The Anatomy of a Tornado Encounter

I was thirty-three years old when I got caught in my first and only tornado. Born and raised in Alabama, the Bible Belt’s tornado alley, I almost got swept away by a twister in Upstate New York. See what happens to wannabe Yankees?

It happened at the end of a long week of writing, after a five-minute ride up the road to the wine store to alleviate some deadline anxiety. Exiting the shop with two bottles of red, I saw a dark wall cloud sailing across the sky that wasn’t there just moments before—a telling sign of tornadic weather. There’d been no tornado warning, as far as I knew, because New York didn’t get those. I drove away, trying to escape back home, but the wind and rain and hail caught me two minutes later, coming at me from all directions. A fear shivered into my mind: Am I in a tornado? The vortexual winds forced me off the road into a stranger’s driveway, panicking whether to stay in the vehicle or take shelter in a nearby ditch. I panicked, unable to decide as every breath drew out a lifetime while the rain and hail pounded at a furious tempo. The roar passed before I could make a decision. It had lasted maybe one infinitely long minute. When the eerie after-storm silence came, I felt my heart beating away, trying to break free to find a safer refuge. In the passenger floorboard sat the two jostled bottles of wine.

The news called it a “freak occurrence,” the “wild tornado of Wilton, New York,” another “sign of the times: Climate Change.” There had been sightings of a funnel cloud on the ground. A thin one. Spindly and unthreading like hair down the drain. It carved out a two-mile path of destruction in just two minutes. Some minor injuries. No deaths. The storm had been three miles north of where it sent me fleeing into the stranger’s driveway. I heard it though, from that far away, and thought what everyone thinks when they hear it: like a freight train—fifty tons of force, liquid as the wind.

I used to ponder: a train or a train horn? Train horns consist of multiple pipes, musical chords, containing a tritone, which is a musical interval of two notes three whole steps apart—naturally dissonant and alarming. But after I heard that tornado in New York, I realized those people had not meant an arrangement of notes, but rather a howl of raw power. Of gravity defied. It’s a howling, out-of-control engine that can crush down out of the sky and then lift up again light as a plastic bag. A locomotive that picks up its passengers and transports them into the violent whirlpool of the sky—the gates of heaven through the mouth of a funnel cloud.

It was three miles away and I heard it.

One hit close to home, central Alabama, in my early twenties. I drove down to witness, saw how it did not pull the pine trees by the roots but rather snapped them in half. Like twigs. Not a dozen trees or one lot of woods but all of them. For miles. How some looked almost charred or burned—but by what? I marveled at how the storm cloud had eaten a hole straight out of the center of the Kimberly Church of God but left the gym across the street perfectly intact. What kind of message was God trying to send—that your body is a temple? Work those abs?

Out of the church parking lot, I collected a few shards of the exploded stained-glass window. Yellow, red, blue, green. I carefully rolled them in a brown paper bag and placed them at home in a drawer of memories. Before I left, I noticed above the broken steeple a spiral of buzzards stretching up to the beautiful clear blue. Participants in the sky burial.

Meteorologists, revered or reviled as modern weather-whisperers (especially in the Deep South), categorize twisters by wind speeds: F0 through F5. The most dangerous category, the F5, indicates winds approaching, or even exceeding, 300 miles an hour. For comparison, the biggest, most powerful hurricanes spin at only about half that speed—and a hurricane may have an eye, but a tornado has a maw and a narrow throat.

Growing up, the meteorologist to watch on TV was James Spann. One could get an accurate reading of a storm’s severity based solely on James’s level of undress. During inclement weather, the man simply couldn’t contain his nerves on camera. He grew sweaty, pit-stained, jowly, and Nixon-complexioned. If he’d removed only a suit jacket or unbuttoned his cufflinks, nothing to worry about, go back to bed. But if his suspenders were down and sleeves rolled up past his elbows, shit was hitting the fan somewhere.

When the season of wind and thunder and lightning arrived every year, it was common for my dad and his friends to place bets on how ‘undone’ or how ‘naked’ James would get. At their knees under the table, my brother and I giggled, filling our heads with make-believe stories of James down to his underwear—Boxers or briefs? Definitely whitey tighties!—meanwhile the weather map behind him lit up hornet-red with a tsunami of tornado dots. My brother and I knew it was serious. What I didn’t know was that humor is a common first response to fear, a coping mechanism. Under the kitchen table, we laughed the fear away like the adults surrounding us, knowing no better.

My mother and younger sister, on the other hand, were terrified of bad weather. An angry thunderclap was enough to send them scrambling toward our basement for safety, begging my father, who had the exact opposite reaction, to join us. If Dad wasn’t making fun of the weatherman, he elected to nap through severe storms, up in his room alone on the second floor, while the rest of the family huddled alone in a basement closet, my mother cursing his name. “If he gets blown away it’s his own fault.”

