Tornado Alley

by Donna Schoenkopf

It’s hard to go back.

It seems like a long, long time ago. But when I make an effort, like now, to think about it, it comes back with force.

I have been through earthquakes, a tidal wave, wildfires. But nothing, nothing, is like a tornado.

This house I designed, this Southern California house, with its expanse of glass to let in light and the outside world, is beautiful. There is nothing like it here in Oklahoma, at least that I’ve seen. And, of course, I take pride in that, being a lifelong iconoclast, loving NOT fitting in. Oh, yeah. Love it.

But this time, this time, I wish I had made myself less conspicuous, less so out of touch with reality. Sorry I thumbed my nose at you, Mother Nature.

Yeah, yeah, I love this house most of the time. There is nothing quite like being a part of the outside world while you are still inside. I love the light and air. Love it.

But when the thunderstorms come, and with them, the tornadoes, I feel like a complete and utter idiot. My lack of understanding of where I live now is writ large. I imagine that there are people here who MUST be snickering into their shirtsleeves looking at this ridiculous house.

Here I sit, on top of this barren hill (and we WILL go back to that point later) in a steel and glass house. Lots of glass. Enough glass to cut me from stem to stern if I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time.

When I lived here as a young woman, I lived in a big old house with a storm shelter, which we never used, and tornadoes were always somewhere else except that one time one knocked the Buick dealership down and messed up City Hall. The warning system was very primitive. There were no fancy Doppler radar pictures on TV, no nonstop coverage of storms in Oklahoma, no NOAA radios. Just a vague warning about there maybe being a tornado somewhere. And you know, it kept everybody from being too alarmed. Tornadoes were something you might be afraid of if you had been in one, but if you hadn’t been in one, they were something that happened to someone else. Sort of like being hit with lightning. You didn’t REALLY understand until it happened to YOU.

These days the drama of the tornado report is intense. It starts with the attention-getting music that lets you know your regular programming is being interrupted for a Severe Weather Report. The screen is filled with the logo for severe weather. It’s all red and orange and purple, just like the colors of a Doppler radar storm system.

All three local channels compete in the coverage. They cut off programming at the drop of a hat.

This new technology has its pluses and minuses. It’s like my experience in giving birth. Back in the day, no ultrasound, no amniotic testing, no nothing. Just take your vitamins, get big, go to the hospital, breathe long and hard, and have a baby.

But ten years after my youngest child, Rebecca, was born, I found I was pregnant at 40 years of age. And what a world of difference there was between the first pregnancies and my last.

I was given amniocentesis to determine if I had a Down Syndrome baby because I was an older mother. The wait to hear the result was horrendous. I was a mess. Then, while in labor, a long wire with a needle on the end of it was inserted vaginally into my uterus to be attached to the scalp of my about-to-be-born baby. Every time there was a change in pulse or pressure or heartbeat, it would register on the monitor next to my bed and I would freak out.

Now I live on the top of a hill, the WORST place to be when lightning abounds, the WORST place to be in a high wind, the WORST place to be in case of tornadoes. And I am reminded of all this when the television guys tell me all about the hooks and twists of the thunderstorms coming my way.

(I just stopped writing to look out of my glass that runs the whole length of my southern wall to watch butterflies flitting and grass gently moving and the leaves of my beloved cottonwood tree dancing. I have to say, I do love my house.)

But I digress.

(I’m finding it hard to recount what happened here. I think I’m still a little shell-shocked.)

We had been warned for a week, here in Oklahoma, that there were going to be severe storms. But I had also been told (and had noticed the phenomenon myself) that Tornado Alley had moved from Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas to the Mississippi Valley.

So I was not too worried.

Finally, the day came. Sure enough, the wet air from the Gulf of Mexico blew up over Texas to meet up with the dry air of Colorado, right over Oklahoma. When they meet, they breed ... tornadoes.

I hadn’t really been paying attention to weather, other than there being clouds and rain and wind.

The phone rang.

“Hello?”

It was Neighbor Jim. We had a pact that we would call each other if there was iffy weather out there.

Without further ado he said,“Are you worried?”

“No. Are you?”

“Are you watching television?”

“Not the local channels. I guess I’ll go right over and turn them on.”

So I did. The weatherman was completely involved with Oklahoma City. Every once in a while the screen would show a wider picture of our weather event, but you kinda just got a glimpse of it. And no actual verbiage about what was happening out here.

Pissed me off.

I called Neighbor Jim back.

“It seems like everything is in Oklahoma City, but to me, it looks like it’s gonna go to the north of us.”

“Yeah,” he agreed.

So I went back to my business, but kept the weather channels on.

Then the air got very heavy. And humid. And there was a pressure, sort of. And the light changed to a brown kind of smog color. It was about five in the afternoon. So the sun was just beginning to set. Had about two and half more hours of daylight.

The feeling was oppressive.

I looked at myself. Hmmmm. Pajamas. A luxury of mine. When I finish my work for the day and am going to be home for the rest of the evening and because I live alone, I just jump into my jammies.

