I am being pursued by hurricanes. Or cyclones. Or storms.
I was in Joshua Tree, California, when the remnants of Hurricane Rachel arrived with sixty-five-mile-an-hour gusts and stinging rain. It wreaked havoc on several tents campers had used during the popular music festival. Two large camping tents ended up in a Dumpster, poles crumpled by the wind, accompanied by several sodden sleeping bags.
Now I’m in Moab, Utah, riding out the remnants of an apparently unnamed storm that arrived with a day of moderate rain followed by thirty-six hours of heavy rain and a day and two nights of high winds. We were warned about the risk of flash flooding via very loud emergency announcements at 7 a.m. and again in the afternoon. We were warned about frequent lightning and tornado watches. (There were tornado warnings Wednesday morning in Flagstaff, but no tornadoes that I know of.)
I thought I was leaving these monsters behind when I left the East Coast, where the word Nor’easter can stir up New Englanders to a fever pitch.
Apparently not.
An Atlantic hurricane that makes landfall far enough west in the Gulf of Mexico can easily spill over, still a tropical storm or depression, into the Southwest U.S. And a Pacific storm, like the one that pummeled the southern California shore recently, has just a short hop east into the desert, still packing a punch.
And any of them can deliver wind and rain in dramatic fashion.
But desert storms seem to let up every so often. Paul calls them “windows” and tracks them on Weather Underground’s radar and uses each one as a chance to get out of his trailer and move.
Yesterday, which was Wednesday, three of us used a half-hour window to fit in a little hike up to a place where we had a view of our campsite and all our different vehicles, from hundreds of feet higher.
Today, which is Thursday as I write this, but Friday on the East Coast, the window was long enough for us to walk to Beth’s Winnebago travel trailer without needing to wear rain gear on the way there or back. We met at three and we talked.
We talked about where we’re from: Central Connecticut; Northern Minnesota; Flagstaff, Arizona.
About how long we’ve been on the road: “Four weeks tomorrow!”; two months; five years; nine years.
What we did for work: journalist; medical assistant; firefighter; paramedic; mountain bike guide
And we talked about where we might go next: Quartzsite, Arizona; skiing in Colorado (sooner than you might think); Boulder (to get a heater installed); Norman, Oklahoma.
We told stories and some of those stories told tales about why we live on the road and not in a traditional house. For two hours — a good-size window in anyone’s book — we sat inside where we were safe and warm and comfortable and we almost forgot about the howling wind.