Dad sleeping through the storm made it feel slightly less scary, like something I didn’t have to take seriously, even as the simultaneous thought of losing him made it very scary. Climate change has widened Tornado Alley into a highway, leaving fewer places for us to hide. But the terror as a child wasn’t real, wasn’t lived like that day in New York when a close encounter made my heart pound so hard, like it would escape my chest.

In elementary school, I made fun of our ‘tornado drills,’ which sound semi-fancy but really consisted of nothing more than lining up in the halls, crouching down against a wall, and placing over our heads a single hardcover textbook. Even then, I couldn’t help but snicker with friends about the futility of the protection ritual—couldn’t help but imagine some bizarre Pompeii scenario in which a school buried in the rubble is rediscovered generations later filled with petrified bodies and . . . their books? The future people would surely think, What the hell—they were reading until the very end? Dedicated, smart people, these extinct Americans. The thought made my friends and I giggle until a teacher (not ours) approached and told us to hush up—a funnel cloud had been spotted nearby. And the way the teacher said it, a tone people reserve for the mysterious monsters of the world, put a little sting of fear in us.

When a twister is near, you can taste the electricity in the air. Metallic like nickel or the positive tip of a battery. Like the static between balloons I used to rub in my curly hair. Dad plucked them from my hands and offered them to the ceiling where they’d stick for days. Pure electricity held them up there.

Unlike the distinctive sound of tornados, their shape is something people often get wrong. It’s not a funnel or a cylinder, or any frozen shape superimposed on the landscape. It’s a living, breathing thing. The storm is hot and charged on the inside. Filled with a molecular pulse. Despite my one encounter in New York, and many near misses, I’ve never seen one.

The giants are hardest to see. One has to be far away to glimpse them. Years ago, my friend Kathy described a storm that chased her and her family from their home. That was the same storm my brother and I tried to laugh away under the kitchen table. The sky was volcanic that day, spawning numerous twisters across the state, including one barreling toward Kathy’s house. With no basement or storm shelter, she and her family of six climbed into their van. The safest place was flight. As they sped away, she saw it briefly in the rearview mirror, the living, smoky shape of it, so small in the glass, that black snake plume. “A giant worm going up to the sky,” she told me, relieved that by some miracle it didn’t destroy her home. Or her family.

F5, the most dangerous classification. That’s what James Spann and all the others said the following day. That’s what Kathy saw swirling in the mirror. An F5.

Even things without hearts or brains live and die. Live and kill. They taught me early on in school that the big systems that spawn multiple maws of destruction are called multi-cell storms—or just storm cells. Just like predators, hunting in packs.

What is the anatomy of a tornado encounter? Even though I didn’t see that Upstate New York twister, I did see the dramatic wall cloud that created it. I knew—instinctively or maybe from years of experience?—what that meant: Get away. I didn’t know, however, I was actually driving straight toward it. Wildly, the first thought that popped into my head as the storm’s darkness twisted and gyred around me like an hourglass of ink, the very first thought I had was of The Wizard of Oz, the black whirlwind sucking on the landscape as Dorothy flees inside her home. It had been a family favorite growing up, especially for my mom. We started it so many evenings, but it bewildered me and I always dozed off before Dorothy clicked her shining, ruby slippers, slipping back into the pre-tornado world. It occurred to me then like lightning how much truer the storm looked in monochrome: black and white or the film’s original sepia. How much more terrifying it was because tornados don’t just swallow people and buildings, forests and animals. They swallow the sky, the light, which brings the color.

The very next day in New York, tired from the previous night’s wine, I drove around to inspect the wreckage. This is what we did as a family after a big storm in Alabama—pass through blown-apart neighborhoods that exist now only in memory, Dad at the wheel of his red Ford truck, some kind of big-chested pride in surviving yet another tempest. Was it pride—or hubris? Are we as a species, like my father asleep in the storm, napping through this climate apocalypse? The damage in my little Upstate town was worse than I expected: trees uprooted and hurled into homes, bow-tied road signs, a warehouse completely stripped of siding, a trailer sandwiched onto a van. This is what I almost blindly drove into, all of it laid bare by daylight.

I thought of Oz again and understood why Dorothy awakes after the storm in a Technicolor dreamland, candy-esque and brimming with neon sensory overload. This was just as vital a creative decision as the sepia wormhole that served as a conduit to Oz, not because Oz is supposed to be a magical place (on the contrary, it’s frightening!), but because anyone who’s ever lived through a tornado season knows the day after a violent storm is eerily bright and beautiful. I’ve almost come to fear that post-storm light—as if nature in all its beauty and power and randomness is saying: Feast your eyes on this bright, sunshiny day—there will be much too much to see.

____

Jeff Dingler is an Atlanta-based author and actor who’s written for New York Magazine, The Washington Post, The New York Times’ “Tiny Love Stories,” Flash Fiction Magazine, Salmagundi, Newsweek, WIRED, and more. More info at jeffdingler.org.