tornado season

i was born where the bible belt buckles tight across tornado alley. during tornado season. on decoration day. this explains a great deal. not everything, but certainly enough. i remember spending more than one evening sitting in the bathtub while the entire world outside wrung itself out. for those of you who don't know, this is what those without a basement do when there's a tornado. get in the bathtub. and if you have a mattress or blankets or pillows, pile them on top. really. there were countless hours spent in tornado drills at school. kids in the rows closest to the windows would open them, then we'd all file outside into the hallway and duck and cover. because our own skinny nine or ten or eleven year old arms were considered excellent protection from projectiles moving at hundreds of miles an hour down a straight hallway with doors open at either end. it was always difficult to resist the urge to look up when the wind got close. when you are in a tornado it becomes such a loose thing you don't always see it "hit". but you can't tell children things like that. well, you can, but they're not going to listen to you. we drew pictures of them always as funnels with distinct edges. and we wanted to see those edges slam into the world.

when the youngest child was still a baby all three sisters were eating at mcdonald's with a set of grandparents. the sky turned green and the wind whipped up and a manager rounded everyone up and took us down to the basement. the basement of mcdonald's. that's right. we waited out the sound of a train rumbling through the store above, all of us there in the dark sharing the same fear, and came out like new creatures, wandering over broken plate glass windows to separate cars. it lasted only a few minutes but nothing looked the same. our grandpa drove us home under a sky the color of an old bruise. i could not stop talking in the car. i could not stop talking when we got home. i did not yet understand property damage.

this was at a time when we lived next door to two teenage boys who would bring us hailstones after the sky relaxed. we'd stand on skinny legs there on what seemed like a very sheltered front porch. the air when a tornado passes smells different. before. after. and the hailstones, too. at least to a small child the hailstones seemed to have that smell, so clean you're not sure you should touch them. but we'd pile them up, always sized by tv and radio according to various sports equipment. golf ball size. baseball size. we'd watch the lightning stab down from the sky. i don't think i ever knew enough to feel unsafe.

when i was eleven or twelve i went with a neighbor family to the middle of nowhere kansas. the woman was taking a child to a special doctor and i went along to keep the other three children from biting and clawing each other to death. now, kansas really is as flat as a sheet of paper and we were all staying with this woman's family, sitting in an afternoon kitchen when someone came running in yelling about a wall cloud. we all ran outside,what seemed like maybe thirty adults and kids, to stare at the sky. the sky had fallen. for those of you who don't know, a wall cloud looks like the whole sky just drops down under the weight of the cloud it's carrying. and this massive low cloud just barrels along toward you (if you happen to be in its path, and we did) and it spits out rain and lightning and hail and tornados. someone opened the tornado shelter (they do live in kansas) and we all piled inside. one of the men, a brother of the woman i was there with, probably, brought the kids up to the door to look out. there was nothing to break up the sky, bigger than i'd ever seen it, as it rolled toward us. just fields and fields and fields. the tornados dipped down like fingers testing water, some deciding to stay, some not. the man closed the door just as twigs and leaves began to blow in underground, just as those fingers from the sky seemed like they would reach down and touch us. the sound went over us, solid, heavy. when we came up from the ground it felt like all my senses had been scrubbed clean.

a month or so before my wedding next to a strip mine pit in a wide open corner of kansas, a tornado worked its way though my own hometown in a part of missouri that lives dangerously close to those open plains. although i still did not own property at that point, i was old enough to understand property damage. and so i winced as we drove through town. yards looked like they were storing giant broccolis, whole trees upended and laid down. roofs gone. trailers twisted and torn in half. windows broken.

and i think of my parents living near enough to the town's railroad tracks they might have missed a tornado or two, thinking it the evening freight train rumbling through. they live in a ranch house on a flood plain with a newer bathtub, younger than i am, which will not keep them rooted during the winds but is too small, anyway, to climb into and feel safe in. there is a crawlspace but neither of them have the joints to get into it and it's pretty much above ground anyway. i think of a conversation i had last week with my mom. i called to visit and she said, in this bored way, "oh, we're under a tornado warning. let me call you back when it blows over." and she did. and she complained about how the stupid television warning kept interrupting the show she and dad were watching. "they never do it during the commercials. it's always right during the show." she was seriously disgruntled. i got the impression that sight of a tornado out the window was the only warning she intended to take seriously. and what would she do? what would dad do? nothing, i suppose. watch tv until the wind blows the channels right out of the air. get some dinner. drive into town if the lights stay off. these are people who treat forces of nature, what insurance companies call "acts of god", like they're rude children.

so perhaps it is only fair to amend what i said first. i was born where the bible belt buckles tight across tornado alley. during tornado season. on decoration day. i was born to people who let me stand on the porch in tornado weather. who saw the creek rising up close to the house with a swift current nearly a city block wide and let me wade in it. who let me sled down our backyard hill into a sewage seep and put me right back on the sled. who encouraged me to get married next to a strip mine pit. this explains a great deal.