MountainMornings

This morning I woke to a line of deep slate grey-blue mountains. No wind, some sun and the feeling that Spring has definitely arrived. But on Friday, I should have known something was up. Sitting down at the computer in my third floor aviary office, my thoughts were interrupted by a beautifully indignant bluebird. First he flew at my window like a kamikaze pilot, then he sat down on the windowsill and proceeded to peck at his reflection, occasionally looking me right in the eyes. “What an orange breast you have Mr Bluebird,” I said. He just kept knocking.

Bob speculates that it’s mating season, and the bird saw his reflection as a territorial challenge. I’m not so sure, because two things happened later that same day and they both had to do with nature and destiny. Killer tornadoes swept across the South and the Midwest, with one aiming straight for the Bride and her Husband in Nashville. This was the second storm in 48 hours, first taking 13 and now about to take 38 lives. A friend who grew up in tornado country says you just get a feeling when they’re coming – the sky changes color, rain comes sideways and the wind will switch directions. And then there’s the sound of a train. We were on the phone with our daughter, who was home alone and had heard the sirens.

Luckily, she has a basement. Gathering her dogs, laptop, cell and a book, she headed downstairs. It was late afternoon, the Groom was still at the hospital and she was scheduled for the graveyard shift. We watched the radar loop online, tracking the tornado which touched down just south of the city. I was the Madame Defarge of knitting while Bob tracked the eye of the storm and sent text after text. It’s almost impossible to imagine or describe my feelings for that hour, until she instagramed a picture of her hand, outside, holding a golf ball sized piece of hail. The “all clear” siren had sounded.

But I did say two things happened on Friday. I learned that our state Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli was thwarted by the VA Supreme Court in his race against science and reason, vs UVA and Michael Mann. If you recall, I wrote about the Climate Change scientist here:
https://mountainmornings.wordpress.com/2012/01/14/baby-its-cold-outside/

This is Mann’s response to winning his battle over politically fueled religious nutcase deniers: “I’m pleased that this particular episode is over. Its sad, though, that so much money and resources had to be wasted on Cuccinelli’s witch hunt against me and the University of Virginia, when it could have been invested, for example, in measures to protect Virginia’s coast line from the damaging effects of sea level rise it is already seeing. One would have hoped that the fact alone that the Inspector General of the National Science Foundation last year looked into the allegations by Cuccinelli and other climate change deniers against me, and found that there was absolutely no basis to them, would have ended the attacks against me. But as I describe in my just published book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars”, they are part of something much larger—a coordinated assault against the scientific community by powerful vested interests who simply want to stick their heads in the sand and deny the problem of human-caused climate change, rather than engage in the good faith debate about what to do about it.”

Bluebirds, tornadoes, and hockey sticks, oh my. Can you hear them knocking?