Stormy Weather
Living, as I do', here in the South, I am constantly reminded of the degree to which our comfort and well being are dependent on our creativity and technology. There was an interesting article in American Heritage magazine some twenty years ago that traced the development, evolution and impact of air conditioning in US history and in particular on the blossoming of the South since the 1950's. I have heard recollections from numerous friends of my parents' generation, recalling how one of the chief attractions for them of some early movie theaters was the fact that they were air conditioned. In their memory, it mattered little which specific movie was being shown; it was almost incidental to the blessed relief from the heat and humidity.
From the first practice of agriculture and then settled habitation some ten thousand years ago, the story of man has been the story of exerting greater control over our environment, slowly taming and constraining those factors that used to keep us in such a perilous state. Weapons and fire protected us from wildlife. Working stone and clay allowed us to store food against bad times. Brewing light beer freed us from the ravages of filthy water. There have been a thousand avenues of technology and social organization that have freed us from the indeterminable and the capricious. But the more free we are the more we are reminded that the unknown and unmanageable is still out there.
We may feel like we are in control but every now and then Mother Nature just womps us up side the head with a blizzard, tornado, hurricane, drought, or some other weather generated reminder of our insignificance in the scheme of things.
Growing up living around the world, I had plenty of opportunity to see first hand some dramatic aspects of weather starting from my very first years. In the early sixties, we were living in Venezuela and annually would fly back to the US for family vacation. Those trips are memorable for one's intimate engagement with the weather. This was in the days before routine jet flight, sophisticated on-board radar or even detailed weather forecasts. Nowadays it is by far the exception to have a trip inconvenienced by rough air. Before taking off, the pilot knows where the rough patches are going to be and routes around them or flies over. Back in the early sixties, chugging along on two or four props at much lower altitudes and with much less in terms of sensory gear, you used to routinely fly up onto a storm and basically just have to bulldoze your way through.
The rank fear as the plane is tossed about, everyone strapped in and holding on tight, remains a vivid memory. That long, closed tube of fuselage seems impossibly fragile in the grip of these winds. The occasional intercom announcements from the pilot were intended to reassure passengers. As a young child, what the pilot said was only partially comprehendible but whatever reassurance was intended in his words was belied by the tension and strain in his voice - elements of non-verbal communication to which a child was far more attuned.
In Nigeria we experienced the torrential downpours of the rainy season. Rains so hard that they seemed to flatten and subdue the land, drumming incessantly for hours at a time on the roof. Surely this is what Noah must have experienced.
In Libya, the quotidian aridity of the weather was magnified by periodic "ghiblies". These were sirocco winds off the desert bearing gritty sand and could enclose your world for a few hours or a few days. Steady hot, dry winds laden with sand blowing all about and at speeds of up to forty miles an hour. We had just moved into our new home and had been fixing it up, repainting inside and out, etc. We had been in-country perhaps two or three weeks. One day we repainted the window frames, and as one does, laid down masking tape along the edge of each pane of glass to help minimize splashes and paint spills. We left it overnight for the paint to dry but when we woke the next morning, it was to a world closed in by whirling dust and a low dim wattage light of grey-brown. Our first ghibli. It continued on and on all through the day - a strange sensation with which we had no experience. It was awful in the sense that the power, sustained force, constant pittering of sand blasted against the house, the eerie noise of the wind, filled you with awe.
But like everything, it passed. By the next morning we were back to a cornflower blue sky with a bright yellow sun beating down. I went out to fulfill my designated chore of pulling off the masking tape from all the windows. It was then that I became aware of just how powerful those ghiblies were. What I discovered was that the tape was no longer recognizably tape. It had been completely baked onto, and indeed, into, the glass. Forty some years later I remain astounded. There was no peeling off the tape. No soaking and scrubbing away. Tape and glass were fused. The best that could be done was to use a straight edge and carefully scrape, scrape away. I got about half of it but the evidence of that one day of ghibli remained on the window panes when we left something more than a year later.
In Sweden I became familiar with the twin aspects of winter: the dreadfulness of being bone cold and the beauty of deep encompassing snow falls. Snow so thick that it stilled the very wind and sat in perfect balance inches deep on the thinnest of twigs. On beautiful winter nights I would sometimes wake and simply watch thick flakes drifting down in the yellow of the street lights, layering more and more on the ground, the world a deathly quiet, all noise blotted out.
