Natural Disaster Read online

  “If you don’t want to get married, you don’t have to.”

  I froze. It was like she’d thrown a rock and hit my head with that one sentence. I felt light-headed, and not just from hunger. This woman, who had been through a war and traveled to America to start her life over with nothing but a trunk and a few words of English scribbled on a piece of paper, had always been a voice that demanded my attention and respect. And here she was, offering me permission to say no. Past the etiquette deadline. Past the time when any of my guests could get their tickets refunded or cancel their bridesmaids’ dresses (although in my opinion they were a vibrant shade of green that could have easily been transformed into a lovely summer tablecloth down the road). Past the conversation where I’d agreed with Joe that my USPS raid at dawn had been nothing but normal wedding jitters. But most of all, she was giving me the gift of seeing that it was okay to listen to the voice in my head that I couldn’t allow to be heard.

  In retrospect, that is the essence of my depression. I often knew when something I was doing was wrong, but I rarely had the confidence to make the difficult choices—always avoiding confrontation and allowing the hurt and pain to stay inside me. It sounds like you’re being protective of others, but in truth it’s a cowardly way of living, avoiding difficult communication so you can get where you want to be. In this case the gravity of my decision would have legal implications and it is one of the first times I let the right voice override the invertebrate that typically resided in my body.

  My mom joined us and supported my decision wholeheartedly. If I’d had the strength and hadn’t been barely surviving on war rations, I would have skipped through the fields. But I needed whatever strength I had left to face Joe with the truth and to stick to it.

  I don’t know if I blocked it out, but I honestly don’t really remember the details of how I finally ended it with Joe. I do remember that this time Joe knew I was serious, and he was devastated. I knew that he really loved me, that he accepted my crazy unconditionally. I wondered why that wasn’t enough, but I did not waver. There was no turning back. He pleaded with me to go to counseling and postpone the wedding until I was ready. The yes-girl inside me who people pleases as naturally as she breathes entertained that idea for a moment. It would be so easy. Just forget about my needs and my instincts and marry this guy. Luckily, the woman my Oma recognized in the fields put her foot down and said, No. I can’t marry you. If it’s not right now, it won’t be right later.

  I enlisted support so I would remain firm in my decision. My mother and my Oma had my back, as did my stepfather, my dad, and my brother, and as each day passed (and I began to up my calorie intake), I grew a little bit more confident in my decision and prouder of myself for making it. I was telling the truth. My truth. Even though I owned a house and had a real job, canceling my wedding was the first decision of my relatively young life that made me feel like a grown-up. And even though it took me two tries, I was finally making a very difficult decision that would ultimately and undoubtedly save both Joe and me a lot of misery down the road. I knew I was jumping into the unknown, away from the life I thought I was supposed to have, and somehow I just knew that it would all be okay.

  My mother loves to tell the story of how, when I was eighteen months old, I stood at the top of the stairs, looked her straight in the eye, and jumped. I can only imagine the fear, wondering how she would survive the next eighteen or so years with me as her daughter. And whatever she thought the future might hold, she probably wasn’t far off. I was the high school cheerleader who thought the top of the pyramid was the only worthwhile spot (although I was almost always a base because of my weight and height, and ironically needed more stitches than the cheerleader at top).

  In college, I started storm chasing, definitely not a mother’s dream for her daughter. And now, I’m a meteorologist, a job that certainly does not require being a daredevil, but that’s the part I love the most and have fought to work into my career. In fact, if I’m not taking risks I’m miserable. Even when I’m on television just talking, I don’t use a script; it’s all ad-libbed, and I am rarely scared in any of the adventures I take on.

  In the end, my non-wedding became an impromptu family reunion with double the champagne and cherry-jam party favors. It felt odd to be partying at all given the heartache I had caused and the heartache I was feeling, but you could say we were all celebrating how Ginger finally learned to say no.

