There's something uncomfortably primal in how we react to pending news of a great and terrible storm when you're close by it. I've not been in anything even close to what's about to hit Queensland, but I've felt a big storm coming. Everything in the atmosphere changes. Domestic pets whine and cower. Birds flee. The sky can almost be visibly seen to wring night from day. Our senses become more acute. We become more conscious of our blood, moving rapidly about our bodies. And we wait.
As the co-founder of this site remarked to me earlier today, for the span of our lives, Cyclone Tracy has been the (in his words) "Don Bradman" of storms. Tracy claimed 71 lives and levelled Darwin. In fact, the damage wreaked by this storm etched itself onto the Australian psyche, more so even than the bombing of Darwin, which is incredible and puzzling in equal measure.
It seems like Tracy might just be about to be superseded. Lord, I hope not. But a forecast of a severe category five cyclone (as if the "five" weren't enough) is the stuff of nightmares. The damage that wind can do when its moving at over three hundred kilometres an hour is barely comprehensible. Ocean surges of up to twelve metres simply defy belief. And yet, we wait.
I don't know what's going to happen. No one knows for sure. But if you hear anyone complaining about incorrect weather reports if, God willing, Yasi doesn't turn out to be quite as bad as expected, spit in their face. Please. Anyone who thinks that such a result is anything other than miraculous is beneath contempt in moral terms, and intellectually, surely a barely functioning primate. (Seriously; try predicting the weather. There are more variables than you can count.)
For the second time in a matter of weeks, God be with the people of Queensland.
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