(Photo from the public domain).  

It is Sunday morning and we are deep into our respective rituals:  The Norwegian listens to 103.7 The Buzz, to worship at the altar of local talk-show host Bill Vickery.  I read OS and work on whatever little projects I’ve got going on in my mind.   

Occasionally, he talks to me through the wall, which drives me a little crazy.  I can never hear him exactly and I always have to get up and go into his office to ask him to repeat himself.   This morning, though, I heard him loud and clear:  “If you have anything outside, you better go get it.  You have 24 minutes.”  

I took off my headset and stumbled into the hallway. “Tornado?”  It is spring in Arkansas.    

Around here, it’s not unusual to expect a devastating storm to blow up out of nowhere, even when there’s nothing going on outside but an overcast sky and a strange stillness.  Last week, Mena, Arkansas was practically demolished by an E3 tornado half a mile wide. Over 100 homes were destroyed.   Last year, a tornado stayed on the ground for 150 miles through parts of the Ozarks and East Arkansas, destroying towns in several counties. 

My family’s close friend Britt had to help his own family recover from the destruction of two houses, a barn, and pretty much their entire farm operation.  The family survived by standing in a hallway, the only part of their house to survive.  

“Not this time, just high winds and large hail,” the Norwegian said.  

“Oh, good.”  I said.  We don’t even bother trying to get our vehicles out of the way.  Even if we had a garage, at least one of our cars would be out in the elements.  We just accept the fact that it’s possible something we own could be randomly demolished by wind, or hail, or tornado. 

Last year, just after we bought our little house and moved into the neighborhood, an E1 touched down literally a block away.  It uprooted trees in dozens of yards.  It also destroyed at least two houses, which have just now been rebuilt.   It was the first time, in my 35 tornado seasons, to actually hear one.   It didn’t sound exactly like a freight train, the old cliché that everyone repeats.  It sounded more like a little god taking a deep, violent breath.

Since I have lived with the threat of tornados all my life, my first reaction is to go crawl in the bathtub or a closet.  It is extremely rare to find a house with a basement in Arkansas, so a lot of people in the country have storm shelters.   In town, though, there’s really no protection except the interior rooms of a house. 

I always heed the warnings, especially if the sirens go off.  It’s annoying, because the news is interrupted at least once or twice a week during certain times of the year.  Our own homes are really rarely threatened (maybe once or twice a year), but someplace in the state is at risk pretty much continually.   It would be easy to ignore them, even when they are close by.  

I think I’m more cautious than most people, by even bothering to head into the hallway when things look dicey.   Last year was the second time a tornado hit a block from my own house.  I spent a long afternoon in 1997 sitting in the hallway of my downtown apartment building, watching a neighbor’s portable television while a tornado destroy McArthur Park, within sight of us.   A woman who lived down the hall from me had just moved to Arkansas from Hawaii.  She came into the hall to find the entire building packed into the downstairs hallway with their kids and their pets (dogs and cats and at least one bird) and she laughed. 

“Are you all that scared, seriously?”   She said.  

Everyone looked at her like she was insane.  “There’s a tornado about to touch down a block away from here,” someone said. “You better be scared.”   

The Hawaii woman looked incredulous.  “I think Tornados are a myth.  It can’t really be that bad.”  

“Turn on the TV,” someone said.  “And watch the radar.”  

“I have been watching it. I think you people are freaking out about this like you freak out about snow,” she said.  

I thought that was rich coming from someone fresh from Hawaii, but whatever.     She proceeded to head out to her car. She needed groceries, she said.   

Five minutes later, the tornado flattened the grocery store she mentioned.   That experience was just a little too close for comfort for me.  I took the warnings seriously after that.   

In 2005, when politicians were squawking about how the people of New Orleans were somehow responsible for their own fate because they didn’t heed warnings to evacuate, I sympathized with the locals.  When you live in a place where hurricanes are that common, you have to adopt a little bit of magical thinking in order to survive it.  Instead of thinking, “we could be blown away at any moment,” which would just be constantly depressing and frightening, it’s much easier to think, “It won’t happen here, it so rarely does.”  

It always seems to happen to someone else.  It happened to Britt’s family, but I’ve never been hurt or even truly threatened by a tornado.   There’s no logic to what it will hit, no way to control it.   Who can really face that possibility and do anything but simply wait and see whether the wind hits, or not?