The flash-flood warnings were rolling in,
Along with the roiling creeks, liquid mud.
Dense fog descended at noon. Extrinsic
Mortality due to inclement weather became,
Once again, possibility. A few days earlier,
Tornadoes had obliterated a town in Alabama.
Montana had set a March record, minus 40.
Whenever weather dominates local news,
Whenever everyone starts comparing notes
Of their own alarming encounters—“my son
Woke me up to tell me he could hear the creek.
I sent him back to bed. I told him, it’s not when
You hear the creek you have to worry, yet.
It’s when you can smell it”—thoughts turn
To my own mother, whose dirt-poor farming
Childhood in New England in the Depression,
A childhood of hand-pumped water, outhouses,
Wood stoves, ice and snow storms, maybe
Played a part in her late-life obsession with weather
On cable TV. She could sit for hours, glued
To updates on hurricanes, tornadoes, killer
Heat waves, even displays of any records set,
But especially floods and blizzards. Her children
And her grandchildren sometimes joked about it.
I did. Weather destroys nowhere near as many
Lives as guns, guns nowhere near as many
As infections, infections now lagging cancer.
My mother herself died of general collapse
And senescence, indoors in fine summer weather,
By then oblivious to any news, even of storms.
But people will perish of weather by nightfall,
Somewhere, by nightfall every night and again
Before morning. I’ve lived long enough now
To have known neighbors who later froze
To death or vanished under a rock slide. Hikers
And campers die here in Zion every year.
Another warning to stay out of flood-prone
Areas then lit up my phone, cell service alerts
Reaching out through the foggiest high country.
I grinned and remained on the side of the road.
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