The Eye of a Hurricane

I was once in the Eye of a Hurricane -- much excitement.

 

By the spring of 1964, I had spent two years at the University of Minnesota, majoring in mathematics, vacillating between becoming an architect or a mining engineer, trying to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.

 

That summer, I read a magazine article about computers and how there would soon be a huge demand for experts in this new field. It sounded exotic and potentially lucrative.

 

Being an impetuous young adventurer, I decided to become a computer programmer.

 

On August 10, my 20th birthday, I stuffed my belongings into the trunk of my 1953 Chevy and headed for Florida early the following morning, where I intended to enroll in Miami-Dade Junior College in Miami, one of the three top-rated computer schools in the country at the time.

 

Four days later, I arrived in Miami and checked into a cheap motel near campus. It was hot, humid and raining. As far as I could tell, I was the only person in Miami wearing socks.

 

The same day I arrived, a weather disturbance classified as a tropical cyclone moved off the eastern African coast.

 

After catching up on my sleep, I went to the college campus the next day and registered for fall semester.

 

The weather disturbance soon reached hurricane force in the Atlantic and was named Cleo.

 

There was a pool hall across the street from campus with a lunch counter that soon became my unofficial headquarters. I had spent much of my youth in pool halls and felt right at home there.

 

On August 22, Hurricane Cleo slammed into the French West Indies, causing 14 deaths and much damage.

 

I eventually found a cheap place to rent near campus. It had a bedroom, kitchen and bathroom. It also had cockroaches the size of sewer rats and enough beefy spiders to make a horror movie.

 

On the morning of August 24, Hurricane Cleo passed south of the Dominican Republic, killing seven people. Later that same day, it veered into Haiti where damage was considerable and 192 people perished.

 

Two days later, I was hanging out in the pool hall, wondering why the place was so deserted.

 

On August 27, the eye of Hurricane Cleo moved onto Key Biscayne. The owner of the pool hall began chasing out customers and preparing for some sort of onslaught.

 

That’s when I first learned about Hurricane Cleo.

 

Dominic, the owner of the pool hall, invited me to join his family and a few guests at his house, a block from the pool hall, for a hurricane party. It sounded better than waiting it out with cockroaches and spiders so I accepted.

 

Classified as a category-four hurricane, Cleo had sustained winds of 135 mph, with gusts up to 160 mph. It hit Miami at full throttle.

 

At around midnight, I watched a large garbage can blow down the street and never hit the ground.

 

About 1:00 am, the exterior wall of the TV station collapsed during a live broadcast of weather conditions. A few minutes later, the electricity went out in all of Miami.

 

Not too long thereafter, there was a sudden dead silence. The wind had abruptly stopped and it was no longer raining.

 

Dominic handed me a flashlight and announced that he and I were going to check on the pool hall.

 

When we got outside, the entire area was flooded with knee-deep water.

 

I followed Dominic to the pool hall, which had about a foot of water inside. It smelled like rotting fish but everything else looked okay.

 

On the way back to the house, Dominic told me to hurry -- we were in the eye of the hurricane and it was about to kick in again.

 

I was simply a young wanderer from the far north where the lakes have loons and winter temperatures are prefixed with minus signs. I knew nothing about hurricanes or the eye that came with it.

 

Dominic also told me to watch out for snakes -- another news flash that got my attention. It's amazing how quickly you can move when you're knee deep in snake-filled water in the dark, in the eerily silent eye of a moving hurricane.

 

We made it back inside the house just as Hurricane Cleo hit again with full force.

 

The closer to the eye, the stronger the winds. And we were on the very edge of the eye just then, with the fierce wind now blowing in the opposite direction as before.

 

While everyone else eventually went to sleep, I spent the rest of the night waiting for the roof to cave in.

 

Hurricane Cleo (category-four) caused $125 million in damage in the Miami metropolitan area.

 

It continued along the eastern coast, mostly out at sea, until it fizzled out on September 4 east of Newfoundland.

 

Only three disturbances to reach landfall as a category-five hurricane, the most intense category, have ever been recorded in the USA.

 

• 1935 – Labor Day Hurricane in the Florida Keys
• 1969 – Hurricane Camille in Mississippi
• 1992 – Hurricane Andrew in Dade County, Florida

 

Other category-five disturbances recorded in recent history include the Japanese tsunami of 2011 and Charlie Sheen, but that’s another story.