  It turned out there was another quite unexpected reason to celebrate. The day before my non-wedding, I got a call from the news director at WMAQ in Chicago that the weekend meteorologist job I’d interviewed for months ago was mine. It was a network affiliate in a major market, and I was over the moon. I would be leaving behind the reporting job and the memories of Joe and starting a brand-new adventure. I felt like I’d jumped and landed more than safely. I felt like I’d finally landed in my life.

  There are really only two places to watch the beautiful formation of a growing thunderstorm: the vast open fields of the Midwest plains, and over any large body of water. It was Lake Michigan where I first fell in love with the weather. The course of my life was set at age nine. I consider myself very lucky that I found my passion so early, and also that my parents got divorced.

  I know that sounds crass and completely random, but it’s not. I really don’t believe I would have found my passion as early or as intensely had my parents stayed married. Because if they hadn’t gotten divorced, my mom would not have been (briefly) engaged to a man whose cottage on Lake Michigan sparked my enthusiasm for the weather.

  My dad wasn’t a big fan of the guy and nicknamed him “Dickhead,” which my brother Sean and I thought was hysterical. My dad allowed Sean and me, five and eight at the time, to call him Dickhead, and that was just about as much fun as watching Beavis and Butt-Head or In Living Color (which was also allowed only by my dad). My dad is a handsome, hardworking, quiet guy who emigrated with his parents from Holland when he was six years old. Almost immediately, my oma and opa moved to Western Michigan, where thousands of other Dutch folks had settled. He grew up loving sports. Reading wasn’t easy since English was his second language. Still, he graduated college with a degree in geology and started traveling with his high school buddy to see more of the United States. They basically worked to ski and enjoy life, though on one of their many stops they briefly worked for a tennis-court contractor in California. And with that entrepreneurial streak so common in immigrants, he and his buddy took that skill back to Western Michigan. While they were plotting the start of what would be a successful thirty-plus-year business building tennis courts, my dad was making money as a gas station attendant. One fateful day, he pumped my mom’s gas. I know, that sounds so double entendre-ish and cheesy, but it’s true. My mom, a beauty from Long Island, New York, had moved to Michigan for the diving and swimming team at Michigan State University. She had studied nursing and was currently teaching in Western Michigan, and she needed her tank filled.

  They dated for a year and then broke up. During that break my mom realized she was pregnant. They really weren’t together together, but my mom showed up to my dad’s softball game and said, “I need to talk to you. I’m pregnant.” And my dad hit a home run. Or so the story goes. They married in Grand Rapids, and my mom still tries to say you can’t see me in her wedding dress. You totally can. The Empire waist gives this almost-bastard child away immediately. Before I was born, they moved to California so my mom could get another master’s degree. (My mom loves school.) Eventually we moved back to Western Michigan, they had my brother Sean, my dad worked hard, my mom worked hard, and they just did not work together. And so they divorced. Enter Dickhead.

  Dickhead had a cottage on Lake Michigan. Like, on Lake Michigan. It was one of those pricey joints we had never even visited, and for Sean and me, the house almost made up for the guy being such a jerk. Well, we might not have known the full extent of his jerkiness quite yet, but in my dad’s eyes, he was the first guy my mom dated
after they broke up, so that was jerky enough. He would graduate to magna cum laude jerk soon, though. The lake house Dickhead owned was a huge gray modern design that opened up to a deck where it felt like you could see forever. A perfect heath covered in tall grass spilled up to a wide-open beach that was all our own. I remember countless afternoons when the storms would start gathering on the lake. We would hear my mom start freaking out. (She always loses her mind in storms, which is pretty ironic given that she gave birth to me. Her threshold for a freak-out is about a twenty-mile-per-hour gust, and then she yells “Everyone down in the basement!” at the top of her lungs.) I loved watching the base of those thunderstorms, the billowing tops of the cumulonimbus, the lightning that effortlessly lit up the lake and sky. It was gorgeous, so energetic. I was in love.

