Tornado Watch

On March 6th, 2017 I had a bad feeling about the thunderstorm warning and tornado watch predicted for late afternoon or early evening. My husband rode his bicycle to work, knowing he would miss the storm. The cloudy sky, heavy with grey humidity, felt more ominous than usual. When the tornado siren went off as my husband and I lay in bed that night, I thought of the times when we’d get our then small kids to put on their bicycle helmets, put our own on, and huddle in the bathtub.

“Seek shelter in a small interior room with no windows” is the official advice to those residents whose houses lacked basements.

Jim told me not to worry and turned over to go to sleep. I hoped I’d wake up with our house intact, our trees intact, our bodies intact, and went to sleep.

At 1:20 a.m. our power went out. I woke up and went to the bathroom. Jim got up after me to do the same thing.

“The light doesn’t work,” I cautioned him as he went into the bathroom.

“The power is out,” he said, and started to look for his watch so he’d know what time it was.

How was he going to know when to get up to go to work without a working alarm clock? He gets up in the dark at 4:15 a.m. to get ready for work.

Fortunately, our kitty Chloe was on the job. She knows what time it is without a clock or a watch. She sat on his chest and started purring even before he had to get up, but not much before.

Jim petted Chloe, his devoted companion, and used the plug-in flashlight from the hallway to illuminate the bathroom while he took a shower and brushed his teeth.

The coffeemaker didn’t work, so he took a bunch of Folger’s singles to work so he could drink coffee there.

We learned later that 10 tornadoes hit Iowa Monday night and Tuesday morning (3/6-3/7/17). Seymour, Iowa suffered the greatest damage. We had medium-size branches from our trees strewn around the back deck, but that was nothing compared to those who had their roofs torn off, their houses demolished, their school demolished.

I remember years ago leaving a social work conference in Cedar Falls, Iowa, and speeding home to Iowa City on I-380 where my two latch-key children were waiting for me. I was trying to outrun a tornado that was headed to the same place I was. I found myself behind a storm-chaser van with all sorts of antennae all over it with the license plate “twistr.” I tried to keep up with it but soon realized, as I pressed harder on the gas pedal, that that was foolhardy. Whether the tornado hit my house before I got there or not, my kids, injured or not, were going to need their mother. I let the stormchasing van rollick away and disappear.

The twister hit a house just to the southeast of us about a mile or a mile and a half away from our house. I’ll never forget the newspaper photo of the little boy crying next to the wreckage of his rented farmhouse.

To get a sense of what stormchasers do and experience, I highly recommend the book “The Stormchasers," by Jenna Blum. I remember Ms. Blum introducing her boyfriend, a real-life stormchaser, after her reading at Prairie Lights Book Store in Iowa City.