, which struck me as something out of a Stephen King novel ("I'm going to die hurtling through the air while listening to 'I Love Rock and Roll'").

I prayed a lot, is what I'm basically saying. In His generosity, God granted me my prayers and spared our lives, which I appreciate. Not inappropriately, our sermon at church that morning had been on keeping in mind one's impending death, so that one lives life with the right priorities. This experience drove that lesson home. I couldn't help but think of all the news broadcasts I'd seen about tornadoes and the lives they claimed, and perhaps like most people involved in such an event, one never thinks of themselves as "one of those people," or wakes up in the morning thinking you're going to die that afternoon. Obvious, perhaps, but a pattern of thinking that I easily slip into. Marilyn seemed a lot more collected about the storm than I did, but then, she's grown up in the Midwest. While it turned out to be relatively harmless (at least for us - and no reported tornadoes that I'm aware of), I don't remember having been so scared in a long time.

The bright side of this is that the storm was riding a cold front of air from Canada, which blew away the humid heat in the upper 90's that we had all weekend and replaced it with lovely cool weather. It's beautiful out today.

Oh, and before I forget it, when we went to the Science Museum with Mom and Dad, we got to see their most recent prize exhibit: artifacts from Pompeii, imported from Italy and touring through only seven or eight museums in the U.S.. It was amazing to see ancient Roman artifacts up close, so well-preserved. They set up the exhibit to really help you get a feel for what it may have been like to live in Pompeii, with the sounds and music you would have heard, the sorts of everyday exchanges and items you would see, and so on. Most moving were the plaster casts of the remains of bodies buried under the volcanic ash and mud. To be technically correct, there weren't actually bodies in them any more - when the bodies decomposed, they left cavities in the stone that conformed to their shapes. The casts, nonetheless, are lifelike enough to give you an intensely real idea of what these people must have been feeling in the last moments of their lives, before they were suffocated by a flood of scalding mud. Just before seeing that exhibit, we had seen the film in the IMAX theater - it was on the ancient Greeks, and apart from an excellent soundtrack (which my parents thoughtfully purchased as a gift for me, along with a cool picture-book on ancient Rome that included a sequential art narrative [i.e., comic]), there was a segment on the film discussing the fate of Thera, which was likewise destroyed in a volcanic eruption. Thanks to convincing computer animation, I got to experience a visual sensation of standing on a hill while watching a wall of volcanic ash rush toward me like the firestorm of a nuclear blast. So I paid special attention to the display in the Pompeii exhibit discussing volcanic eruptions around the world. Knowing that, for example, Yellowstone National Park is described by some scientists as a "supervolcano" that could obliterate part of America and throw the world's climate into havoc for a while - and could erupt at any time, really - puts the fear of God into a man.

*Which, in turn, reminded me of the feeling I had the first time I went to an IMAX film. I was a kid, and the movie was on the planets of the Solar System. I distinctly remember being terrified by the unearthly size of Jupiter and the storming ferocity of its Great Red Spot. That was probably the very first time I had a real sensation of feeling tiny and insignificant in a world that had previously been all about my own wants and frustrations. Upon these reflections, it's good to be reminded of these things.