Why I’m a feminist: Part 1

In the wake of the Harvey Weinstein scandal in Hollywood, the hashtag #metoo has been trending on Facebook and Twitter.  Some people are surprised that so many women have experienced sexual harassment or assault, because when you look around today, it’s affected basically everybody.  It’s so prevalent that it’s somehow normalized.  It’s an uncomfortable topic (I inadvertently keep using “it” because I’m grasping at straws for language I can use comfortably), but we need to have the conversation as a culture.  It is unacceptable that many women are made to feel unsafe in everyday situations, just because of men who lack respect or self-control or both. While my voice is not the most articulate about women’s issues (ugh, I hate that these are termed “women’s issues” because they should matter to everyone…besides, the issues are most often with the men), I hope that sharing my story through my small platform can help foster some empathy.

You see, a few years ago I didn’t really understand the fuss about “rape culture” either.  My sexual education was a mixture of abstinence and verbal consent, both courses of action that respect a woman’s personal space and her right to reject you.  In high school through grad school, the “locker room talk” rarely went into practice outside the locker room: the few times that it did, the guys intervened, making it clear that the behavior was uncool and unacceptable.  My classmates at Rice and Vanderbilt were generally respectful, and the extent of sexual misconduct within my circles was limited to ill-advised, unwelcome flirting. Sure the pressure for sex existed, but never with any of the reckless desperation evident in high-profile collegiate rape/assault cases. I understand that this is not everyone’s experience, as many men my age are not socially engendered with the same respect for women. Nevertheless, treating women with common decency is NOT equivalent to upholding feminist ideals, not even close. It took a compromising situation for me to begin to properly empathize.

About a year ago, a colleague and I met for lunch to discuss our work in meteorology. We had connected at the Tornado Summit in Oklahoma City, and he expressed interest in my tornado prediction project back when it was just an idea. He had worked as the meteorologist behind the scenes at a TV station for several years, then recently began as the operations meteorologist for the city emergency management team. The lunch conversation was very interesting and enjoyable, he even offered to pay for my meal (kind gesture, or red flag?). Then he invited me to tour the city’s emergency management facility, which was simply fascinating: during emergencies, up to 500 police, firemen, EMTs, dispatchers, and support staff pile into a Cold War-era, underground concrete bunker to coordinate response operations. Today it was nearly empty. He gave me a detailed tutorial to the radar and profiling software that he uses to track storms, further inviting me to come in on tornado risk days to watch radar. Somewhere behind the facility, he led me through garages that housed armored emergency response vehicles. As part of the tour, he led me through a doorway at the back of one of the garages.

He slammed the door behind me: we were in a large, dimly-lit storage closet. He stood in front of the door and stammered, “I…I’ve been wanting to ask: are you gay?” Taken aback, I replied with a short “no.” He pressed. “So, you’re 100% straight? Are you sure?”  Quite uncomfortable, I said, “…yyyes.” He explained that he had ‘felt something, like a special connection’ between us when we met at the conference, and that he found me attractive.  He paused and took a step forward; I was stock still, mind racing. Emboldened by my lack of a reaction, he asked, “If you don’t mind, could you take off your shirt?” I took a couple steps back as I said “no” pretty emphatically. He continued stepping toward me, again pressing, “Come on, it’s nothing! I just want to see…” I was edging around the back corner of the room as I responded, “I’m sure you’ve already seen it before, on Facebook.” He looked down, briefly, then regathered. “You seem like a very fit guy…what do you do to work out?” I deflected, saying that I don’t work out regularly, then somehow changed the subject for long enough to ease over to the door and walk out within the flow of forced conversation.

Looking back, I am extremely lucky. Blessed by my 6’2” (and evidently fit-looking) frame, he did not attempt to overpower me. If I were a woman or child, the outcome could have been way worse than (relatively mild) sexual harassment. If I had called out, there is no way that anyone would have heard me and come to my rescue. For a large number of sexual assault and rape cases, it’s the victim’s word against the attacker’s in court…it’s very easy to see this scenario playing out the same way. I understand why many women actively avoid one-on-one meetings with male coworkers/bosses, why many women feel uncomfortable walking alone at night (or even during the day), why many women try to schedule first dates in public places, carry pepper spray and take self-defense classes, go to the bathroom in groups, the list goes on…a subset of predators in our society have made these precautions necessary. My story is inconsequential on its own – my psychological recovery was quick (a matter of days or weeks) and there were no legal ramifications – but knowing that my experience is one of many millions is unsettling. Sad as it is to hear people’s experiences, I’m encouraged that the #metoo campaign has put this issue squarely in the spotlight. Now we need a cultural response.

 

A year in the rearview

1 year, 24 states, 15,000 miles.

