My Tornado Alley story…

Everybody who lives in Tornado Alley for any length of time has at least one story about the big one that almost got him. Here’s mine.

I lived in a little town in the Texas panhandle, and to make matters worse I was even in a trailer park. May as well give a blowjob to a 12-gauge, right? It wasn’t a question of “if” it would happen. And sonofagun, one fine evening it happened.

Joel – The Early Days

In April in the Panhandle, tornado watches happen daily. It’s no big deal. Even tornado warnings call for nothing more than heightened awareness, or you’d never get anything done at all. My practice was to tune the radio to the local station, which normally played nothing but really annoying country music. (This was during the Charlie Rich/Kenny Rogers period of cm, which I genuinely could not stand.)

If anybody ever plays “Behind Closed Doors” in my presence, ever again, I will not be responsible for my actions.

But I digress.

The theory was that as long as the radio was annoying me with bad faux-country “music,” everything was cool. If the radio stopped doing so, it was time to raise your head and pay close attention. On this occasion, the phrase I remember coming out of the radio was something like “No casualties reported yet.” It got my attention.

The front bedroom of my 2-bedroom trailer was devoted to guns, gear and ammo, because in those days I was a genuine redneck po’ white trash gun nut and made no apologies, and the reloading bench was right next to the front window with a lovely view of the parking lot and the next row of trailers. An unusual number of my neighbors seemed to be assembling in the parking lot. I thought perhaps I should join them.

You know you’re in the very heart of Tornado Alley when the Landlord’s trailer is parked on a slab of reinforced concrete, over a storm shelter big enough to hold everybody in the park. Or so I’d been told, I’d never seen it. The park was on the extreme east side of town. I mingled with a bunch of guys standing around trying to look cool about the whole thing, not at all far from the shelter’s entrance.

To the west, we could see what looked like a dozen skinny, whippy tornadoes that from our vantage appeared to be tearing the living crap out of the town. The storm cell was clearly coming our way. The sky was a weird color. The heavy cloud cover frequently swirled overhead in a manner that made me happy I had recently visited the bathroom. Birds went by like buckshot in insane gusts of wind. There were bursts of incredibly big hail. This had a real shot at being the big one.

Everybody was facing west, so it took a while before anybody noticed what was happening to the east…

It was big. It was fat. It was incredibly well-defined. You could see things lifting off the ground, abruptly turning right, and disappearing into the cloud. Seriously, I expected Charlton Heston in full beard to show up at any moment. It looked very close. It did not appear to be moving.

There’s a rule. If it looks like it’s not moving, it’s coming toward you. The big brave guys tried not to actually knock one another out of the way as we stampeded to the shelter stairs.

The door clanged shut behind us, and things got very quiet. Somebody had brought a portable radio. The local DJ sounded like he had a pants-load. Then the station went off the air. I mean, the station was still on the air, you could hear incidental noise from the open mike. But nobody was talking.

Then the lights went out. The incidental radio noise stopped, and there was static.

Flashlights came out of pockets, helping the landlord dig out electric lanterns. There were some babies crying, but nobody freaked. I was kinda proud of my neighbors.

Nobody had any idea what was happening up above. But there was no noise. It seemed to me that if an entire park full of trailers was being torn to shreds just above our heads, it would have made some noise. There was no noise.

This went on for what seemed like a very long time. Finally the big brave guys nearest the door had to peek out and see what, if anything, was happening out there. So we did.

The sky was clearing. The weird wind gusts had stopped. Absolutely nothing was out of place. Whatever had been torn to shreds hadn’t happened here at all.

It turned out that no tornadoes had touched down in the town proper. Those skinny tornadoes had torn hell out of the wheat fields west of town, and that big fat close one (which was bigger, fatter, and farther than we guessed) had wiped a brand-new Halliburton yard out of existence. The one guy present, a security guard, had seen what was coming and didi’ed his ass out of there. Nobody was hurt, but the visuals were impressive.

The radio DJ had heard of a whirlwind directly over his building and bugged out to the cellar, leaving his mike open and scaring the hell out of a lot of people. “This ain’t no ship, and I ain’t going down with it,” he said later. He was fired in disgrace.

Ironically, years later I moved back to my native Michigan which is not particularly known for tornadoes. And the vocational school I worked in was hit by a tornado and sent two students to the hospital. Go figure.