With all the news this week about Tropical Cyclone Nargis in the Indian Ocean, I'm struck by the lack of analysis by the geoblogosphere. Though I personally know no one in Burma, I have friends in nearby Malaysia. The 10,000 projected death toll from this tropical storm is tragic -- and entirely predictable. Tropical storms and low elevation population centers do not make a happy mix. As the human population of our planet grows, I reckon devastating events like this will occur with greater frequency, even independent of any climate-change-induced increase in frequency or intensity of the storm itself.

Typhoons, cyclones, and hurricanes are all the same thing with different names based on which oceans they happen to develop in. To help share some perspective on what one of these things feels like, I thought I would share my experiences sitting through two of them: a typhoon in the Philippines in 2001, and a hurricane in DC in 2003 (Isabel, pictured above).

I'll start with my time in the Philippines (excerpted from my complete account of the Philippine trip). I was there visiting my friend Noah (who was then in the Peace Corps on the island of Panay). As this image of Pacific Ocean typhoon tracks shows, a lot of those storms cross over the Philippine archipelago:

Some background on the excerpt you're about to read: Noah was working as an environmental volunteer on the island of Panay, southwest of Manila. I've included a couple paragraphs below on the day we arrived on Panay, and then an extensive description of weathering the storm. The storm was only half of the trouble: there were also complicated social issues in Noah's life at this time. Specifically, he had just moved into a new beachfront house ("the nipa hut") and inherited some grouchy pets and expectant neighbors from the previous owners. Also, an ex-coworker and ex-romantic interest had invited herself to stay with him, and that made for a sticky situation. Anyhow, I guess I'll just let you read all about it:

Like any third-world den of squalor, Kalibo had a petrol fume/human excrement stink to it. The town was drier than Manila, but with much more exhaust and dirt in the air. I was glad when Noah arranged a ride on top of transport bus to Pandan, his village. Riding on top of that vehicle was an experience I will never forget. At first, I was thrilled by the air, the views of paddies, and bamboo and palms. Farmers were threshing rice by hand, drying rice on the street, planting new rice behind a plow pulled by a carabou, the ox of the Philippines. As we rode, I gripped tie-lines that held in place a half-ton of luggage and supplies. These sacks and boxes were lashed to the roof of the bus, and Noah and I and five other men were clinging on top of it all. Soon a few drops of rain began to fall, and the temperature cooled noticeably. There was a gray wall of clouds ahead of us, and it looked like thunderstorms to me. Noah shouted something to me that I couldn't quite make out: it sounded like he said "typhoon." The raindrops increased in frequency and decreased in temperature. I put on a pair of sunglasses to protect eyes, in spite of my giddy desire to see as much as possible.

Two days before I had been back in America, packing up my classroom, getting coffee with my girlfriend, and now I was here. Surreal, I thought, gripping the wet guy-lines, atop a bus, hurtling down a mud road on a minor island in the Philippines, rain lashing my face. We rigged up a tarp to protect us from the cold rain, and in the lee of its shelter, we made it comfortably to Pandan.

...

That was the day that the typhoon started.

The "persistent breeze" that had been blowing from the southwest intensified through the course of the day. It was a sort of wind that we do not ever experience in North America. This typhoon wind was steady and constant, not gusty. It just continued to blow and blow and blow, hitting the beach at Pandan head-on; the shoreline perpendicular to the main force of the wind.

The rain came in mid-afternoon, joining the wind by degrees, until at sunset, the two were one: an unvarying horizontal threshing of droplets. The palm trees were all bent back, giant fronds splayed towards the northeast, like spiky-haired tykes squinting into a powerful hair drier.

Just 8 degrees north of the Equator, the sun sets early in the Philippines. Or rather, it sets "early" to my summer North American perspective. Bear in mind, I had come from DC, where the sky stays light in summer until almost 10pm. Here there is less variety; year-round, the sunset comes between 6 and 7pm. While the day began with a spectacular sunset as I swam in the ocean and heard Noah recount his traumatic evening, it ended with a dull fade-out. The lashing rain diluted any view of the sky or the horizon that we might have had. It just changed from light gray, to dark gray, to darkness.

I sat in the nipa hut in the darkness, thankful for the electric light that allowed me to stay up writing and musing on this new storm. The same wind that had been blowing all day was still blowing. The same rain that has been falling all day was still falling. Steps on the bamboo deck outside shook the house, and the door opened in a splatter of droplets. Noah had returned from town, and he yanked back the hood of his Gore-tex jacket, revealing a large wet grin. "It's officially a typhoon," he told me. "The whole town is talking about it."

