Cyclone

Cyclone

As I sit here on a bright, clear, beautiful morning in the north east of Victoria, cyclone Larry is raging up north.

My thoughts are with everybody all the way from Townsville to Cairns and surrounding areas. And with all the people who live on the islands along the coast.

It’s so frightening to be caught at the mercy of good old Mother Nature. So hard for many people to imagine the force and ferocity this old earth can unleash at times.

When we were getting ready to fight the fires that surrounded us on New Year’s Day this year, we had a taste of what it’s like. You do everything you can, and then you sit and wait for the worst to hit. You don’t “fight” these things. You ride them out. You survive.

Many people asked me afterwards if I had this item or that packed up and ready to go.

The answer was no.

The important things are what you think about. Life. Saving ourselves and the animals we love. That’s all we thought about — do what we can for our house and belongings, but preserve life above all.

It was only after the danger passed that I thought of all the silly little things I would have lost that mean so much to me. Like photographs and mementos. But we would have been alive, and so would our animal friends. Possessions are only things after all.

Hurricanes are not like fires or floods. The noise is what haunts you.

The noise of a hurricane bearing down is indescribable, relentless. It rages on and on and on. Then there’s the eerie quiet at the eye of the storm. We use words such as eerie, spooky, weird, but there’s no real way of describing that either. It’s more than just “eerie”. It’s ominous, dangerous… You know the horror is about to begin again. It’s like a cruel glimpse of normality amid the destruction. Like nature is saying: “This is what it was like yesterday, what it will be like tomorrow, but today I’m angry. Today I’m showing you how small and insignificant you really are compared to me.”

Today, I’ll look up at a perfect sky of blue and enjoy a perfect day of 29 degrees Celsius. I’ll walk around my farm and enjoy the sounds of birds, cattle, dogs, my footsteps swishing through the grass.

Today, I’ll spare a thought, a prayer, a tear of sorrow and a heartfelt hope for strength, endurance, and a great deal of old fashioned luck, for all those riding out the fury of Larry and the cyclone that’s following close behind him.