I didn’t want to run out into the storm with breasts a-flappin’ so I put on a bra and a shirt and jeans and socks and my scuba shoes (don’t ask) and settled back into my normal life. Sort of.

A couple of minutes later I picked up the phone and dialed Neighbor Jim. I said, “I’m askeert. Can I come over?” And he said, “I’m already on my way to Steve’s storm cellar.” And I said I’ll be right there.

I shooed the dogs out the door and left a three inch crack in the eastern sliding glass door for the cats to leave or not and grabbed my keys and purse and ran out of the house and climbed into the car and drove down the eighth of a mile or so to Neighbor Jim’s just as he was getting into his SUV. I followed him over to Steve’s and we parked in his front yard and Jim told me that Steve wasn’t answering his phone so we just walked into Steve’s house and Steve heard us and was surprised by our unannounced barging in and we laughed about all that and then Steve and Jim and I went out back and Steve opened the storm cellar door. Which fell open to reveal a flight of concrete steps, a lot of them, going down into the cellar, miraculously lit by the light bulb Steve has for such purposes.

There was some old lawn furniture down there, perfect for sitting, and about two or three inches of water, due to the nonstop rain we’ve been having for the past month.

I was really, really happy to be there.

I tiptoed across the watery floor and dragged up a plastic lawn chair and propped my feet up on the plastic picnic bench while the menfolk went upstairs to do ... I didn’t know what. Luckily it was to bring down flashlights because the electricity went out. Jim and Steve stood on the stairs and looked out and I cowered in the corner.

“If you want to see what a tornado looks like, there it is,” Steve said.

Jim looked up. I refused to budge. I had visions of them being sucked out of the cellar into the maw of the tornado.

Jim said, “Wow.” Or some such thing. I asked them what it looked like and they said it looked like the whole sky full of clouds was circulating rapidly. Right over our heads.

There was lots of wind and debris being blown. And then it got eerily quiet.

“That’s the eye of the storm,” Steve said.

Time went by. Things started to settle down. The men, being all brave and everything, promptly went up the stairs and I timidly followed.

No electricity. Quiet. Rain. The family across the street came over—Dad and the three kids. Dad told us that his wife had seen the twister touch down as she was driving to work just a mile or so up the road and that she had been scared out of her wits but kept going on to the hospital where she worked.

We spent some time talking and laughing and comparing stories. I learned that last year we had had a mini-tornado in our ’hood. Jim and Steve were reminiscing about how it had torn off the tops of their trees. Then I got to thinking. I had written a piece about the wind being so strong it blew my lawn furniture up in the trees and PUNCHED my house and turned my pond into a whirlpool and that the weird thing was that a single leaf just floated straight down to the ground in the middle of all the commotion.

“That was the mini-tornado,” they both agreed.

Steve asked me if I had ever wondered why there were no trees on my hilltop and the little valley you look down before you get to my house. I got an uneasy feeling. He said that in the ’80s a tornado hit three mobile homes right there on his property and Jim’s and proceeded down the road to what is now my property and cleared all the trees out.

Oh ... great.

So I LITERALLY live in tornado alley.

Well, we hung around together for a couple of hours and then we all went back to our respective domiciles and then I started getting phone calls because the news had said three people had died in Tecumseh, which turned out not to be true, BUT a huge slice of Tecumseh is no more. I have some pictures here to give you an idea of how devastating it was.

Nephew Jared and I went by and talked to a family whose house was destroyed and I took their pictures and Holly, who was home with her mom, told me how they ran to the bathroom just as the tornado hit, but she didn’t quite make it to the tub and was knocked down by the force of the tornado. She said it didn’t sound the way she thought it would. It sounded like a loud wind. It went on for 30-40 seconds. She told me this as she and her fiance Charles and Charles’ dad Clarence and sister Martha sat in what used to be the front yard. We were all in shock.

Holly looked over at the house and said, “I’m glad I still have my washer and dryer. I like my washer and dryer.” And there they stood. In the middle of the rubble. Looking perky and cute. I love her washer and dryer too.

Two days later, either 80 mph straight winds OR a mini-tornado blew things apart in Tecumseh AGAIN. Shattered trees, carport wrapped around a house, lots of things just exploded. It was a stretch of devastation about a quarter mile long.

And today, I sat in the service lobby of the nearest Toyota dealership (which is 50 miles away) and listened to a woman tell me about poppers (little tornadoes that don’t register on the Doppler) which just pop up and explode things. When she was little there was a popper (baby) and a big (mama) which went up the hill behind their house and the baby just strewed things all over and the mama straightened all the debris up into one neat row up the hill.

I made it back to Tecumseh a little while ago and stopped at McDonalds for a Number One Combo because I needed a treat and who should be standing at the register but—Holly!

I asked her where she was staying and she said the Absentee Shawnee Tribe had just given her and her fiance a new house and that the Sac and Fox Tribe that her fiance worked for had just given them a bunch of furniture and clothes and things.

And then she said, “We’re blessed.”

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