Mom Nature

My heart goes out to the folks who are engaged in war with fires out west.  I can't imagine what it is like for them to deal with the destructive power of those enormous blazes.  I guess part of the problem is that fire has been around far longer than people, and while we can do a lot of things to deal with nature's forces, this is one that is just too strong.

Fires, hurricanes, droughts, tornadoes, and even volcanoes and earthquakes cause great devastation, and remind us that we aren't more powerful than Mom Nature.

I call her Mom because, well, we've become quite close over the years.  Whenever I go outside, there she is.  It's been mostly raining over the past week after not seeing rain for much of  August.  That's not unusual around here.  Some years there are floods and windstorms.  Some years droughts.  All in all, we're pretty lucky in Wisconsin.

We don't have a lot of natural disasters in Wisconsin.  We do have tornadoes.  The National Weather Services says we had 1,537 tornadoes from 1844 to 2014.  That's a little over nine per year, which isn't bad until you see that the 30 year "normal" is 23 tornadoes and that in 2005 there were 62.  I suspect that in the 1800s the population of Wisconsin was small enough that most tornadoes weren't seen or reported.

In 1984 a little town in Wisconsin called Barneveld was 90% destroyed by a strong tornado.  In 1984 dollars, that storm cost $40,000,000 and several lives.  Fortunately, many tornadoes visit unpopulated areas.

In terms of hurricanes, now and then we'll get some rain that comes from a Gulf hurricane.  And, we've felt a little quiver now and then from the New Madrid fault near St. Louis.  We've had no volcanoes of which I'm aware.  We have grass fires in the spring, mostly, when people are anxious to get rid of their burn piles before the land has greened-up.

There have been forest fires in Wisconsin's woodlands, but not a major one that I can remember, and not even one one-thousandths of what California and Oregon and Washington are facing this year.

One thing we have had in Wisconsin is several ice ages and the attendant glaciers.  They're gone now, but the topography of Wisconsin is the way it is because of them.  And, they may come again.

Most of the time Mom Nature is pretty kind to us.  Enough sun and water to make our gardens grow, and enough mayhem to make us appreciate those years when everything is fine.  

I'll tell you one thing: I am not taking our good fortune for granted during this Western fire season.  I think we should probably all send some money along to non-profits who are helping the people who have been displaced.  

Mom Nature would like that.