  Before we ran inside, I would wash my feet as fast as I could in the outdoor shower. I wanted to get up and watch the storm coverage on television with my mom. Were these storms dangerous? What would they do to us? Why was my mom acting this way? I watched the meteorologists on my local station showing us the warnings. It was so fascinating to me that those meteorologists became my idols. I was like a kid from Cleveland who wanted to grow up to be LeBron James. These scientists on television inspired me to be a meteorologist from an early age, but I never thought I would be on television. Actually, very few meteorologists are on television. Most meteorologists work either for other private companies (think insurance, trucking, and shipping) or the government.

  The rest of that summer played out with many more storms and culminated in a true disaster. Dickhead left my mom six days before their wedding. Now, my mom is one of the most passionate women I know: strong and bulldog-ish when you need her to be, scary at times because of her intensity, but soft and fragile, too. My mother is the ultimate caregiver, but when she reaches her limit and doesn’t feel people respect her or value her efforts, look the F out. I’ve seen my mom fly off the handle and cry more times than I care to remember. But this time was different. I woke up to the sound of deep, guttural cries. My aunts and grandma were there consoling her. At nine years old, I didn’t understand exactly what was going on, but I do think I started to feel better about calling him Dickhead.

  Dickhead had gone to my dad’s house and asked my dad to take my mom back. He said he couldn’t handle us all. He gave up on her, and us, days before we were supposed to become a family.

  My mom was understandably devastated and embarrassed. Ironically, much like my non-wedding years later, we still had a party with all the goods that were meant to be at the end of the aisle for my mom and Dickhead. Our family gathered to celebrate being together. It was a family reunion in place of the union that was supposed to take place. What a mess, but a beautiful mess. That’s really the point of this story: while my mom was and always will be a diva of disarray, through perseverance and good-heartedness, she’s been able to come out of everything with the most beautiful life. She has four great children and a twenty-five-plus-year marriage that’s going strong, all of which came from her ability to say yes and allow life to happen in good and bad times. I know which side I get most of my natural-disaster traits from (hers), and this is also one of the first points in life where I remember finding some pride in it, too.

  Oh, and to you, Dickhead, if for any reason you or anyone related to you is reading this, I want to say thank you. I am so grateful you didn’t marry my mom, because that meant we got my stepdad, Carl, who is the antithesis of a dickhead—and I still fell in love with weather on your beach and got to follow this unbelievable path. With maturity and a failed engagement of my own, I commend you for making the best choice for everyone, albeit a difficult one.

  Throughout school, science and math came most easily to me. Since that summer on Lake Michigan, I had it in the back of my head that I wanted to be a meteorologist, but at first, I fought it. It seemed so far-fetched.

  In my senior year of high school, I took a class called TV Studio, which was taught by a former television reporter named Colleen Pierson. She was an encouraging, sweet woman who embodied a 1990s reporter/anchor with her bright pantsuits and even brighter coordinating lipstick. Colleen gave me a fateful push by suggesting I should try TV weather forecasting as a career. At the time, it seemed ridiculous, and I dismissed it. But I stayed focused on meteorology.

  I chose my college, Valparaiso University, not only because I could get a bachelor of science in meteorology, but because they actually had a class called Storm Chasing. I had seen the movie Twister when I was in high school, and the dramatic storm-chasing scenes in the movie struck a chord somewhere deep inside of me. If I could figure out a way to do that when I grew up, I would be happy. But I didn’t just want to chase the tornado for the adventure; I wanted to gather the data like Helen Hunt’s character did, dissecting the atmosphere and making the calls. That was enticing.

