Nature's Vagaries

Mother Nature took a deep breath Monday and let it out all along the East End bays, sparing the oceanfront for a change but filling ponds to the brim, flooding low-lying basements, and dealing yet another blow to the spirits of a rain and wind-weary population, a population that had been fooled by last weekend's marvelous weather into thinking that spring had come.

Instead, another northeaster arrived. They come weekly now, or so it seems: howling gales accompanied by sheets of rain no one could possibly feel like singing in. This week's 50-mile-an-hour gusts came at the worst possible time for a North Haven house that had caught fire early Tuesday, whipping the blaze into an inferno that defied the best efforts of firefighters.

It was raining heavily two weeks ago, too, the night a house in Northwest Woods, brand-new and never lived in, was destroyed by flames. That followed the erosion from a northeaster three weeks ago that toppled a Sagaponack residence into the ocean and undermined several of its neighbors so severely as to create a minor boom in the house-moving trade.

Even as Monday's storm was battering the South Fork, a mass of tornadoes, again driven by El Nino rains, whirled in from the Gulf of Mexico and plowed across Central Florida, killing at least 38 people, with 11 more reported missing.

It was the deadliest round of tornadoes in Florida since the National Weather Service began keeping detailed records 50 years ago. The devastation is said to equal that of a high-category hurricane. There are those who say a hurricane would, in fact, have been preferable, because it announces itself well in advance while tornadoes are almost never predictable. Maybe.

Meanwhile, winter is far from over. What will next week bring? We know at least one fellow who's hoping for nothing worse than a blizzard.