Ian (while riding with drunk man to his farm -- during a tornado -- to get the generator): "Do you hunt much?"
Travis: "Not so much since we had the kids. I used to have 35 guns. Now, I only have 7."
Or the classic:
"I'm not a crazy person. I just like to drink beer." (Spoken as he carried an 18-pack of Busch Lite cans out of the Cordova Bar and Grill)
And, yes, i know it's waaay too long for print, and I need an editor, but that's what blogs are for, right?!
Before last Thursday night, I can’t remember the last time I’ve been honest to goodness-OMG-what are we going to do-scared.
But when you’re cruising down I-80 in central Nebraska with your two children in the backseat and your husband beside you, as the radio dj anxiously reports tornado sirens are going off all around you, fear has a way of taking hold.
Tornadoes were certainly on our minds already as we foolishly decided to brave the weather reports that afternoon. We knew Nebraska was under a tornado watch, but we had both grew up in Iowa. We’d take our chances. Yes, we now feel very stupid.
Colorado towns like Windsor had suffered devastating losses just a week earlier and Parkersburg, Iowa, 45 miles from where we had been visiting my husband’s grandfather, saw break-your-heart destruction just days earlier. But we were anxious to get home. We wanted to plant the garden, do laundry, just sit and relax a bit before our vacation ended.
It was about 280 miles into the trip that the sky began to turn ugly – draconian swirls of purple and black and gray. Not much rain where we were, but lightening sizzled across the plains in front of us. If you’ve ever driven through Nebraska during a thunderstorm, you know it’s like attending a Laser Floyd show – enormous bolts of fury for as far as the eye can see. “I think we better find a local radio station,” I told my husband. We were just a few miles outside the town of York, and a dj from a station based there was fielding phone calls from area residents. Golf ball sized hail, lots of wind, we’re hunkered down in the basement, listeners reported.
Kearny, the town we had planned to stop at for the night, was being nailed with twisters. Power out. Roofs damaged. The tornado was traveling west along I-80. Mile markers 398-366 in the warning zone. I looked up. Mile marker 366. “Take this exit!” my husband shouted. We got off on a gravel road heading south, where the sky was brighter. Quarter tank of gas, gravel road, two kids watching Barbie and the 12 Dancing Princesses in the back of our black Subaru.
Ian and I yelled at each other, not knowing what to do. The dj was on the phone with a caller when his voice suddenly disappeared. But we could still hear the caller saying “Hello? Hello?” My stomach dropped. Cordova, seven miles, a sign read. A group of 15 or so people stood off the side of the road wearing raincoats and looking through binoculars. Storm chasers. You know, like Helen Hunt and Bill Paxton in Twister kind of storm chasers. Not a good sign.
We headed down the road, Ian calling his parents in Evergreen, trying to figure out where we were going, what the weather was doing, what we should do. We pulled into the tiny town and drove up to the main street (about a block and a half long). There was a bank, a community center, a giant windmill, and one open business – the Cordova Bar & Grill.
Ian went inside to try to find out some news. The cell phone service stopped working. We heard I-80 was being closed down – semis and cars were being blown off the interstate. That likely would have been us, had we not turned off. Not knowing what else to do, we unloaded the kids. As we were walking in, a woman came out warning us: “Don’t go to Beaver Crossing! My sister-in-law says sirens are going off!” We had no idea where Beaver Crossing was (Mapquest told us the next day it was just 8 miles away, and, yes, a tornado did touch down there).
About 15 people sat eating fried food and drinking beer out of cans. None seemed worried. Two kids came over and ran around the room with our daughters, Grace and Anna. Ian kept going to the car to listen to the radio. Our cell phones had no service, but the Internet worked … the weather map did not look good. Another ginormous storm was coming up from Kansas.
We ordered a basket of cheese balls and chicken fingers for the kids. “Let’s try to make it to York,” Ian said after they had nibbled a bit. We stepped outside and the wind was howling, the sky darkening. Do we stay in this greasy spoon or try to beat the storm? The parents of the kids our kids were playing with were leaving at the same time. “Any advice you can give us?” we asked. “Can we make it?” Midwest hospitality set in and the couple offered to take us in their home to wait out the storm. Hoping they weren’t serial killers, we followed them a couple blocks to their ranch-style home.
We watched the weather scroll across the bottom of Lost on TV until the satellite went down within half an hour. The Internet no longer worked on the phone, and the wind outside reminded me of a hurricane I was once in when I lived in South Florida. The kids? Blissfully unaware anything was amiss, as they played with the largest My Little Pony collection I’ve ever seen. Sherri, the wife, was nervous. Maybe not as nervous as we were, but she kept checking the Doppler on her laptop. Travis, a farmer in Cordova, cracked jokes and offered cans of Busch Lite. Grace and Anna were lost in the excitement of new toys, while Macy and Tyler seemed happy to have unexpected playmates.
Then we lost power.
We all headed to the basement in the dark, armed with flashlights. Ian left with Travis in his pickup truck to get a generator from the farm. I was not pleased. When Ian said, we’re “going out” to get the generator, I thought he was talking “out to the garage.” Not a few miles away to the farm during a tornado warning. But they made it safely, and we soon had light. By now, it was around 11 p.m. Anna, my 1-year-old, began to cry like I’ve never heard her cry. Sherri -- bless her heart -- kept Grace busy by French-braiding her hair and playing beauty shop. Macy, 6, played Disney songs on her mom’s phone and worried about her Webkinz getting damaged by the storm.
The power hadn’t come back on, but the wind eventually died down and the sky went from doomsday to just gloomy. If you stood up in the family’s bathroom and aimed the phone toward the window, you could get a signal, so we called the Holiday Inn in York, and, yes, they had power. The monster storm was now headed east toward Lincoln, so we profusely thanked the family and felt safe to head back out.
As we drove back toward the interstate, lightening lit the sky all around us, trees were knocked over in several yards. Had it not been for the lightening barrage and our headlights, it would have been completely black outside. We got back on I-80 and were forced to take the York exit – 80 was closed from there to Kearny. Around 12:30 we settled in our hotel room. The kids were totally out cold and slept through the night without a peep. Ian and I both had terrible dreams all night.
Traveling home the next morning, we saw semis still tipped over, grain bins flattened, every irrigation pivot we passed had been flipped over. Billboards? Smashed to pieces. Interstate metal signs? Snapped in two. The towns hit hardest: Kearny, Aurora, York. The towns we were now passing. The towns we would have hit at the exact wrong time, had we not turned off when we did. Thankfully, there were no major injuries. And the knots in my stomach slowly began to untwist as we grew closer to the Colorado border.
The moral of our story? When you see an entire state is in a tornado watch, please, stay at home. Delay your trip. And don’t mess with Mother Nature.
No comments:
Post a Comment