My love happened to chat about pinball with someone from Texas this weekend. He (the Texan) mentioned that no, nobody has basements in Texas. And, fine, that will happen. I didn’t think much particularly about that revelation, because I grew up in New Jersey, where we don’t get tornadoes. If a tornado forms in the New Jersey area it immediately strikes Brooklyn or, if it can’t afford Brooklyn (who can?), Staten Island. My love, growing up in Michigan, wondered then what Texans do in tornado weather if there isn’t a basement for shelter. I can only guess that when there’s a tornado siren in Texas everyone grabs a gun, rushes outside, and shoots it until the siren stops. And if there is a tornado it only gets worse treatment. I’m open to learning better from people with actual experience of Texas tornados, but I shall know you’re lying to me if you claim that afterwards they don’t barbecue the tornado’s corpse. There’s some things I know even before I look them up.
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The Another Blog, Meanwhile index fell eight points when there was this scary sound outside and nobody was willing to investigate it.
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Having lived in Texas all my life, I often wondered why we don’t have basements when we so obviously need them. Hell, they were good enough for Dorothy in Kansas, so why not us? When I was little and my family lived in a trailer park, we got in the bathtub and put a mattress over us. Not even joking. Now that I live in a house, we are instructed to move to the room with the most interior walls, as far away from windows and exterior walls as possible.
But yeah… basements make more sense.
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I am genuinely surprised. I can imagine cases where a basement doesn’t make sense, like if the house is so near the coast that any basement would be too close to the water table, or if the land were so soft that basements would need too much bracing not to be collapsed inward. But, like, Dallas (where my conversation partner was talking about) isn’t exactly coastal as far as I know. And the ground has to be pretty solid if it’s holding up Interstates with that many lanes and access roads and multiple levels and all that. So I don’t know.
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In Oklahoma we had a couple neighbors with tornado shelters.
Never used them, but it is nice to have neighbors with tornado shelters. Prolly nice to be that neighbor, too.
They all got torn down when the hospital expanded. People sold, got old, died.
We’ll all be dead soon enough.
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That comment took a turn.
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Tornadoes bring a lot of turns like that.
Well, turns and that Joe Meek sound.
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Neighbors with shelters sounds like a good idea, although I remember a couple of Monsters-are-Due-on-Mulberry-Street type episodes of the Twilight Zone where that just turned out horrible for everybody involved. Oh, there were some episodes where things turned out well for everybody involved. At least most of the people involved.
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