My house has developed a new habit. It whistles while it works.
To
be clear, a house’s job is not particularly difficult; it just needs to stand
there and stay in one piece. Yesterday, when confronted by heavy gusts of wind,
it whistled at the back door, rattled at the front, and huffed all around. But
my house, thankfully, did its job.
The
fact is, the entirety of Western Montana suffered through a raucous day of high
winds. Locally, the winds were dangerous enough that schools shut down as a
safety measure.
Trees
were knocked down throughout the valley and in the mountains all around us.
Power outages covered vast swathes of the region. Big trucks were tipped over
on the highways. In some areas, wind gusts approached 100 mph.
In
an update posted to social media mid-morning, the National Weather Service’s
Missoula office reported that gusts had clocked in between 59 and 73 mph in
Butte, Plains, Missoula, and Kalispell. The outlier on that list was a 96-mph
gust at Mount Aeneas in the Flathead National Forest.
Scary
stuff. Still, there’s something reassuring about a house that can sigh and
whistle its way through such violence. Hopefully, your house managed the same.
—Mitchell
Hegman
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