Adventurers - from May 21, 2004

I've decided I'm insufficiently brave.

I emerged, or tried to, from University Health Services this afternoon with my prescription and the newspaper clamped under my arm. Arriving at the glass door, I thought to myself, "Why is it so dark outside? I don't remember these windows being tinted." I opened the first door, entered the glassed-in lobby, and thought, "The sky is green."

Earlier, as I'd walked down the street towards UHS, I'd glanced up at a heavy, brooding sky. Last night, too, the tornado warning sirens had sounded in Ann Arbor, eerie, intense and urgent, rising and falling in their terrifying wail. Paul and I had run down from my apartment - after I fidgeted near the door, heart clenching, while he looked for his shoes - to the laundry room in the next building's basement. When the sirens silenced, we returned, and I paced about my apartment for awhile, trying to get better reception on the radio, while lightning flickered and flashed every moment, outside. When we turned out the lights, I lay awake in bed, watching the room illuminate, illuminate, illuminate, while thunder muttered and roared at intervals all around us. At last I fell asleep.

The green sky outside the door of the medical building, then, didn't surprise me; but I felt the same sudden jolt of fear, and turned round instantly to cross the waiting room and descend the stairs to the basement. And so I caught only a glimpse of sky; saw only a moment of the sheeting rain as someone opened a large utility door to allow a frightened, drenched passerby to run inside. A remarkable scene: pale, sickly green air, rain and hail falling in white, angled sheets, nurses calling urgently out into the rain as the individual, framed by the door and silhouetted by the weather, ran in, eyes wide with alarm. Slowly, the patients from other floors in the hospital trickled downstairs: Prof. Verhoogt, his foot in a cast, who looked at me curiously but seemed not to recognize me with my newly short hair; a friend from ultimate; secretaries and pharmacists who bustled about, ensuring everyone's safety and expressing their laughing surprise at the intensity of the storm.

After a few minutes, one man went upstairs to see how things were progressing, and I followed him, chastising myself for my caution. I'd been one of the first to dive downstairs at the merest hint of trouble. But by the time I looked outside again the storm had mostly passed - I had missed the bulk of its intensity. And I found myself suddenly sorry, for that. I missed the experience; I missed its vigor, its unusualness, its lurid green sky, the wild and whipping winds. I don't want to be reckless, but I don't want to be timid, either. Life is too strong, too insistent, too present for timidity.

Now, I'm back in the geology building, and the trees outside are dancing a wild dance, still wind-whipped. When I returned I looked into B.W.'s office, who sat calmly working at his computer, hunched there like he always sits, spreadsheets open in front of him. My own office was empty and dark, my officemates gone, and I asked him where people had hidden themselves to escape the storm.

"Oh, I don't know," said he in his usual loud, jovial tone. "Most of them went out to the lobby to watch through the window" - here he imitated them - " 'Wow, the sky's about to fall!' "

That's geologists for you, at least from my own aquaintance: unafraid, full of their own particular bravado, an attitude that says, "I am a geologist, and an adventurer. I know this natural world, I study it, I have, in my way, conquered it. I'm not afraid of it and intend to show you so - to show you how cavalier and bold, how careless and experience-seeking, I can be." These are the geologists and student geologists I know from B.'s picnic each year at his farmhouse, throwing one log after another onto the yearly bonfire in the rain, carelessly pushing the logs deeper into the flame with their boots, standing closer to its heat than I dare, telling stories of drinking, stories of field camp, stories, probably embellished, of their their adventures, hiking, exploring, mountain-climbing, drinking. Casually needling one another, smoking cigarettes, coolly adding the bench-logs to the fire.

Then B. showed me a weather map of the storm on Weather Underground, and pointed out the long front of red, followed by oranges and yellows in a vast swath behind it, already leaving town, already gone, continuing on, on, on. And dismissed me, in his usual sudden, peremptory way, that is always as abrupt and as startling as his friendliness.