Spinning Tales

(Note: This was originally published in the 2007 edition of The Wapsipinicon Almanac, a literary annual that’s published not far from here in Anamosa, and if you haven’t read it, you should. The publisher—Tim Fay—still sets the type by hand and uses only woodcut illustrations, so not only is it fun to read, it looks great, too. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

By the way, the tornado mentioned below hit Iowa City in 2006.)

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The radio announcer’s words were calm, reasoned, routine:  “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for coastal counties in southeastern New Hampshire and southern Maine.”

His tone, though, was anything but: “Ohmigod! Run! Everyone! Run for your lives! The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for coastal counties in southeastern New Hampshire and southern Maine! Do you know what that means? We’re gonna die! That’s what it means! We’re all gonna die!”

Within seconds the phone rang. It was the city editor in the main newsroom, breathlessly assigning me a story about the tornado for that afternoon’s editions.

“What tornado?” I asked.

“The tornado they just issued the watch for, find out where it is and if it’s caused any damage...”

As this was going on, the receptionist made plans to bolt for the basement the second she saw the tornado spinning down the street, and an advertising rep rescheduled a sales call because she didn’t want to be outside when the tornado hit. I could only scratch my head. Having grown up in the Midwest, the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning was bred into my bones. A watch meant merely that “conditions are favorable for the development of a tornado,” as the dry, scientific/bureaucratic language of the National Weather Service puts it. In other words, it’s merely a yellow light, the weatherman’s way of saying “oh, by the way, keep an eye out.” Besides, in the Midwest, we don’t need government agency telling us to watch out for tornadoes. All we need do is look out the window at those summer clouds juiced up by heat and humidity into soaring towers of gray-tinged muscle, stalking across the sky with bad-ass cockiness because they know they can’t be stopped. They’re menacing, ominous things that trigger our collective memories of muggy summer days and remind us any one of them might explode into a tornado at any time. Sometimes it seems like tornado watch announcements are on TV as often as re-runs of Friends, complete with color-coded maps and crawls listing all the affected counties. A tornado warning? Now that was something to worry about. But a watch? Please. Don’t bother me until I actually need to hide in the basement.

But in New England, where tornadoes appear about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series, that watch/warning distinction is lost. The clouds there are thin, wispy things that drift across the sky, as light as a....well, a cloud. They look like the fluffy, friendly clouds that kids draw in elementary school art classes, hovering over their houses with a happy-faced sun. So for a typical New Englander, tornadoes are completely off the radar, unless they’re spawned by a passing hurricane, in which case a tornado is just one more bad thing that can happen that day.

Despite a life lived largely in the Midwest, I’ve seen only one tornado up close. I was a college student in St. Paul at the time and I watched from my apartment as a thin, gray string hanging from a cloud a mile off shilly-shallied across a golf course, then lifted off the ground and snaked back and forth like an unmanned fire hose until breaking apart. As tornadoes go, it wasn’t very dramatic and a few downed tree limbs, chewed up fairways and missing pin flags were the extent of its damage. No green sky or freight train rumble, as so many witnesses describe a tornado’s presence. Meteorologically speaking, it probably wasn’t much more than a glorified dust devil and despite the screaming air raid siren and stern-voiced TV weatherman urging me to take cover, I never for a moment felt compelled to hide in the basement.

Such nonchalance wasn’t the case last April, though, when a tornado viciously tore apart parts of Iowa City, where I live now. The images of the rubble of St. Patrick’s Church and the walls-laid-bare sorority house have become iconic and will live forever in the town’s history. Fortunately, my neighborhood didn’t suffer any damage, but the steady, eery roar of the freight train sounded close enough that I took my kid and my cat and headed to the basement.

The next morning, when I boarded my bus for downtown, the driver suggested I bring my camera because we were heading into a “war zone.” I thought it was intentionally over-the-top rhetoric on his part to build dramatic effect until we arrived downtown and it did, indeed, look like a war zone. Construction scaffolding folded up and dropped in a pile. A convenience store canopy blown over. A pizza joint flattened. Brick facades hung perilously from the roofs of buildings. The streets littered with glass, limbs, whole trees, loose power lines and traffic lights. I was awe-struck. I knew it was bad, the pictures broadcast on the news the night before told us that, but no TV news pictures could convey the extent of it all. This was no fault of the photojournalists. Like real war, the damage simply overwhelmed the limited frame of a TV camera.