  So I dove into my meteorological studies once I arrived at Valparaiso University in northwestern Indiana. The college is in the small town of Valparaiso, about an hour east of Chicago and about two and a half hours south of my home in Grand Rapids. During my freshman year, one of my professors, a lovely man named John Knox, suggested I do an internship in television. Now I had Mrs. Pierson and Professor Knox telling me they thought I should try television meteorology. My confidence and interest growing, I sent about three dozen résumés out to television stations, mostly within driving distance, and heard nothing back. Not one response. I guess nobody wanted a freshman as an intern. But just as I was about to leave for a summer of bartending and hanging with my high school friends back in Western Michigan, I got a call on my dorm-room phone (note, we did not yet have cell phones) from a woman with a very thick southern accent.

  “Y’all know Birmingham?”

  The answer was no. I was a Michigan gal currently going to school in northern Indiana. I had never been to Alabama. But I lied and said, “Sure do!” A week later I moved to Birmingham for the summer. It was fate. And one of those moments when my natural-disaster spontaneity worked out.

  My internship was with James Spann, a weather king in our industry whom I credit with solidifying my interest in pursuing a career in television meteorology. Within the first week of the internship, James invited me to accompany him to an elementary school that had invited him to talk to the students. He got up in front of about a hundred children, and he might as well have been Justin Bieber during the peak of “Baby” at a mall full of twelve-year-old girls. But he wasn’t singing pop music. He was singing my tune: science. I saw each of those adoring faces light up, nod, and get excited about the weather because of James’s passion. It was infectious. I saw in that moment what has come to be my favorite part of my job—the communication of science.

  Three days a week I would show up at ABC 33/40 for the five, six, and ten P.M. shows, dripping in sweat (my car didn’t have a great air conditioner, and summer is no joke in Birmingham). Usually I would be coming from my money-making job (this was a nonpaying internship) as a beer-cart driver/pool attendant at a country club. From that extreme heat, I would enter the refrigerator that was the studio. I have worked in at least a dozen studios now, and they are all way too cold. When I have asked, they always say it’s better for the cameras, or the monitors, or whatever electronic device happens to be in my line of sight. I just don’t buy it. I think it has to be the men in suits setting the controls, because my television monitor at home seems to work just fine at seventy-eight degrees.

  Frozen or not, I loved every minute of the time I spent with James. I got to see the behind-the-scenes workings of a television meteorologist. It was the school talks, the radio shows, the family James doted on, and the community he was a huge part of that I wanted. I still have never seen anyone do it better than James.

  When I returned from that internship, I became focused on getting a job in television. And on the very first day of my sophomore year, I ran into a poster hanging in the meteorology department that read ON-AIR TV METEOROLOGIST WANTED. I
couldn’t believe it! The ad was from a PBS station called WYIN. I looked around, hoping I was the only one who had seen it. Most of the students in my meteorology class wanted nothing to do with television, so I didn’t have much competition there. But I heard there were several upperclassmen who had seen the same ad and were going to audition. I drove the twenty-five minutes to the small town of Merrillville, Indiana, where the station was based. I was so nervous. Was I really going to audition? Against juniors and seniors? I was only nineteen! I walked through those doors with a “What’s the worst thing that can happen?” attitude, and amazingly, I came out with a job.

  At WYIN I went by Ginger Zuidgeest. Meteorologist Ginger Zuidgeest. That is a mouthful, and the male anchor who had been there for at least thirty-five years always stumbled a bit on my last name, but I didn’t care. I was on TV! The viewers probably numbered about a dozen, and the job didn’t pay, but my career was starting, and it was an exhilarating time. I would show up around three in the afternoon and tape my weather segment. We actually stole The Weather Channel’s graphics from their website and photoshopped their logo out. So strange, but I guess at PBS you can get away with a lot (who’s going to pick on a PBS station, right?). I had a little desk in the corner of the cold studio, but it was all mine. The set was basically one old camera, a news desk, and a green screen. But that green screen was the first that I ever had regular practice in front of. I learned a lot in front of that green screen, like where to stand and how the screen acts like a mirror so your movement is actually reversed in the camera when you see yourself. It’s where I became comfortable looking into a lens. I wish I had some of those tapes, but I saved nothing.