Tornado Alley
Three Tornadoes Approaching, charcoal and ink on paper, approx. 4’x3’
The news of the recent tornadoes in Kentucky has me thinking about growing up at the northern tail end of Tornado Alley. Tornado Alley, for those not familiar, is the expected path of most tornado-forming summer storm systems. It is not that a single tornado will follow the path all the way up the center of the country from Texas to Wisconsin, rather that baby tornadoes are spawned all along the path and vary in intensity and damage. The worst damage is caused when they “touch down” to ground. Often they will hop along, touching down just here and there but completely sparing other adjacent areas.
For kids on Tornado Alley, tornado warnings were simply part of normal summer, happening roughly ten times per season. We came to know a certain greenish color to the sky, an odd temperature, and a sense of impending shift in the world. I am sure this is some mostly atrophied animal instinct in us. Time to turn on the radio for warnings, make sure the southwest, windowless corner of the basement was stocked up, and get off the road or scout for ditches if stranded in transit. Later, as idiotic teens, it was time to barrel around the country roads in our beater cars and trucks looking for a tornado on the horizon to get our thrills and hopefully make it home in time!
I created this drawing years later, from an intense memory of early childhood in the cornfields of Illinois, peering out of a small basement window, with mom’s permission. It gets boring in the basement for hours! Then……three! Three tornadoes were on the horizon across the flat expanse, approaching. Back under the table in the corner! Our house was untouched, but it ripped a newly planted small tree from our front yard. Impressive! Much later, while working as a Psych Tech at the Acute Treatment Unit of the as yet to be emptied out mental hospital, our unit of not-yet-stabilized patients needed to be evacuated to a tunnel that connected us to the nursing home wing. I was young, just 18, and was assigned to stay one-on-one with a large and fully delusional schizophrenic woman patient. I was terrified more of what she might do than the tornado! The tunnel was a bizarre and chaotic scene, a bustle of tense and crowded elderly on carts and wheelchairs, psychiatric patients in all stages of treatment or lack of, bobbing and rocking and vocalizing and squatting against the walls to leave a pathway for movement. All I could do is try to project calm and soothe her and pray! It passed, our hospital unaffected.
I learned that this recent spawn of tornadoes included a rarity, a single tornado that remained on ground level for 200 miles. Totally unusual. Much more dangerous and destructive. I wonder if climate change will cause more of the same, or even change the underlying conditions prerequisite for Tornado Alley to exist as a predictable route. Unpredictability is in our future, I am sure.
