BY JOHN H. WALKER
L’Observateur

Remember when you were a kid and one of your friends had a pair of those flippers, like divers use? Well, if it keeps raining it looks as if we’ll have to find a supplier.

Thursday’s storm had the roof rattling here at L’Observateur and about the time the rain was horizontal — along with the hail — it sounded as if the top of this old blue building was going to get peeled back the the top on one of those old sardine cans that came with a key attached.

The wind got up in there and starting rattling around and, for a while, it seemed a safe bet that we’d have a bigger than life “skylight” before everything was said and done.

Mother Nature can be nasty any time of the year, but especially now.

Two of the most unusual weather phenomenons I’ve ever experienced happened about this time of the year when I lived in West Texas.

The first was in Childress, located halfway between Wichita Falls and Amarillo on U.S. 187 and happened back in 1976.

One Saturday morning, the sky to the west had a reddish tint to it … not as pretty as one of those skies that fits the “red sky at morning” saying, but certainly enough for a newcomer to the region to pay notice. By early afternoon, the rain drops started to fall from the sky — but because the red, swirling dust of that dust storm was so thick, it “mudded” instead of rained.

I had on a white golf shirt that day and got splattered in a rat-a-tat fashion … and those reddish brown splotches faded over the years, but they never went away.

There was another memorable dust storm in West Texas after I lived in Big Spring. Friend Mel Prather and I — along with 10 or 12 friends — were in a local watering hole called Doc Holliday’s when somebody came in and yelled, “Ya’ll come look at the sky!”

Like lemmings fueled by Coors Light, we did just that and coming from the west, we saw a ground to top-of-the-sky wall of brown dust coming at us ninety-to-nothing. It was on us before we could react and, since the dust was soooo dry, we were forced to go back inside Doc’s until it wound down several hours later.

The darndest weather phenomenon I’ve ever experienced happened on Friday, May 10, 1996. I was inside the historic Ritz Theatre in Big Spring to watch the movie, “Twister.”

About a half-hour earlier, I had been out riding around, watching a rainstorm move south of town, when an errant hail stone hit the windshield of my Jeep Cherokee. I quickly turned around and headed into town, parking under the drive-thru at First National Bank, which was located across the street from the theatre.

Not long after taking my seat, there was a loud “boom” from above. Since the theatre was being renovated, folks thought it was someone working.

Then, the noise became more frequent and turn from a single boom to a roar.

Someone yelled, “It’s hailing” and we all went to look.

It was. The hail was softball and grapefruit size and when it hit the street, it bounced as if it was one of those superballs we played with as youngsters.

Morris Robertson, who owned a body shop, kept one of the hailstones in his freezer for years — and it truly was grapefruit size.

The ground was so pock-marked from the hail that it looked like a dimpled golf ball skin that has been peeled away.

As documented at http://www.met.tamu.edu/osc/TXOKgh.htm, the stones measured up to 5-inches and injured 48 people. There were a couple of houses that were destroyed and dozens that were severely damaged as property damage estimates were about $28 million in a town of 20,000 people.

That Saturday, the town was inundated with “roofers” — many of whom were probably in a place similar to Doc Holliday’s the night before and decided they were “gonna be roofers” and get some of that insurance money. It was a mess, to say the least!

It’s not just West Texas where the saying is applicable, as we can just about be anywhere, wait 15 minutes and the weather will change.

The one lesson we all need to learn from our contact with Mother Nature is that her power is often overwhelming and almost beyond belief.

(John H. Walker is editor and publisher of L’Observateur and can be reached at 652-9545 or john.walker@wickcommunications.com.)