It has been a week of dodging rainstorms and unstable straight-line winds. To say that our weather is up in the air is as obvious as the unmistakable warning wail that begins off in the distance and builds to a full-on siren. Lately, I have heard the weather warning once too often but feel fortunate to have a basement where we can go underground and take cover. Still, the drill makes me edgy and brings back memories of being squashed next to other kids in a hallway at school, head down and knees up. Here at home, the basement “safe zone” doesn’t feel comfortable either. We sit in a part of our house where we usually don’t hang out in the night – full of creepy corners that never get cleaned.
Tornadoes, or tornadic activity as the weathermen put it, is part of the risk of living in the Midwest. Here in the corn belt, nothing changes very quickly but everyone acts like things are changing all the time. The plain safety we sometimes feel knowing we are surrounded by expanses of farmland are the same ground that seems to breed a lot of angry skies and furious category storms.
Several nights ago, as a fast-moving thunderstorm set off alerts in the middle of the night, we headed to our hiding spot, in what we called the cellar when we were kids. Our stairs don’t work very well right after I crawl out of bed, and our flatscreen gives off a radiating light that pierces through my squinting eyes. We plop down and listen to an analysis of barometric readings and watch the approaching storm depicted on one colorful contour map after another. There are three weathermen talking back and forth, using terms like advection and hydrologic cycle and background reports coming in from people called spotters who are out on the fringes of the front, utterly fascinated by threatening weather.
Is there such a thing as a good weather spotter? If not, we need one or two. They would call in to the weatherman during the sunny days when they see something cheerful that needs reporting, fascinated by happier sights. For example, a good spotters would call in about that guy who dances on a busy intersection in a gorilla suit holding a sign for Jungle Boogie cowboy boots. Each day on the news an upbeat spotter would call in for something good, and even if they had nothing cheerful to say, would know how to say nothing at all, like we were taught as children, and would not succumb to mentioning subjects that were menacing like dark adiabatic air masses.
I have to be careful here to not make light of a situation that can turn dire in an instant, like the life-threatening appearance of a tornado. I made that mistake once in high school in a class everyone had to take called Speech. The instructor wanted to film us as if we were anchors on a news cycle, reporting on a piece of news. Back in the day, videoing someone was not as easy as just pulling out your cell phone and pushing a button. It was a major technological achievement to video someone; a camera was set up on a tripod and there were cords snaking to all parts of the classroom.
When the time came for me to give my news report, I began reporting about a horrific house fire that had trapped the occupants who escaped only because of the heroic efforts of the local firemen. I began my broadcast so enthusiastically you would have thought the circus had come to town, setting a totally inappropriate tone given the life-threatening fire. It was the kind of news article that should have been delivered with an air of somberness, not liveliness and gusto. The next day, I tried it again, and made my news delivery as if I was depressed and had lost all the members of my family to a fire. My short stint as a news anchor was an epic fail. Finally in exasperation, my speech teacher, wanting to avoid giving me a failing grade, found an article I could read about an unusually large litter of fifteen puppies that had been born inside a Maytag dryer, and I stood and reported on that instead, eking out a C for my final camera appearance.
You’d think I would have recognized tragedy and danger when I saw it. When I was seven, I saw a real tornado when I attended a camp in Wisconsin. It was in the sixties and the twister came crashing down out of the sky and almost destroyed the town of Plymouth. At the time, I was playing baseball and was summarily hustled off the field and into a crawl space underneath the camp office, but I had time to look back over my shoulder to see the gray shape of a funnel. Sixty campers huddled together without the advantage of doppler radar that can now tell us the air speed of tornadic spin and predict where the tip might touch down.
When my life was teaching on clay tennis courts on a resort in Florida, I walked out on the upper beach deck at noon one day to watch a waterspout form out in the bay. As the sun hit the furiously rising cool water, clouds swirled into blue, then came to a point as the spout moved closer to land. I could see the golfers out on the course stop momentarily to watch it, but they didn’t seem that concerned until the funnel moved to the land. Then the spout turned from bluish white to black as it sucked up the earth and everything attached to it.
Scientist call what happens next as reactive immobility. It is the strange and inexplainable reaction human-animals have when they freeze to figure out the next move. Watching from above, I couldn’t believe the golfers weren’t running away, but instead had stopped and watched until danger swept across the fairway towards them. Only then did they dive for cover into sand traps or speed off in their golf carts as if being chased by Godzilla. One golfer, nonplused, teed up his golf ball and hit a two-hundred-and-fifty-yard drive straight down the middle of the fairway. I believe he had a high-risk job in real life, like repairing satellite dishes nine hundred feet off the ground or photographing jaguars in the Amazon basin. His shot, arching impressively towards the seventh hole green began to change course suddenly and curve upwards as the tornado vortex pulled it in. If the ball would have been found later across the bay, and if he could prove it was his, it would have travelled two miles and been recorded as the furthest t-shot ever hit, a drive that could never be topped. Golf is that kind of a game, unpredictable and full of bad lies.
As I sit in the relative safety of my basement and the front passes, I see a map of southern Indiana filled with tiny towns I never heard of, towns like Solitude and Pelzer. We sit and pray for the safety of our family and for our house, but also for these little towns too, the ones with big hearts whose people meet at the church and join hands the next day, organize prayer vigils and pitch-in dinners.
In the middle of our prayer, however, we are interrupted by a screen filled with an unrelenting black and white circle whose mesmerizing moiré pattern hurts our eyes, followed by an abrasive screech. The noise is on the highest end of the auditory scale, which is why it was chosen to warn thousands of people to wake up and pay attention. I notice my wife is staring at me and I can see her face pulsing from the awful noise emanating and raking across our basement hideaway. In fact, I could take her pulse right now just by watching her face, and get it correct with a beat or two.
“Can you please switch channels”, she asks meekly, “I’m getting a headache.”
The other two stations have weather guys who are using terms like Nexrad and microburst, and Rossby waves, all in the same sentence, but the storm has passed and my wife has gone back to bed. Her extended outlook is in dreamland, a stratospheric anomaly she can relate to. We’ll awake to see pictures of the grandkids eating Fruity Pebbles and arguing over who gets to play with the gold Pokémon card. The next time the kids will be in the bathtub it will be for their nightly bath and they won’t need to be covered in cushions and protective blankets. They will play with flower magnets on the bathroom tile and fill toys up with water that weren’t meant to have water in them.
Along our street, after the local storm passes, neighbors come out into their yards like stowaways on a ghost ship dragging their trash bins and chain saws and cutting up limbs that left holes in their trees and they sleepily go about the business of raking up piles of sticks. It is quiet, thankful work, and no one is complaining. Nature has spoken – loudly – with her usual finality. Our severe thunderstorms might be routine, mere inconveniences, that is, until you realize that ambulances and sirens have been the background noise most of the day.
We have survived another night in Tornado Alley and escaped unscathed. We could make a huge kid-fort out of the debris in the yard, but these sticks and branches aren’t part of a collection that should be treated as fun or recreation. They are not taken lightly, but picked up and carted away, or cut up for firewood as we settle back into our normal noises and a siren that has been silenced by a cloudless sky.