When I was little, a tornado blew through the town next to ours. We could hear it. It sounded like a locomotive chugging through the sickly yellow-tinted skies. A few days later, my dad piled us all into the car, and we went rubbernecking through devastated neighborhoods, eyes agog at the uprooted trees and crushed roofs. Residents’ vulnerable indoor possessions sat outdoors in the rain.
Scroll forward 22 years, and we had little kids of our own. Whenever we heard a tornado siren, we took shelter in the basement and opened up old MREs from time in the Army. Although the tornado alarms lasted only 45 minutes, we gorged on the crackers and spreadable cheese and grainy chocolate as if we’d been camping down there for days.
Scroll forward another 22 years, and we can’t be bothered to seek shelter when our phones blurt out tornado warnings. What happened to those memories of childhood? The smashed homes and cars and the locomotive rumbles? What happened to the conscientious huddling of our children into subterranean corners?
Maybe we think we’ve lived good long lives and what are the chances that sturdy oak tree is really going to cleave our home in half anyway? Maybe we’re so sleepy that a tornado warning is just a rude intrusion, and we roll over and go back to sleep with our ears covered. Maybe we’ve been through so many of these warnings that it’s like the Boy Who Cried Wolf. I’m not going down in that dark, dank room behind the garage for the 25th time for no reason when all these storms do is rain and blow lawn chairs around!
When we watch the news, see tornado wreckage, and hear that some people have died, we wonder, “Wow, why didn’t they take shelter? Were they deaf, asleep, or just plain stubborn?”
I don’t wonder this any longer. I admit I am one of the stubborn ones. If it comes, I want to take a good photo of it before it hits.
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