Tornado

In the spring of 1998 a level sonofabitch tornado ripped through our county. It killed two people and left a huge amount of damage.

The high school where I taught had just got out, and I was in my room, working with a boy who was having trouble; I’d just sent my son (a senior) out to the parking lot to bring my car around to the back door. I was waiting at that door (which is always locked) for him when another car pulled up out at the sidewalk, and a whole bunch of teenage girls came running and screaming toward me.

Now, teenage girls run and scream quite often, so I opened the door without thinking much about it, but then I noticed a grown woman running and screaming with them and as they ran into the building they were screaming, “IT’S A TORNADO! WE SAW IT OUT ON THE ROAD!” — What? I thought confusedly; I didn’t see anything. But then. I did. The sky turned an eerie shade of green; I mean it: green. There is a wooded ridge behind the school…and that damn thing came up to it and stayed still, churning in place (and it was silent, I don’t care what anyone says; I never heard a thing); pieces of trash — garbage can lids, roofing shingles, tree branches, leaves, bark, etc. were flying through the air.

I was a lot like the bandar-log when Kaa hynotizes them…stared helplessly. I couldn’t look away. It was HUGE, and stayed on the other side of the ridge (debris still flying everywhere), and then turned. Headed, as it turned out, to our little town. Another teacher and I got all the kids who were staying after school and corralled them into the boys’ and girls’ bathrooms on that hall, the only rooms with no windows. There are a surprising amount of kids who habitually stay at the school after 3:00: clubs, tutoring, sports, the ones who just plain don’t want to go home…

Then, it passed; a little quieter; we let the kids out of the bathrooms and sat them on the floor in the hall, like they’d taught us to do in tornado drills…the administrators put the school on Lock-Down (this comes into the plot later)…and…I remembered. I’d sent my son out to get my car. Besides normal Lock-Down, no students could go up- or down-stairs. I waited there at that door. I waited there at that door. I would not leave that door. Where was he? Finally another teacher took pity on me; “I’ll wait for Ernest,” she told me; you go downstairs to see if you can find him.” Sure enough, he was there. “I saw it, Mom,” he said; “and I ran for the building. I’m sorry, but I left the keys in the car.” (A friend, hearing this from me, said, “Heck, I’d have left it running!”

Anyway, we came back upstairs together. We were walking back down the hall to my room when another teacher passed us. “Aren’t you all from Stoneville?” she asked. We nodded and she continued; “I just heard it was really hard hit.” And she went on. My 90 year old mother lived with us, and she was home alone. I turned to my son who was over 6 feet tall and weighed about 250 lbs and was not particularly fat. “Son,” I said; “go downstairs again, go outside, get in my car and bring it around. If anyone tries to stop you, don’t argue, don’t say anything. Just keep walking.” And he did.

We pulled into our yard and it was covered with roofing shingles…oh, no! However, they were not ours; the tornado had indeed come right up our road from Stoneville (which it had decimated); had sucked the shingles off the roof of our neighbor’s house, and dumped them in our yard. The only damage we had was that the roof was blown off the bird feeder. Having lived through a tornado, it seems to me that the path they take is much like a balloon when you let out the air; whizzing around with no pattern at all…

And my mother hadn’t noticed a thing! She was absolutely stone deaf by that time and remarked mildly, “I thought it got kinda windy.”

Parenting note. Hearing the news, dozens of parents who worked in nearby towns/cities came scorching into town, their children being at the local day care center. By this time the town was cordoned off. The State Patrol at the roadblock said, “You can’t go any farther.” And they replied as one, “The hell you say!”, piled out of their cars and took off running, to get their kids.

There is a lovely little Memorial Park in Stoneville, on one of the vacant lots the tornado left when it obliterated the building; but the best memorial is the clock on the side of one of the stores. It has remained stopped at 3:40 for the past 19 years.