Adios, not-so-perfect storm
http://test.denverpost.com/extremes/ci_4396034
09/25/2006
By Scott Willoughby
Baja California Sur, Mexico - La tormenta. The word itself is impressive, but not nearly so much as the swirling green mass of glowing radar that
inspired me to look it up. After navigating the Mexican keyboard to the local weather Web page, I think it wise to learn the Spanish word for
hurricane. Given my limited resources, the best I can do is la tormenta, the storm.
At the moment, I'm reminded by the Web page, the Pacific tormenta they've named "Lane" remains only that, a storm. Of course, they don't just toss out
names willy-nilly to every Tom, Dick and Harry tempest with a lightning bolt and clap of thunder. In order to earn a name like Lane, you have to rate.
And even my pidgin Spanish skills are enough to decipher the forecast for Tropical Storm Lane to mature to full-fledge category 4 hurricane status by
the time it's predicted to hit landfall roughly 30 miles south of our temporary bastion in Todos Santos. That prediction, I might add, was fewer than
24 hours from ahora.
Never having felt the full force of a hurricane up close and personal, I can't say I looked forward to my first. Having faced her fair share of them
growing up on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, my travel partner looked forward to greeting another even less.
But as we evaluated the integrity of our rental digs and stocked up on fresh water, dry cereal and cold cerveza, it came to my attention that our
"safety first" philosophy was hardly universal. Less than two weeks after Hurricane John had battered the surrounding coastline, surfers from San
Diego to San Francisco lined the solitary paved highway to Los Cabos, heading south to the legendary breaks of Costa Azul and Baja's East Cape in
search of storm- induced late-summer swell.
"That's what I'm here for," a San Francisco surfer named Brad told me. "Todos Santos is a pretty good place to hole up. But we're heading down to Cabo
tonight to try to beat the storm. The last one went right up the gulf coast."
I admired Brad's tenacity, even understood it, to a degree. Although my own Colorado surfing skills - falling somewhere around "tolerable kook" on the
surf-scene barometer - were a far cry from "hurricane rider," I felt like I'd been there before: On la caza, the hunt.
It was, after all, a seasonal wanderlust that brought us to Baja in the first place, seeking out adventures of a new sort. After last winter's snow
had dissipated, the rivers had run and the trails had rutted, a week of splashing in the surf sounded ideal. It was the promise of rideable waves that
made the peninsula so appealing. Of course, that was when the surf appeared promised to remain part of the sea.
Now, as the looming storm increased in intensity, I suddenly felt like a Texan in Telluride on the eve of an El Niņo epic. There were no skis wide
enough to help my plight, no powder cords long or orange enough to retrace the route of my impending yard sale, no instructor to guide me through this
utterly unfamiliar environment. My destiny, it seemed, lay under a wide- brimmed hat in the base lodge.
As an arm-chair meteorologist accustomed to chasing Canadian cold fronts and Wasatch whiteouts, it feels odd even now to describe a storm in a
negative light. My tendency is to drive through blinding blizzards in search of powder snow, across several states to ride rain-fed rivers, even to
time up the Canadian border crossing with the appropriate tidal swell to kayak-surf at Skookumchuck.
I'll wait out the interlodge at Alta for the sensation of first tracks the next morning, fly into a Sierra squall to huck myself at Squaw, or drag a
kayak to Costa Rica simply because it's rainy season.
So why is it that none of those adventures compare to the exhilaration I experienced when I logged onto the Internet the next day to discover
Hurricane Lane had veered east at the last minute and was hammering the Mexican mainland?
Everything's relative, I reminded myself as we piled our hurricane survival kit into the rental car and joined the real surfers camped out to the
south. I hadn't come to Cabo to kill myself, or even to prove anything I didn't already know: that no matter what, the wave riding is still better
than it will ever be in Colorado. I paddled out, rode back in, and gave thanks for the opportunity. La tormenta had passed.
|
![[*]](images/xmbforum/default_icon.gif){kind=icon}
Sorta of
a mother nature gone wild thing, an extra bang for your bucks while you're checking out the local scenery. If you're home is destroyed and your life
is wrecked, that's something else. Not a good thing.
