Ed Note: Readers you are in for a treat as Tom Cervenak, Visitor Services and Marketing Manager for Virginia State Parks, weaves the story of how he came to work for parks and what his career has been like. This series will run nine chapters, with many of them split into two parts.
Chapter 3 Weather or Not (Part 1)
Besides a love for the great outdoors, it turned out I found a second love, the weather. Through my life it occurred to me that it was a subject everyone seemed to talk about, almost daily at that. There were no less than 2 major events that turned my interest into fascination when it came to weather.
The first was 1969 when I was at my families cottage on July 4th weekend. We had several of the neighbors at our house playing board games, cards and having conversation, you know some of those lost arts. Well towards evening the mother of all thunderstorms hit and went on for hours on end. We lost electricity early on and used lanterns to light the place and continued to keep on playing games as the storms roared on through the night. No one could go home as it was so bad. We could hear trees falling down all around us in the dark, but we kept on playing, after all, we were kids. When morning light came, I think we realized how lucky we were to be alive and it opened my eyes to the power of a storm.