I’ve lived through earthquakes, college finals, soul-crushing food poisoning, respiratory infections, asthma attacks, torrential thunder storms, turbulence on airplanes, severe drunken blackouts, the wrath of an angry woman and even the blighted drive from San Jose to Santa Cruz on Highway 17—but, until I came to Korea, I had never survived a typhoon…and, since I’m still writing this blog, I clearly survived typhoon Kompasu and can now safely add that disaster to the list of things I’ve survived.
In early September, it was starting to cool in Korea: August had been unbearably hot and humid, so I was grateful for the cooling that followed. However, one day, during a lunch break, I was sitting in a restaurant eating some buckwheat noodles when a downpour began and I, without an umbrella, was stunned. I should have expected the chance of rain with such humid weather: I’d been to the East Coast and experienced flash showers. Little did I know that this moisture in the air, evident in the sudden downpour, was a precursor to typhoon season.
In the beginning of typhoon season, I moved into my apartment (which was closer to my school and a blessing compared to the love motel). The apartment had a kitchen, a laundry room, a bathroom, and a bedroom with two huge windows. There were no curtains, so my nude yoga was put on pause, but I liked having such big windows: they opened my room up and they served as a natural alarm clock, while the alternative—no windows—was a dismal prospect. So I stayed clothed more often, opened my windows for fresh air, and September continued.
One evening in September I was drifting to sleep and suddenly I heard fierce wind outside my window. I got out of bed, opened the window, and saw my neighbors clothesline whip violently in the air. Trash and leaves danced like ghosts in the night while the wind moaned at me. I immediately closed my window, got into bed, and pulled the covers over my head. I felt like one of the little pigs threatened by a vicious enemy outside and I prayed for my house NOT to get blown down.
The next day at work I had to express my surprise at the wind to my co-workers: had anyone heard or felt that extreme wind last night—I mean, my god, I thought my windows were going to get blown in! It felt like a hurricane or something. “Well Billy, this is typhoon season…duh!” that was the response at work. “And, oh yeah, by the way, there’s a typhoon, Kompasu [Japanese for the archaic compass used to draw circles] coming up through Japan…should be here by tomorrow.” Squealing with fear, this little piggy ran all the way back to his apartment, hoping big bad Kompasu would not blow his home down.
It was pouring rain the day Kompasu arrived. I felt like one of those old ladies from Mary Poppins when I was walking home—honestly, I could have been blown away the winds were that strong. Despite the rain and developing thunder there was an eerie calm before the storm—I know it’s cliché, but it was eerily calm. I had dinner, I had electricity (the storm hadn’t blown it out,) so I figured the worst had passed and I got into bed. That’s a typhoon, I thought incredulously, a bunch of rain, some thunder, and a strong breeze? I’ve had bowel movements worse than that. I closed my eyes and pulled the blankets over me thinking that the Korean typhoon was going to pass Suwon calmly.
Always when I am sure of something though, my expectations are revealed to be unfounded: the pitter-patter of the rain turned into jack hammering, the wind howled like a big bad wolf, and it huffed, puffed, and tried it’s hardest to blow my windows in. The panes vibrated, my bathroom door quivered, and I was sure that the windows were going to explode. I was unsure of this kind of weather—this is the kind of weather that kills people, I fretted, this kind of weather swallows people up and spits them out like a chicken bone. In good Billy fashion, I imagined the most diabolical and menacing hurricane outside my window and then imagined it destroying my new home, shattering my curtain-less windows, and wrecking Suwon. Kompasu had arrived and I had severely misjudged it.
The wind persisted, the rain eventually let up though, and I rationalized that if the typhoon was going to be as bad as I was dreading than my school would have warned me. The prospect of work the next day overwhelmed my inklings to worry so I put in some earplugs (because the wind was that loud) and went to bed. I remember my last though being: well, if I’m going to die by a typhoon, might as well be relaxed because it’s unavoidable.
My apartment was still standing the next day. I prepared for work, went outside and then realized that Kompasu did have its way with Korea: In Suwon, large branches had been ripped from their trees (while there were some incidents of uprooted trees), glass windows were shattered, banners were stripped from their posts, and bits of refuse had been strewn throughout the city. In Seoul, the damage was much worse and it had halted the city’s subways. In general, the damage was severe in the countryside, and the clean up afterwards took weeks.
Now on my list of things I’ve survived is ‘typhoon’. I was scared during the typhoon, but compared to how scared I’ve been during other calamites I’ve lived through I would rank it underneath an earthquake and underneath an asthma attack—staying indoors diminishes most of the effects of a typhoon, while staying indoors doesn’t do anything for an earthquake or an asthma attack. If an earthquake is like that huge rolling boulder from Raiders of the Lost Ark and an asthma attack is like snorkeling with a straw than the typhoon, Kompasu, was like the big bad wolf that couldn’t blow my apartment building down and decided to make a mess instead.
Typhoon warning, folks? No worries: Stay inside, put some earplugs in, and wait it out.
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