There is a mesh windscreen in front of Noah's house, but the wind and water come through it with ease, and the beach-front side of the nipa hut was already sodden. The back of the house, facing inland, towards town and the mountains, is in the lee of the wind. I was surprised to find it was completely dry there, and even for several feet extending back, in the "wind-shadow" of the house. This evidence convinced me that the wind really had not changed direction all day. I was reminded of the act of spray-painting a textured object, where shadows of unpainted areas extend beyond any raised obstacles, fading at their edges into the exposed areas.

In the nipa hut, we had moved into fortress mode. All the windows facing the beach and the force of the typhoon had been shut, resulting in a greater than usual sense of darkness in the house. We had a few windows open on the leeward side of the house, thankfully, admitting light and fresh air. There was a constant "white noise" roar outside the walls: the sound of furious but constant wind tearing through the coconut fronds.

It had been an odd day. We three (Noah, his ex-paramour Zita, and I) had spent pretty much the entire day at the house. In fact, Zita had not left at all, not beyond the porch. The unceasing rain coupled with Noah's urge to "nest" as a new homeowner kept us on the property. I took the opportunity to do some reading. I read through Pico Iyer's perspective on the Philippines in an essay included in Video Night in Katmandu, and an ecological history of these islands titled Plundering Paradise.

Noah and I walked into town in mid-afternoon when we were both getting a little stir crazy. Also, we needed to talk out of earshot of Zita. [She wanted some nookie from Noah, but he wasn't interested!] We bought some hardware and some random fruits from the market. When we got back to the house, we sampled guava, mango, avocado, breadfruit, and santol: a nice filling little frugivorous feast. But out on the road, hunched under our Gore-Tex hoods, we discussed the situation back at the house.

Zita was being a sullen sloth. It was incredible to see how starkly her personality imploded. I compared last night's devil-may-care rash party animal with today's sleeping grouch. All day she had been laying around sleeping in the dark house. ...I was sure that Noah's rejection of her advances led to her sour mood. When she was not asleep, she wrote silently and fiercely in a small journal.

She was not speaking much to me, and only marginally more to Noah. He had been polite to her all day, but kept taking every opportunity to try and convince her to leave. Cultural conflict was swollen in this situation: it's the Filipino way to host a guest as long as they wish to stay, but it's obvious to me that the situation was tense in this small little house with such foul weather outside, and her taking up all this space and energy by hanging around. Both Noah and I wanted to be rid of her. The longer she stayed there, slumbering in the middle of the room where Noah and I were trying to get things done, the more frustrated we became. She was dampening the mood, and making me nervous: I had seen the energy she was capable of the previous evening, and now I was seeing the sullen grade of her fury. Would she lash out? Would she burn down the house? My God, what to think? How to get her to leave, culturally sensitive or not? She didn't even wake up to eat the dinner that Noah and I made: banana shoots and squash in coconut milk curry.

Noah asked me to sleep in the same room as them that evening as a deterrent, which I did. Roaring of wind and rain when I fell asleep, roaring of wind and rain when I woke up.

Day Two of the typhoon was a lot like Day One. The storm raged through the night, and continued unabated. In fact, it intensified in strength, though the unidirectional wind remained unaltered. The electricity had died during the night, some wire blown down somewhere on the island, wherever it came from. I had seen the haphazard wires in the trees, and I guessed that we wouldn't have power for a while. I was right. Stepping out onto the deck, I was shocked.

The ocean had come up almost to the house! A furious whipping surf stretched from a few meters away, to a distance of about two hundred meters offshore. It was an incredible sight, and I thought first of running. But, as I stood there observing, I realized that it was holding steady, at least in terms of the reach of the waves. The whitewater was solid, a strip of froth as wide as an interstate freeway, running up and down the shore as far as the eye could see. The eye, incidentally, could not see all that far: the raindrops were thick in the air, and all images faded to gray before they were a quarter-mile distant.

Slack-jawed and breathing hard, I stared at this raging ocean. I was squinting, of course, since the wind and rain were coming straight in at the house. And it was loud: the constant roar of wind and waves had not faded nor paused for a full day. The beach was but a sliver. As I watched, a strong wave breached the storm-shield mesh screen. My eyes popped: I had never seen a storm like this before, never seen the sea so churned up.