To show how capricious a tornado can be, when I arrived at my office I found my building was utterly undamaged. Not a scratch. Not a single broken window. Nothing. But right across the pedestrian mall, not 100 feet away, an entire block of buildings had their roofs torn off and their brick facades were scattered on the sidewalk. Months later, some of the businesses in those buildings still had not re-opened.

Later, I walked to the residential neighborhood east of downtown and saw the emotional damage that accompanied the physical. One homeowner stood in his second-floor bedroom, now fully exposed to the world, and shouted to no one in particular, “my house ain’t got no fuckin’ roof.” Over and over he shouted it, “my house ain’t got no fuckin’ roof,” as if it was only through repetition he could make himself understand that his house no longer had a fucking roof.

I also passed by a young woman sweeping broken glass off the sidewalk, her motions robotic, her face empty and expressionless. Behind her stood her house, now with no roof, no windows, and a pine tree lying horizontally across the demolished porch. Faced with the enormity of the re-building task that now faced her, she chose to sweep broken glass off the sidewalk. At least it was one thing she could scratch off her to-do list.

Fortunately, my own then-4-year old son seems to have escaped the evening without too much trauma, despite the fact we spent a good portion of it huddled in the basement bathroom with a terrified cat. He still gets a little skittish when lightning flashes, the wind picks up and brightly colored maps appear on TV, but after a few deep breaths, he goes on. When I was a child, I felt impervious to tornadoes, at least at home, because we lived just a few blocks from Lake Superior and my parents assured me that such close proximity to water protected us. Tornadoes, they said, don’t come near water. I wasn’t sure why tornadoes were afraid of water because it didn’t seem to make much sense, but it gave me one less bogey man to worry about so I happily believed. I know better now, but I’m still not sure where this myth comes from, and even more mystified by the fact it still hangs on. For instance, many of my Iowa City acquaintances were surprised that our tornado crossed the Iowa River last April, blowing apart the venerable Dairy Queen on the west side, then crossing the water and heading downtown on the east. Tornadoes, they had convinced themselves, don’t come near water.

I wonder sometimes if believing in this myth is a conscious choice because a tornado’s uncontrollable rage strikes a nerve in all of us—we usually can’t detect them until the last minute, we don’t know when they’re going to hit and we don’t know what direction they’ll move. In the end, if a tornado has us in its sights, we’re screwed. It’s that kind of fear that causes such an emotional reaction to Dorothy’s plight in “The Wizard of Oz,” as she scrambles around the farm desperately looking for safety as the badly animated tornado bears down and then carries her away from all that she loves. They remind us that in the eternal conflict of Man versus Nature, Man almost always gets pinned. We like to think we’ve got nature licked—that dams control floods, chemicals control bugs, medicines prevent disease. Modern technology gives us an edge against even hurricanes, because we can see them coming days in advance, plenty of time to batten down the hatches (though folks in New Orleans may question that one). But it’s hard to kid ourselves when it comes to a tornado because with tornadoes there are no such illusions of control. Our only real defense is to run like hell and hope you can find a place to hide. But we don’t like to run and hide, our nature is to stand and fight and it’s frustrating to know that if we try that with a tornado, we’ll get our butts kicked. So we believe in myths like the shield of water, convincing ourselves that there is a defense against tornadoes, and we all have one less bogey man to worry about.

Which is probably why my New England co-workers were so frantic about the thought of a tornado. Their only frame of reference is Dorothy helplessly spinning away from her Kansas farm, or TV news pictures of the flattened houses and demolished lives in the most recent tornado-squashed Midwest town. They think of that awesome power and wonder how their quintessential colonial New England coastal town can stand up, the whitewashed church steeple, the colonial inn where George Washington ate, the fleet of lobster boats docked in the harbor.

In the end, all of that was safe because, predictably, there was no tornado. Eventually I convinced our receptionist to stop looking out the door every few minutes, the ad rep there was no need to cancel her client meetings, and my editors they should stop planning the big package of tornado stories and not expect photos of flattened houses anytime soon. The watch was still the day’s lead story, though, probably the first time that “there was no tornado” made the front page.

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