I’ve crisscrossed the Midwest, sojourned into the South, and wound through Appalachia. I’ve met with many experts in severe storm meteorology. I’ve surveyed tornado paths and assisted with debris cleanup. I’ve reconnected with family and friends. It’s been every bit as exploratory as purposeful, however, as the long hours alone behind the wheel have afforded me ample opportunities to think, to observe. Out my windshield I watch for subtle climate differences, terrain shifts, wind and cloud patterns, local pockets of cultural identity. While I can’t cram the whole journey into a single blog entry, here are the highlights:

I left Oklahoma City last October for Missouri, stopping in Joplin on my way to Springfield.  In Springfield, I helped my friend Russel Gehrke with rebuilding the engine for the Tornado Puncher, an armored vehicle for storm research. Together with his family and a few friends, we went to the Kansas renaissance festival near Kansas City. Then Russel and I went to the St. Louis area to check out an ice cream factory that was looking into innovative recycling processes for their waste streams. After St. Louis, I made a weekend visit to my buddy Clayton in Chicago just as the Cubs kicked off the NLCS with a city-energizing win. I continued to Ann Arbor via the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan, and the whole drive was lined with yellows and oranges at the peak of fall. While visiting my friend Will, I experienced some of Michigan’s best: gameday in Ann Arbor, fresh Macintosh apples at a cider mill, and the Ford factory and museum in Detroit.

What does any of this have to do with my research on tornadoes? The next week, I scheduled 3 days’ worth of visits with academics and other experts on tornado meteorology. I drove across Ohio and Indiana to get to Purdue, where I met with 5 professors who shared insights and advice about my nascent project. I then drove to the University of Illinois, where I connected with a future collaborator in GIS expert Olivia Kellner. I stayed with old friends who had volunteered with me in Joplin in 2012, enjoying a cookout and game night in Lebanon, IN. Then I met with meteorologists at NWS Indianapolis and grabbed lunch with a friend in Louisville on my way to Nashville. From Nashville, I flew to Portland, OR to attend a planning seminar for VORTEX-SE severe storm field research and attended the first day of the Severe Local Storms conference. Here I connected with many researchers from all over the country, many of whom were open to exchanging data and offering guidance for my research. While I missed the historic victory parade in Chicago, those events were a nice consolation prize.

I hit my stride on the research over the winter, when I was bouncing back and forth between Oklahoma City and Springfield. It was nice to spend Thanksgiving and Christmas at home, in recent years I’ve often missed one or the other (after all, I hadn’t spent a full month at home since the summer of 2011). Being home for an extended time also meant fun activities with family: several hikes in the Wichita Mtns., Thunder games, a beer dinner, game nights, and more. I popped up to Springfield a couple of times to design the ice cream waste digestion process and to help with the Puncher, which culminated in our first car show in Branson in late February.

Tornado season started early in 2017: the deep south experienced several destructive storms in January and February, then the last day of February brought a severe outbreak to Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana. I picked up a chainsaw and headed to Perryville, Missouri, where I spent a weekend cutting and hauling debris from the path of an EF4 tornado. There I met the Cook family, who took me in for two nights and shared their passions for music and service and God. I spent the better part of March and April in Nashville, close enough to drive down for any VORTEX-SE field research in northern Alabama (but, of course, AL had no significant tornadoes while MS and GA were smattered this spring). I made weekend trips to New Orleans, Savannah, and Asheville, stopping to see recent tornado paths in the New Orleans area, Hattiesburg MS, and rural Georgia (in fact, I saw my first descending funnel cloud by accident from I-16…proof that you don’t have to chase in order to see tornadoes). I surveyed more tornado paths in Indiana and Illinois on my way to Champaign-Urbana, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Madison, where I met with a premier expert in tornado simulation at the University of Wisconsin.

The summer presented me many opportunities to reconnect with family. On my drive back toward MO/OK, I stopped for a nice visit with my great-uncle Sid at an assisted living center in Decatur, IL. A couple of weeks with family, in which I helped Lauren move back home. Then we met up in Florida for a family reunion cruise! It was a ton of fun with extended family, many of whom I hadn’t seen since I was a young kid. I extended my vacation in Florida with a trip to Miami, Cape Canaveral, Animal Kingdom and Disney World. The day after I returned to Oklahoma, I turned around and drove Lauren’s moving truck 3 days to Delaware. I lingered for a couple weeks in Delaware and Maryland, visiting friends in D.C. and meeting a professor at WVU who also simulates tornadoes. I flew to Houston for a good friend’s wedding, which ended up being essentially a Rice reunion. A few weeks of work in Oklahoma and Missouri, then I headed to Nashville to view the total eclipse, a perfect exclamation point to an exciting summer.

Sorry for the laundry list, but a few of you were curious where my travels have taken me. I plan to elaborate on several of these stops in future posts, as the experiences are worth sharing in detail. There’s a chance that I travel even more next spring: I applied for a grant that would enable field research into topography effects on tornadic storms, basically 3 months of following the severe weather around the country. I’ve truly enjoyed the last year’s experience, but I understand that my work will eventually take root and tie me to one location sooner or later. Not that the work is unsustainable (low income is offset by low expenses, so I could continue this lifestyle for at least another year), but traveling so much certainly presents challenges, especially when it comes to working with others. We’ll see what happens…for now, traveling has enabled me to meet people in my new field and to reconnect with friends and family, which has made this solo venture a lot less lonely. Anyway, I need to pack: wouldn’t you know, I’m heading to Connecticut this afternoon!