Storm Chasing

We've been half-seriously talking about doing this for years: watching this big old low pressure system come at us on the Weather Channel, and calculating it just right so that we are standing on a lake shore as it slams into Michigan.

Sunday night, as we are enjoying a calm, warm evening, getting dinner prepared, Tim announces that we are going to have to take down the patio umbrellas and batten down pretty much everything outside because what they were calling a 'cyclone' was coming. Seriously? It's too nice out. It can't be. Really? I don't want summer to be over. It's too early for these big Edmund Fitzgerald-esque storms. Once I got my usual skeptical whining out of my system, I joined him at the computer to see what he was talking about. Then he says: what if we were to take a little 2-hour drive to Lake Michigan early in the morning, and see what a gale warning looks like, and how 40 mph winds stir up the water?

And sure enough, at 2am we heard the first rumbles of thunder. We've really gotten cheated of thunderstorms this whole summer. Hardly got any. So we were geeked about that. At around 4am, the breeze started picking up. At 0730 we got in the truck and headed west.

Turns out we aren't the only ones who like to sit ringside at these events. There were already cars lined up along the beach at Grand Haven State Park, and more were arriving every minute. No one could tell where the pavement ended and the sand began because so much had blown off the beach. We parked, munched on pancake/peanut butter sandwiches in the truck and watched the churning, frothing dirty water slam into the beach. I don't think I've ever seen Lake Michigan look like that. Mountainous waves all the way out to the horizon.

Two vehicles over, there was a man changing into a wet suit. Well, now we had to stick around and watch this lunacy. We joined a few other souls on the beach and got sandblasted and splashed with rogue monster waves. We watched this fool and then two others try to negotiate far enough out onto the pier to jump in and surf. One of them was barefoot. It was comical watching them try to walk while holding surfboards: the wind gusts would nearly rip them right out of their arms. And the waves didn't even look that great for surfing. They weren't the nice classic curling kind, they were just too angry and frothy and churning. They tried and tried, and just ended up doing a lot of floundering out there.





Yeah, buddy, that's probably the safest spot for you. We were darkly speculating with the other people on the beach when that day we'd be hearing a news report of an emergency rescue or drowning story.

We checked out another small park southward, and could barely see the pavement because of all the leaves, branches, pine needles and acorns that had been blown down. We felt a little safer standing on a higher bluff above the water.




So yeah, who knows how many important errands we could have run to the parental units' houses or grocery stores with all that gas we burned. But it was fun. We stopped at a roadside market and bought some Honeycrisp apples. We stopped at a beer/wine store Tim had heard about in Grand Rapids. We stopped at a favorite produce market on the west side of Lansing. And didn't get to bed too ridiculously late in the afternoon.