There was that winter crossing from Sweden to Britain, across the North Sea by ferry. It was only about a thirty-six hour journey but as it turned out, a journey through the heart of a wintry North Sea storm. It was one of the few times I have come close to being incapacitated by sea-sickness. The only very minor humorous moment of the trip was passing one of the deck stewards at some point and seeing that he was as green about the gills as any one of his landlubber charges.
Then there were the tornadoes of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A couple of times over the years, we would fly back home in the summer to visit family and manage to time our arrival with summer thunder storms of disconcerting intensity. Flying through them to land engaged you with one set of fears. Having landed you then had to make your way across town with trees swaying and dipping, it seemed, into the street, the afternoon dark as night, the clouds piled up upon one another into the sky, dark and streaked with unnatural colors; lightning piercing the veil and the sound of deadly winds and not too distant thunder.
One memory is of visiting a great aunt the morning after such a storm. A tornado had hop-scotched its way down her street, thankfully on the far side. Her side of the street was untouched. The opposite side was like a checkerboard. The capriciousness of the tornado was such that it had house hopped down the street. One house was completely intact, windows in place, nothing out of the ordinary. Next to it would be the foundations of what had been their neighbor's home. Very little detritus, the wind had simply snatched up alternate homes, welcome mat to roofline.
Another memory remains of nominally sleeping on the fold-out sofa in my grandmothers little box home. It was a step down den, next to the garage with a single window with a pull-down blind. It was a long night listening to the hailing and howling of the wind, the distant explosions of transformers, the tearing sounds of trees and other unseen things being uplifted into the air. All these noises were matched to the periodic bright lighting up of the window blind with streaks of lightning followed by the more or less distant booms of thunder. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .
In Australia, we came to know the desiccation of drought and the ravages of brushfires. Here we were living on the outskirts of a major modern city, Sydney, with all the resources and trappings of a modern economy. And yet when push came to shove, we were just a temporary blot in the way of the forces of nature. One hot summer day the bushfires were especially bad and encroaching on the city, following the pathway up through nature preserves and parks, burning all in its path. Listening on the radio I ended up driving home from work in order to be prepared to escape with the family were the fire to take a wrong turn. We were fortunate; it did not come closer than half a kilometer away but that was far closer than I would have wished. I retain a surreal minds-eye image of standing in the driveway trying to gage the direction of the wind and being reminded at that moment of a reality-negative of Sweden - soot and ashes drifting quietly down all around me, building up on the ground, an ashen snowfall as it were.
Storms, winds, droughts, floods are, as would be expected, in our earliest literature. It's right there in the Bible, most starkly in the Old Testament (Isaiah 29:6 - Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.) It's there in Herodotus, in Ibn Battuta, in Marco Polo, in all the ancient traveler's accounts.
The capriciousness of the weather is recorded in the violent wind storm that knocked out a goodly portion of Xerxes' fleet just before the Spartans marched to their moment in history at Thermopylae. In fact, Xerxes had already had his moment of hubris at Hellespont where he had commanded a bridge of boats to be built across the mile wide gap. A terrible windstorm twice destroyed this temporary bridge. In retribution, Xerxes notoriously had the straight punished with three hundred lashes and branding by his soldiers. Herodotus, in his fashion, commented that this was a "highly presumptuous way to address the Hellespont".
Wind, rain, snow, fire and drought serve as the context for many stories, for the catalyst that leads to change, or simply as a quiet frame for the story. Half our sea stories seem to be substantially a retelling of the extremes of weather.
When reading to our children about the weather, there are stories of adventure, endurance, tragedy, and comfort. There are stories that teach them about precaution and resilience. There are stories that teach us to be a little bit more humble, to think ahead, to prepare, to anticipate our unplanned encounters with the blind savagery of the wind and the rain. Stories that help to calibrate a sense of respect and awe with an awareness of caution; of how to respect the force and unknowable will of nature without being paralyzed with fear.
I hope you enjoy this selection of tales and explanations and reference materials that we believe will help children to understand that weather is always with us and should never be ignored.
Don't forget the Story of Mongrel Grey by Banjo Paterson for a moving account of a flood.
