Toast and storms

I had to text my mother last week. Normally, I just call her on the phone and we talk like normal humans.

But her power was out and she couldn’t make toast with her toaster because hurricane Matthew had roared through the little town she lives in off the coast of Florida with 125 mph winds, taking most the power lines with it.

Toast has nothing to do with texting, I know, but it does have something to do with power, so read on...

This was her first big hurricane and she spent the better part of week getting ready for it.

There’s a Bugs Bunny cartoon that speaks to the dilemma of preparing for a hurricane.

Bugs is in the pouch of a kangaroo with a young roo. The elder roo has an outboard attached to her tail and they’re going merrily across the ocean from Australia to the United States.

Bugs yells out, “batten down the hatches!”

The young roo replies, “I did batten them down!”

“Well batten them down again, we’ll teach those hatches!”

The bit is apparently taken from an old Abbott and Costello skit. But I still remember that cartoon, though it’s probably been 30 years since I last saw it.

My mother basically spent the week getting ready for the hurricane, battening down her house and helping others batten down theirs.

Then, on Thursday, the hurricane came. The power went out and a big old maple in the yard went down, but the house and my mother survived.

Except for toast. They had a generator, which kept the fridge running, but she said they couldn’t run the toaster. It took too much juice.

The phone lines didn’t work either, she couldn’t make calls in or out, even with a cell phone.

But she could text. So we texted a bit back and forth until the storm passed.

Her assessment of the hurricane was to the point.

“I wouldn’t want to go through that again,” she said.

At its worst, the weather outside was simply white, as the wind whipped the rain all around and she could see nothing.

On Sunday, the boy and I were in a storm of our own.

We went to Two Medicine in a driving rain. We saw two moose and one elk and no bears. Water poured off Rising Wolf Mountain and normally dry washes were tumbling streams.

We saw a mid-sized bull moose not far from the Upper Lake, but it was raining so hard it was nearly impossible to get a clear picture. Within the span of a few minutes it became noticeably cooler and the snow started to mix with the rain, so we turned around.

No amount of Gore-Tex was keeping us dry. The hike back was rather miserable. The temperature at the truck was 33 degrees. The next morning, of course, there was snow, early for even Northwest Montana.

I called up Terry Sherburne in East Glacier and he called me back.

“Sixteen inches of snow,” he noted Monday morning.

Glad I wasn’t that moose. We like to think of Glacier as some summer paradise playground. But we often forget how harsh and unforgiving the climate really is.

I must admit, it is nice to go home and make yourself a piece of toast...

Chris Peterson is the editor of the Hungry Horse News.