GODZILLA COMES TO OUR HOUSE

Well last night we met the monster in person, face to face. Tokage, the big lizard typhoon, known in my house henceforth as Godzilla, slowly and thoroughly tromped on the whole country south to north (27 killed, scores still missing), picked up forests and threw them all over, flooded cities, sent rivers over their banks and avalanches into living rooms, tromped over this part of the country through most of the night, especially up here on the mountain where you can really feel the weather's brute force in the muscles of the wind as it leans harder and harder against the walls of the house, grabbing hold of the eaves...

A typhoon at night is a perilous thing because you can hear but can’t see what is happening outside, and want to know... we could hear the wind coming, feel it arriving and hear it going off into the rest of the night like an unappeased monster till the next one came ripping and growling through the forest, trees a foot and a half in diameter bending like reeds; we could hear branches snapping, follow things rumbling along the roof in the dark and then falling to the ground on one side or the other, smashing if a tile or banging if a piece of wood or ladder, or snapping in the wind like a broken sail if a tarp...

The old house down the mountain with the metal roof had half the roof torn off that went on whanging like a giant cymbal against the sides of the house for an hour or so till it finally broke free and went flying on the wind down the mountain in the night, we kept edging open the doors to look outside at whatever made that sound we just heard (a door in such a wind can easily get away from you and not be closable), but dared not go outside for flying tiles and metal bits and wood darts and tree limbs arrowing unpredictably through the air, and what winds they were, playing xylophone on our half-finished roof, driving rain in along the roof beams, electricity out six times (typhoon dark mountain night is the depth of darkness) finally gave up and went to bed listening, waiting for the frustrated lizard to rip the roof off...

Fevered, wind-pulsing dreams, woke to a spark of sun in the ongoing lesser wind and the sound of chainsaws from all directions freeing the roads of fallen trees, though luckily none of our many mountain-weather strong big cedar, oak and cypress trees toppled or even snapped in half; went outside to assess the damage, saw the pergola down, broken tiles everywhere, ripped scraps of tarpaper, tarps in the trees, firewood scattered, garden buried in cedar branches, out front a perfect dawn rainbow glowing in falling rain against the steelgray clouds still whipping against the mountains...

Down in the village persimmons littered the roads, some trees down, and in a touch of Godzilla humor a bunch of portatoilets flung from their storage and strewn about the village, in gardens, up against hedgerows... train office closed, commuters waiting, country life going on in the morning...

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