This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults
The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults
Picture Books
Independent Reader
Young Adult
From the first practice of agriculture and then settled habitation some ten thousand years ago, the story of man has been the story of exerting greater control over our environment, slowly taming and constraining those factors that used to keep us in such a perilous state. Weapons and fire protected us from wildlife. Working stone and clay allowed us to store food against bad times. Brewing light beer freed us from the ravages of filthy water. There have been a thousand avenues of technology and social organization that have freed us from the indeterminable and the capricious. But the more free we are the more we are reminded that the unknown and unmanageable is still out there.
We may feel like we are in control but every now and then Mother Nature just womps us up side the head with a blizzard, tornado, hurricane, drought, or some other weather generated reminder of our insignificance in the scheme of things.
Growing up living around the world, I had plenty of opportunity to see first hand some dramatic aspects of weather starting from my very first years. In the early sixties, we were living in Venezuela and annually would fly back to the US for family vacation. Those trips are memorable for one's intimate engagement with the weather. This was in the days before routine jet flight, sophisticated on-board radar or even detailed weather forecasts. Nowadays it is by far the exception to have a trip inconvenienced by rough air. Before taking off, the pilot knows where the rough patches are going to be and routes around them or flies over. Back in the early sixties, chugging along on two or four props at much lower altitudes and with much less in terms of sensory gear, you used to routinely fly up onto a storm and basically just have to bulldoze your way through.
The rank fear as the plane is tossed about, everyone strapped in and holding on tight, remains a vivid memory. That long, closed tube of fuselage seems impossibly fragile in the grip of these winds. The occasional intercom announcements from the pilot were intended to reassure passengers. As a young child, what the pilot said was only partially comprehendible but whatever reassurance was intended in his words was belied by the tension and strain in his voice - elements of non-verbal communication to which a child was far more attuned.
In Nigeria we experienced the torrential downpours of the rainy season. Rains so hard that they seemed to flatten and subdue the land, drumming incessantly for hours at a time on the roof. Surely this is what Noah must have experienced.
In Libya, the quotidian aridity of the weather was magnified by periodic "ghiblies". These were sirocco winds off the desert bearing gritty sand and could enclose your world for a few hours or a few days. Steady hot, dry winds laden with sand blowing all about and at speeds of up to forty miles an hour. We had just moved into our new home and had been fixing it up, repainting inside and out, etc. We had been in-country perhaps two or three weeks. One day we repainted the window frames, and as one does, laid down masking tape along the edge of each pane of glass to help minimize splashes and paint spills. We left it overnight for the paint to dry but when we woke the next morning, it was to a world closed in by whirling dust and a low dim wattage light of grey-brown. Our first ghibli. It continued on and on all through the day - a strange sensation with which we had no experience. It was awful in the sense that the power, sustained force, constant pittering of sand blasted against the house, the eerie noise of the wind, filled you with awe.
But like everything, it passed. By the next morning we were back to a cornflower blue sky with a bright yellow sun beating down. I went out to fulfill my designated chore of pulling off the masking tape from all the windows. It was then that I became aware of just how powerful those ghiblies were. What I discovered was that the tape was no longer recognizably tape. It had been completely baked onto, and indeed, into, the glass. Forty some years later I remain astounded. There was no peeling off the tape. No soaking and scrubbing away. Tape and glass were fused. The best that could be done was to use a straight edge and carefully scrape, scrape away. I got about half of it but the evidence of that one day of ghibli remained on the window panes when we left something more than a year later.
In Sweden I became familiar with the twin aspects of winter: the dreadfulness of being bone cold and the beauty of deep encompassing snow falls. Snow so thick that it stilled the very wind and sat in perfect balance inches deep on the thinnest of twigs. On beautiful winter nights I would sometimes wake and simply watch thick flakes drifting down in the yellow of the street lights, layering more and more on the ground, the world a deathly quiet, all noise blotted out.
There was that winter crossing from Sweden to Britain, across the North Sea by ferry. It was only about a thirty-six hour journey but as it turned out, a journey through the heart of a wintry North Sea storm. It was one of the few times I have come close to being incapacitated by sea-sickness. The only very minor humorous moment of the trip was passing one of the deck stewards at some point and seeing that he was as green about the gills as any one of his landlubber charges.
Then there were the tornadoes of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A couple of times over the years, we would fly back home in the summer to visit family and manage to time our arrival with summer thunder storms of disconcerting intensity. Flying through them to land engaged you with one set of fears. Having landed you then had to make your way across town with trees swaying and dipping, it seemed, into the street, the afternoon dark as night, the clouds piled up upon one another into the sky, dark and streaked with unnatural colors; lightning piercing the veil and the sound of deadly winds and not too distant thunder.
