Weather

As I plan to travel across the US in summer weather, I don't worry much about how weather could interfere with my plans. In North America we live, for the most part, impervious to weather.  Except for the farmers. I am impressed that Host Dad Larry always knows the forecast throughout the day and adjusts his plans by the hour, knowing just how shifting winds will carry spray or gentle rains will settle seeds into the ground. The other night a thunderstorm woke me at 3. Beyond the lightning flashes, the thunder rolled like a lumbering airplane taking off on an endless runway overhead. It made me uneasy, a holdover response from the days when I was growing up in Honduras, and thunderstorms cancelled plans. Back then the roofs were tin, and the 2 o’clock rains in rainy season drowned out speech. Only the most important roads crossed bridges, and the prop planes that served the country flew by sight around the mountains. You didn’t fly through thunderstorms. You didn’t drive through swollen rivers. You paid attention to the weather.

When I lived on the Mosquito Coast of Honduras (named not for its prevalence of scary-large mosquitoes, but more likely, for the muskets traded from English pirates), the only way out was a three day hike up the river, a three day boat ride along the coast, or a two-hour plane ride to one of the two closest Honduran cities, La Ceiba or Tegucigalpa. Most of our travel between villages was by single engine airplane landing on a dozen unpaved airstrips throughout the region. There was one road connecting the headquarters of the refugee camps where we worked with the main port, Lempira, but anywhere else you wanted to go you walked or canoed (with poles or diesel motor) up a river. We depended most on the airplanes. All of us spent hours, even whole days, waiting on an airstrip for an airplane that might or might not come because of weather or an emergency trip to the medical clinic. All of us watched our plans go awry when the thunderstorms rolled in.

When I lived in Lempira, I would sometimes visit Janey in the towns further south along the coastline where she slept in a net-covered hammock, and walked out of town to an out-house, and taught her sewing course in Miskito. This meant crossing the lagoon that separated Lempira from Cauquira in one wide passenger canoe and then boarding another narrower canoe to navigate the canals connecting the coastal towns. Unless it was raining, the rides along the canals were magical. You rode through mangroves woven overhead and tangled in the water beneath, and the boatman raised and lowered his diesel “tuc-tuc” motor with a pole so that it wouldn’t be damaged by the hidden roots. The ride across the lagoon, on the other hand, was more difficult. You caught the early boat at 4 am and sat on narrow boards, three people across, row after row in the canoe, and listened to the motor’s “tuc-tuc” for three hours in the dark. If the water was not calm as you’d hoped, the waves splashed into the boat, soaking you, and you shivered, and you and all the passengers reached for the long piece of plastic the boatman carried, and you held it over your heads and down onto the edges of the canoe to keep the brackish lagoon water out. Weather mattered.

The closest escape I had from weather was when I was in junior high, and a family friend Rhoda took me and my sister to Roatan Island on holiday and returned to La Ceiba, on the Honduran coast, on a ferry. We got caught in a bad storm. The captain turned back, and then turned back again. The boat was tipping precariously, and water was sloshing over the sides. We were soaked and shivering. When we arrived in La Ceiba in the dark, hours late, my mom met us at the pier, but it was far too rough for the ferry to dock, so people sent out boats, and we were handed aboard and taken through the crashing waves to shore. I remember well my mom’s face—pure relief. That ferry went down in another storm a few years later.

So there’s a reason I’m uneasy when the thunder won’t stop growling overhead and the lightning won’t stop slashing at my window. I hope this respect for the weather has made me more able to roll with the punches, more flexible in my planning. Maybe. If so, it’s because I still have a sense of some larger design guiding in the background. My time with the Mixtecs showed me that their experience of the unpredictability of the weather and all the other natural forces led them to assume capricious and unsympathetic spiritual forces ruled their lives. Like the ancient Greeks, they found their Fates dishing out mostly plates of tragedy. All their omens were dark, and the rain gods were vengeful. It’s only because God has revealed himself as good and leading us to good that we can roll with punches and adjust plans with any equanimity. Our God is good. He walks on water and calms the seas. So he can lead us to good, whatever the unpredictable forces of our lives may threaten. It’s our plan to spread this news around, whatever life’s weather holds.