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Quote for the Day – "Perfect weather for today's game -- not a breath of air." Curt Gowdy

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where hurricanes sometimes go to fizzle out.

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Silence of the Yams

Many philosophers believe that thoughts are deeds. If you project benevolent thoughts, you help create a benevolent environment. Projecting hostility creates hostility, etc. As we sow, so shall we reap.

 

Cleve Backster, America's foremost lie-detector expert, hooked up a lie-detector to a plant about 40 years ago in an attempt to see how long it would take water to reach the leaves. A lie detector is a sensitive instrument that measures such things as Galvanic skin response, slight variations in temperature, pressure, rates of flow, etc.

 

Backster quickly discovered the plant reacted "dramatically" to the experiment itself.

 

When Backster decided to burn one of the leaves, the lie detector readings went off the charts. When he noticed the "trauma" being exhibited by the plant, he decided not to burn the plant after all, whereupon the plant became calm once again.

 

Backster had not approached the plant with a match -- he had only decided, in his mind, to do so, at which time the plant became "emotional." And when he had decided to call off the burning experiment, again only in his mind, the plant returned to normal.

 

In subsequent experiments, Backster had trouble repeating the results because once a plant had been led to believe something was going to happen and it didn't, the plant would retain that knowledge and not become "emotional" the second time.

 

Consequently, fresh plants were required for continued experimentation. This led to the conclusion that plants have some sort of memory and discrimination capability.

 

In other experiments, it became clear that the plants would only react if the experimenter actually intended to carry out the actions. If Backster was only bluffing to do something harmful, the plant wouldn't respond. Thus he concluded that plants could discern intent (through thought transference) and had a "memory" of past events.

 

Backster conducted further experiments over the last four decades and has become one of the leading bio-communications experts in the world. For example, he discovered that an egg would react when another egg was cracked.

 

His work tends to confirm the Gaia Hypothesis which states that the world is one huge, living organism with self-regulating capability.

 

Dorothy Retallack is another specialist in this field. She exposed a variety of plants to various types of music. Plants that were exposed to hard rock (Led Leppelin and Jimi Hendrix) began pointing away from the source of the music, whereas plants exposed to soothing music began pointing toward the source.

 

Through further studies, she concluded that being gentle with plants helps them flourish and being the opposite has the opposite effect.

 

THE SECRET LIFE OF PLANTS, by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, is a book detailing other experiments done on plant life.

 

Distance doesn't seem to matter when communicating with plants. For example, a chemist became so attuned to his house plants that they reacted excitedly when he made love to his girlfriend 80 miles away.

 

In another instance, a philodendron activated by a thought impulse from a technician started a car two miles away.

 

On a more unscientific note, my ex-wife, who is three-quarters Norwegian and one-quarter dingbat, used to talk to vegetables. She could spend hours chatting with a pod of peas or an ear of corn. She did most of the talking while the vegetables listened politely without too much interruption.

 

One day she got some financial advice from a zucchini. Two hours later she went out and bought some brand new furniture. "It really didn't cost anything," she told me, "I put it on the credit card."

 

I chopped up the zucchini and put it in a salad.

 

One morning my ex-wife got into an argument with a kumquat. It had something to do with her new hair style -- the kumquat thought it made her look fat. She tried to get a second opinion from a yam but it ignored her, so she decided to snarl at me instead. Apparently, yams don't like to be confrontational.

 

I never did communicate very well with the vegetables. They prefer to communicate with entities on their own intellectual level, such as fungi, mildew, politicians and dingbats. However, I once had a lengthy conversation with dill pickle about the meaning of life. They tend to be very good listeners.

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Quote for the Day – "The opposite of talking is waiting." Fran Lebowitz

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and an imaginary girlfriend named Tequila Mockingbird.

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Junk and Luxury

One of the fastest ways to fail in life is to work so hard your manager will think you're after his job.

 

In 1976, one year before our semi-blissful marriage of five years, my ex-wife and I went on a sailing adventure in the West Indies. We paid good money to be deckhands on a 248-foot, four-mast schooner, island-hopping the Leeward Islands of St. Martins, St. Barts, St Eustatius, St. Kitts and Nevis for two weeks.