One memory is of visiting a great aunt the morning after such a storm. A tornado had hop-scotched its way down her street, thankfully on the far side. Her side of the street was untouched. The opposite side was like a checkerboard. The capriciousness of the tornado was such that it had house hopped down the street. One house was completely intact, windows in place, nothing out of the ordinary. Next to it would be the foundations of what had been their neighbor's home. Very little detritus, the wind had simply snatched up alternate homes, welcome mat to roofline.
Another memory remains of nominally sleeping on the fold-out sofa in my grandmothers little box home. It was a step down den, next to the garage with a single window with a pull-down blind. It was a long night listening to the hailing and howling of the wind, the distant explosions of transformers, the tearing sounds of trees and other unseen things being uplifted into the air. All these noises were matched to the periodic bright lighting up of the window blind with streaks of lightning followed by the more or less distant booms of thunder. One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi . . .
In Australia, we came to know the desiccation of drought and the ravages of brushfires. Here we were living on the outskirts of a major modern city, Sydney, with all the resources and trappings of a modern economy. And yet when push came to shove, we were just a temporary blot in the way of the forces of nature. One hot summer day the bushfires were especially bad and encroaching on the city, following the pathway up through nature preserves and parks, burning all in its path. Listening on the radio I ended up driving home from work in order to be prepared to escape with the family were the fire to take a wrong turn. We were fortunate; it did not come closer than half a kilometer away but that was far closer than I would have wished. I retain a surreal minds-eye image of standing in the driveway trying to gage the direction of the wind and being reminded at that moment of a reality-negative of Sweden - soot and ashes drifting quietly down all around me, building up on the ground, an ashen snowfall as it were.
Storms, winds, droughts, floods are, as would be expected, in our earliest literature. It's right there in the Bible, most starkly in the Old Testament (Isaiah 29:6 - Thou shalt be visited of the Lord of hosts with thunder, and with earthquake, and great noise, with storm and tempest, and the flame of devouring fire.) It's there in Herodotus, in Ibn Battuta, in Marco Polo, in all the ancient traveler's accounts.
The capriciousness of the weather is recorded in the violent wind storm that knocked out a goodly portion of Xerxes' fleet just before the Spartans marched to their moment in history at Thermopylae. In fact, Xerxes had already had his moment of hubris at Hellespont where he had commanded a bridge of boats to be built across the mile wide gap. A terrible windstorm twice destroyed this temporary bridge. In retribution, Xerxes notoriously had the straight punished with three hundred lashes and branding by his soldiers. Herodotus, in his fashion, commented that this was a "highly presumptuous way to address the Hellespont".
Wind, rain, snow, fire and drought serve as the context for many stories, for the catalyst that leads to change, or simply as a quiet frame for the story. Half our sea stories seem to be substantially a retelling of the extremes of weather.
When reading to our children about the weather, there are stories of adventure, endurance, tragedy, and comfort. There are stories that teach them about precaution and resilience. There are stories that teach us to be a little bit more humble, to think ahead, to prepare, to anticipate our unplanned encounters with the blind savagery of the wind and the rain. Stories that help to calibrate a sense of respect and awe with an awareness of caution; of how to respect the force and unknowable will of nature without being paralyzed with fear.
I hope you enjoy this selection of tales and explanations and reference materials that we believe will help children to understand that weather is always with us and should never be ignored.
Don't forget the Story of Mongrel Grey by Banjo Paterson for a moving account of a flood.
This book list is divided into three sections:
(1) Picture Books
(2) Books for Independent Readers
(3) Young Adults
The list begins below with Picture Books, but you can use the following link to skip directly to the Independent Readers or the Young Adults sections.
