It didn’t sound right either, like a jet airplane circled overhead. The wind felt confused too. Like streaks of cold mixed in with streaks of hot when you drop an ice cube into hot tea. That’s what the air felt like last night when I got out of the car. Lightning flashed on the horizon.
About 7:30, I was visiting my parents when we heard the sirens blow. After a moment, we realized that they weren’t coming from the TV, so we turned on the local news to see what was going on.
The radar image showed an ugly red splotch west and south of our house, so Mom went off and started gathering blankets, crank flashlights, candles, and other odds and ends. Audio from the on-scene storm chasers was being played alongside the radar data. We could hear the first rumbles of thunder outside.
The storm chaser spoke: “…most dangerous at nighttime because they can’t be seen. We’ve got visual confirmation of the wall cloud, but no tornado as of yet.” Lightning flashed outside. “Wait, we think there might be one on the ground, we just got a glimpse…”
Lightning flashed again, and we could hear the storm chasers screaming.
“JESUS CHRIST!” In the background: “Move, move, move, get to the car!” A woman screamed again in the background, and more voices: “Is she hit?! Grab her, grab her, get her to the car!”
My heart started beating a little harder. We all knew that tornadoes track to the north and east, and I found myself thinking: “Where is it? Where is it? Where the fuck is it?”
Now the lead storm chaser came back to the mike: “Guys, this storm is HUGE, it’s a mile wide! We’re getting out of here NOW! It’s incredibly violent, and it’s on the ground at Meridian!” He talked for a moment more before his voice fell into static.
“Meridian,” I thought, “That’s one mile southwest of here! Shit! Shit, shit, shit!”
As if on cue, what could only be described as a wall of air struck the house. Windows rattled in their hinges, the upstairs groaned, and an ear-piercing whistle came from the garage, as the wind slipped under the west-facing door. Hail started pounding at the roof and windows. Between it all, we had to almost shout to hear ourselves inside the house.
We helped Mom get the rest of the stuff into the laundry room.
As we hurried, the lights dimmed and the TV died, but the electricity held on. We were getting bits and pieces of the TV weatherman on the scrambled TV signal once the TV came back on.
“…on the ground in Lone Grove…” static, “…very large, and very violent, seek shel…” static, “…is a life threatening storm…” Even through the static, I could hear the weatherman’s forced calm that belied his urge to run screaming into the shelter.
The lights dimmed again, but still held on. The TV, however, was silent, with only a “NO SIGNAL” splashed across the screen. The roar outside grew deafening.
The lights dimmed a third time, and this time winked out. We stood in total darkness, broken only by flashes of lightning. The wind continued crashing against the house.
We have no cellar, so our laundry room was our “storm shelter”. Everything we thought we needed had been put in there, but we all stood in the lightless den, shoes and jackets on, listening to the storm outside.
I don’t know why we stood there. Maybe we all knew that by retreating to the laundry room, we were admitting that we were well and truly powerless. But hell, we were. It was far too late to try and escape. So we stood there, and listened for the oncoming train.
Mom’s weather-radio blared it’s alarm, and it seemed rather pointless and out of place given the skull-rattling storm all around us. I reached over and turned it off. Nobody objected.
We were in God’s hands now.
Twenty minutes stretched into twenty years as we stood in the darkness. We listened as the merciless wind plowed against the house, and the hail gave way to relentless sheets of rain. We could see outside when the lightning flashed, enough to see the near-solid wall of rain falling down. I could barely hear my own heart thundering in my chest over the din.
After a while, the whistling from the garage lowered in pitch, and the rain lightened. Dad turned the weather-radio back on, and listened as the computer-generated voice tracked the tornado with Shatner-like syllables. “North… of… I… thirtyfive… near… Springer…” We let loose the breath we had been holding for almost half-an-hour.
Later, we learned that the tornado had barreled straight toward us until it was less than a mile away, and then took a hard cut north, missing us. Miraculously, the house wasn’t damaged at all, not a shingle off the roof.
Others in the community weren’t so lucky. Today’s daylight revealed 9 people dead, 46 injured, and over 200 homes destroyed. Thankfully, all of my friends and family were unharmed, and only one had their home destroyed.
The tornado has been classified as an F-4, with winds topping 170 MPH. We had had about 5 minutes between hearing the siren’s warning and having the lights go out.
But life goes on. God had reminded us that our time here can end swiftly and without warning, and it is only by His grace that we were unharmed. Had the storm not pivoted north the instant it did, we would not have been.
Today, there wasn’t a cloud in a sky, and sun shone. Today, the sky was beautiful…