I worried about the integrity of Noah's house: obviously the thin bamboo structure would quickly disintegrate under a pounding from these waves. The question was: would the waves actually reach the house? Another one washed up past the netting and coconut fronds of the storm shield, curling white foam like a tentacle around one of the porch supports.

Across the way, one of Noah's neighbors was wearing a green "hard-hat" helmet as he readied his homestead for the onslaught of weather. I guessed that this was to protect his head from stray coconuts that might be dislodged from above by the winds. He and his sons were pulling in one of their large V-shaped fish traps, trying to get it out of the greedy reach of the waves.

I go back to the nipa hut, where I find Noah on the porch, and he says to me, Whoa.

We go inside to make some coffee. Zita is (of course) still asleep. I see that the cat has returned from its hermitage hideout (wherever that may be), and has snuggled up next to Zita. Perfect, I think, they deserve each other.

I'm really glad that Noah is as much an aficionado of coffee as I am. We use his French press and some coffee beans from the southern Philippine island of Mindanao. We can't sit outside because the rain has again started in earnest. We aren't comfortable in the main room, because Zita is still sleeping in there. So we end up standing in the kitchen, which is actually about the size of a closet. There is enough room for two men to stand there, but a third would be too much. We stare with eyes that are at once revelatory of the stress of Zita's presence, of the ocean that threatens to engulf the house, and our cramped quarters while drinking our morning coffee. Our eyes reveal fear and frustration at the predicament. We stare, then laugh. Pure comedy.

As the day goes by, I adopt a Zita-like strategy of staying indoors as much as possible. However, I start feeling tinges of cabin fever. I watch Noah cope with the stress.

He tried to coax the other abandoned pet into the house for some food. This was Maggie, the dog foisted off on Noah by [the previous owners] when they left. Maggie hates Noah. He was bitten twice by the dog: once on each hand. The dog was freaked out, unhappy, abandoned and well aware of it.

As Noah was pouring Betadine into his cuts, his neighbor Linda came over. She apparently had a good relationship with the former residents, and accepted some pay to do their laundry for them. She didn't waste any time asking Noah if she could borrow money. He had to turn her down.

I can tell by Noah's lip-smacking mannerisms that he is perturbed. He has a lot to cope with at the moment: the storm, the mooching neighbor Linda, Zita intruding on his home territory, the new house itself, work, and even my own presence as a guest and therefore as added responsibility. He remains calm, but he is not his usually exemplar of happy ebullience. This reminds me of my own Peace Corps experiences in Mongolia: attempting to deal with ten issues at once. It is taxing.

I step outside during one of the drier lulls in the storm. The wind never quits, but sometimes it carries more water with it, sometimes less. There is an immense pile of coconut husks, bamboo, fronds, and colorful trash piled up next to Noah's house: pushed there by the largest waves. Indeed, as I watch, another one washes up past the fence, into the yard, and under the porch.

During an especially strong gust earlier in the day, one of the four main supports for the storm-shield had cracked, and slumped against the house. The mesh slumped and whipped in small rivulets as the wind pummeled it endlessly. The bamboo that had cracked was a good five inches in diameter, substantial and strong. I was thankful for the presence of the storm-shield; I supposed that had it not been there, that damage would have fallen to the house itself.

Among the deposited flotsam, I saw a large pufferfish. It is dead, a big flabby bag-like fish, with an immense clean white beak, like a parrot's. I beckoned Noah outside to investigate with me. He picked it up: a heavy sodden corpse, with scaly jowls shaking. We used the bizarre creature as a prop for some photographs, excited by this minor event in our otherwise boring day spent indoors. Noah, taken with a halfbaked inspiration, took the fish over to the neighbors who earlier had solicited him for a loan. They refused, claiming it poisonous. Ah yes, so this was fugu, the species that the Japanese prepare to eat. Specially licensed chefs prepare the fugu, avoiding the toxic glands. Invariably each year a few meals are botched, and a few Japanese gourmands end up on the floor of the restaurant dying, twitching as the neurotoxins take hold. We toss the dead fish back into the surf. We (ahem) do not have to walk far for this task.

Somehow, the weird fish brought back our sense of humor for a while. It felt good to be outside, away from grouchy Zita, in the fresh air, stretching our legs.

We joked and laughed and squinted into the wind. Then the rain started pelting again, and we yelped and ran for cover.