Go to books for Independent Readers
Go to books for Young Adults
Picture Books
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Bringing the Rain to Kapiti Plain by Verna Aardema and Beatriz Vidal Recommended |
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Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs by Judi Barrett and Ron Barrett Recommended |
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Katy and the Big Snow by Virginia Lee Burton Recommended |
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The Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats Recommended |
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Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin and illustrated by Mary Azarian Recommended |
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Sam Bangs and Moonshine by Evaline Ness Recommended |
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Snow by Uri Shulevitz Recommended |
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Noah's Ark illustrated by Peter Spier Recommended |
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Hide and Seek Fog by Alvin R. Tresselt Recommended |
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White Snow, Bright Snow by Alvin R. Tresselt and illustrated by Roger Duvoisin Recommended |
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The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris Van Allsburg Recommended |
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Kate Shelley and the Midnight Express by Margaret K. Wetterer and illustrated by Karen Ritz Recommended |
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Hurricane by David Wiesner Recommended |
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Umbrella by Taro Yashima Recommended |
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Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended |
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The Storm Book by Charlotte Zolotow and illustrated by Margaret Bloy Graham Recommended |
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Clifford and the Big Storm by Norman Bridwell Suggested |
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Bartholomew and the Oobleck by Dr. Seuss Suggested |
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Snowballs by Lois Ehlert Suggested |
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Gilberto and the Wind by Marie Hall Ets Suggested |
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Drylongso by Virginia Hamilton and illustrated by Jerry Pinkney Suggested |
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Come On, Rain! by Karen Hesse and illustrated by Jon J. Muth Suggested |
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River Friendly, River Wild by Jane Kurtz and illustrated by Neil Brennan Suggested |
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Storm Boy by Paul Owen Lewis Suggested |
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Thunder Cake by Patricia Polacco Suggested |
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Keep the Lights Burning, Abbie by Peter and Connie Roop and illustrated by Peter E. Hanson Suggested |
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Kate Shelley by Robert D. San Souci and illustrated by Max Ginsburg Suggested |
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Brave Irene by William Steig Suggested |
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Anna, Grandpa, and the Big Storm by Carla Stevens and illustrated by Margot Tomes Suggested |
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The Snow Walker by Margaret K. Wetterer and illustrated by Mary O'Keefe Young and Charles M. Wetterer Suggested |
Independent Reader
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The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum and illustarted by Evelyn Copelman and W. W. Denslow Highly Recommended |
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My Side of the Mountain by Jean Craighead George Highly Recommended |
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The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis and illustrated by Tudor Humphries Highly Recommended |
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The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain and illustrated by Donald McKay Highly Recommended |
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The Long Winter by Laura Ingalls Wilder Highly Recommended |
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The Good Dog by Avi Recommended |
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Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte Recommended |
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Wind, Sand and Stars by Antoine de Saint-Exupery Recommended |
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Incident at Hawk's Hill by Allan W. Eckert and illustrated by John Schoenherr Recommended |
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Inkheart by Cornelia Caroline Funke Recommended |
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Star in the Storm by Joan Hiatt Harlow Recommended |
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Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse Recommended |
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Seaman by Gail Langer Karwoski and illustrated by James Watling Recommended |
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Hailstones and Halibut Bones by Mary O'Neill Recommended |
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Night of the Twisters by Ivy Ruckman Recommended |
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Abel's Island by William Steig Recommended |
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The Cay by Theodore Taylor Recommended |
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Williwaw! by Tom Bodett Suggested |
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The Big Wave by Pearl S. Buck Suggested |
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Tornado by Betsy Cromer Byars and illustrated by Doron Ben-Ami Suggested |
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Help! I'm a Prisoner in the Library by Eth Clifford and illustrated by George Hughes Suggested |
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The Magic School Bus Inside a Hurricane by Joanna Cole and illustrated by Bruce Degen Suggested |
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Powder Monkey by Paul Dowswell Suggested |
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The Day It Rained Forever by Virginia T. Gross and illustrated by Ronald Himler Suggested |
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Dark Water Rising by Marian Hale Suggested |
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Thunder from the Sea by Joan Hiatt Harlow Suggested |
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Blizzard by Jim Murphy Suggested |
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Twister on Tuesday by Mary Pope Osborne and illustrated by Sal Murdocca Suggested |
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Henry and Mudge and the Wild Wind by Cynthia Rylant and illustrated by Sucie Stevenson Suggested |
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Tornadoes by Seymour Simon Suggested |
Young Adult
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The Wanderer by Sharon Creech and illustrated by David Diaz Recommended |
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Halsey's Typhoon by Bob Drury Recommended |
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Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer Recommended |
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Isaac's Storm by Erik Larson Recommended |
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The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough and narrated by Edward Herrmann (AUDIO CD) Recommended |
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Desolation Island by Patrick O'Brian Recommended |
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Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley and illustrated by Bernie Wrightson Recommended |
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The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk Recommended |
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The Perfect Storm by Sebastian Junger Recommended |
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Flood by Kathleen Duey Suggested |