 

After a few days, we hooked up with a couple from Philadelphia and a couple from Alaska.

 

One day the six of us were wandering the neighborhood back streets of a town on Nevis. Some of the locals were sitting on the front porches of their modest houses, playing dominoes or watching the tourists pass by.

 

The couple from Philadelphia (liberals) mentioned how poor everyone seemed and suggested there should be an influx of government money to help everyone out.

 

The couple from Alaska (conservatives) wondered why no one seemed to be working very hard and suggested an influx of private industry to kick-start the economy.

 

My ex-wife was too busy looking for a shop where she could buy some more useless junk to notice anything.

 

However, I noticed and wondered if I was the only sane person in the group. Everyone I saw along the street appeared to be perfectly content in their existence. You could see the happiness in the twinkle in their eyes. It was beyond my comprehension why anyone would want to barge in and spoil a perfectly desirable way of life.

 

Apparently, there's a big difference between liberals and conservatives and relatively sane human beings. On the Orb of Wounded Souls, being enslaved by dependency on government handouts or being enslaved by becoming a cog in the giant economic engine of production and consumption (mindless growth) are both forms of enslavement.

 

Clearly, there must be a more reasonable way of life.

 

Once upon a time in America, the Europeans had not yet arrived to spoil a perfectly desirable way of life. There were indigenous people (Native Americans) scattered throughout the continent, doing just fine until the white man arrived on the eastern shore, stuck a flag in the ground and declared it to be a "discovery."

 

Some of the indigenous folks had permanent settlements while others were hunter-gatherer nomads. A hunter-gatherer society consisted of small bands of nomadic people who lived in an area where it was too harsh to allow permanent settlements. They survived by foraging for edible plants and wild animals. Basically, they wandered from one food source to another. Everything they owned, they carried on their backs.

 

One of the major areas of concentration of hunter-gatherer nomads was the Great Basin Desert area of the southwest (Wyoming, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, etc.). These societies were part of the Shoshonean bands of Indians (Hopi, Piute, Mono, Comanche, Kawai, Panamint, Chemehuevi and others).

 

In an article titled THE ART OF NOTHING, Thomas J. Elpel declares, "Hunter-gatherer societies succeeded in working only one or two hours per day, yet in our efforts to reproduce their lifestyle we end up working all day."

 

Elpel is the director of Hollowtop Outdoor Primitive School in Montana and author of many books on survival. According to Elpel, the hunter-gatherers "had a lot of time on their hands because they produced almost no material culture."

 

They basically sat around all day doing nothing. This helped conserve energy, an economical imperative so they wouldn't be forced to harvest more food each day to feed themselves. They also produced no unnecessary material goods, including artwork. Whenever they were forced to move on, they needed to do so with a minimal of effort. They didn't want to be dragging junk or luxury items with them.

 

In our materialistic culture where the objective always seems to be growth, we love junk and luxury. Often they're the same thing.

 

We work 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, just to stay even. In fact, we're less than even since our national debt is in the multiple trillions and continually rising. But we're too busy "getting ahead" to notice.

 

So, you can be a go-getter and spin your wheels in pursuit of junk and luxury, or you can be a do-nothing and observe the folly of the go-getters as they work harder and harder while getting deeper and deeper in debt.

 

Work is something you do because it's necessary for survival -- work you do beyond that is called a burden.

 

Instead of continually clamoring for jobs, jobs, jobs, we should make quality of life our common objective. This would include a shorter work-week, less government control, less monetary insanity, less military adventurism, etc.

 

• The corporate world wants everyone working at full capacity to maximize profits.

 

• The government wants everyone working at full capacity to maximize tax revenues.

 

• Financial institutions want everyone working in order to perpetuate their credit schemes to expand their control of the monetary system.

 

• The military-industrial complex wants a world of bloody conflict to justify their costly existence.

 

A shorter work-week and a less stressful way of life for the masses goes against the greedy ambitions of those who control the puppet strings.

 

Endless, mindless growth is a cancer -- sooner or later, the puppets are going to figure it out.

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Quote for the Day – "The sole purpose of human existence is to kindle a light in the darkness of mere being." Carl Jung (1875 - 1961)

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Bret Burquest is the author of 12 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where happiness comes from being satisfied with what you have, not with yearning for more, more, more.

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