Back inside, Noah gleaned some facts from the radio: it's a Signal One typhoon, the mildest incarnation of the five-part scale. I could imagine a storm being worse than this, I guess, but my imagination stops at Signal Three. What a Signal Five typhoon would be like, I have no earthly clue. It must be horrendous, and must strip the islands clean of anything on them. Despite the low classification, the winds in excess of 150 k.p.h. have earned this storm the classification of "supertyphoon." Also, there are the first reports of casualties: two men from Pandan died when their fishing boat capsized several miles out. The radio also reminded us that today is July 4th, American Independence Day. No fireworks for us tonight.

Cabin fever had set in full by the end of the second day. 48 hours is a long time to spend in a bamboo cabin with your friend, a sleeping dog, a piss-ant cat, and a woman scorned. I tried to relieve my inner tension by doing push-ups in the storage room. It helped for a while. The electricity was still out, and the routine of sitting, reading, writing, talking, eating, and sleeping had begun to chafe.

In the late afternoon, the rain eased again, and I elected to take a walk. Noah had taken a break from his efforts at attempting to indirectly convince Zita to leave, and had gone to a meeting; Zita herself was writing in her sullen notebook. I donned my raincoat and whistled up Pawikan the dog. The gate to Noah's yard had been sealed shut by the accumulation of wave-borne debris outside, so we had to squeeze through to exit. Off on a stroll through the typhoon!

The sea had receded a bit, and the beach was again revealed to us to walk on. The sand was dark and firm, the mountains obscured by the gray mist and clouds. As they had been for days, all the coconut palms and nipa fronds along the beach were bent inland, as winds continued to blast in unceasing from the south. But precipitation was light, and Pawikan and I enjoyed the stroll west along the coast of Pandan Bay.

There were some terns with forked tails in the air above the waves. How these birds were managing to fly in this wind was beyond my comprehension: I could only just manage to walk!

We reached a gravel bar where a river flowed into the bay. Huge clots of vegetation were bobbing down the swollen river, more mast for the re-depositing powers of the sea. I threw a stick for Pawikan, but he showed no interest. We turned around and began to meander back.

Almost immediately, a new squall blew in. I was pelted with horizontal rain that stung my skin like gravel pellets. I was exceptionally thankful I had my raincoat with me, and I pulled the hood sideways over the right side of my face. I began running, and Pawikan needed no further cue. The dog ran much faster than I was able to go, and periodically he hid behind palm trunks and clusters of nipa. When I caught up to his position, he would sprint for the next shelter. Shelter doesn't mean having a roof above your head, at least not here: it means having an object between you and the sea! The equation for the Philippines is: Horizontal rain = horizontal shelter.

I got back to the house feeling really good, exhilarated by my small adventure. I took an extended shower and dried off and felt clean and exercised and contented. An evening cadre of guests gathered in Noah’s house: Boy, Zita, neighbor Linda, Bimbot the veterinarian, Noah himself, me, and the wet Pawikan, who was enjoying a scratch from his owner. The grayness outside faded to black, and another day had ended. Still the storm continued; I was exasperated: this was so unlike the summer afternoon thunderstorms that I have been used to in DC and Virginia.

At some point, Noah and Zita talked and reconciled their silent conflict. We bought some San Miguel and stayed up a while, listening to the BBC. Zita had cheered up, and again I was shocked to see the 180-degree change in her personality. She was again an extrovert, calling the beer by nicknames like "SMB" and "Vitamin B1." We had a good time together, the three of us, more relaxed than in days. The storm reflected the change, and though it could only be described as "a dark and stormy night," the roar has abated from freight train to mere Mack truck.

Like a fever, on the third day the typhoon broke. I went out to the beach at dawn, and found myself one among many. Up and down the beach, people were out surveying the damage. One woman was scavenging through the detritus. For my part, bolstered by strong coffee, I surveyed the shore. The ocean certainly looked calmer than it had the previous day. The breakers were still a mass of froth, but less of it than before. The waves still reached high on the beach, but not as high: there were four meters of "breathing room" between the edge of the ocean and Noah's house.

For breakfast, we walked into town. One of the vendors at the market sells bananas fried in coconut oil. They are warm and sweet, crispy and pasty. The bananas are served on a sliver of bamboo, like a Popsicle stick. They had become my new favorite snack. We also bought some rolls and pastries from the bakery. As we wander around eating, we see the first scraps of blue sky above. Good news; I loosen the collar of my jacket. On the way back to the house, we walked along the beach, dodging waves. A lesser frigatebird hung in the air above the trees.

Labels: asia, hurricanes, travel