Day Tornado

It was the middle of the afternoon. We had eaten lunch and had an hour off to read or do what we wanted, since the weather threatened rain, and father worked on one of our other farms that day. My fourteen-year-old brother, Peter, and I (thirteen-years old) enjoyed our time off in separate bedrooms. I played music on the spinet in my room, and Peter busily braided rope halters for the county fair.

The reverie split in two when mother shrieked in the shrillest and most hysterical voice she possessed, “The cows are out! The cows are out!” The heightened emotion of her announcement didn’t seem to match the degree of seriousness of the message, but we didn’t question her. Peter and I tore outside in a heated blast of energy. We spied the cows running towards the north perimeter of our property, and jetted after them. We peered around as pieces of corrugated metal flew through the air past us, sections of the roof from the machine shed. We gazed, mesmerized, as thousands of bales of straw and hay took flight from the back of the barn. The bales simply lifted and swirled around us, as if they weighed nothing at all. A piece of metal hit my left shoulder blade, and slashed the skin open. My adrenalin pumped so hard that I barely felt the gash. Peter and I glimpsed at each other in alarm and screamed, “I think it’s a tornado!”

We dashed into the pole barn and hurriedly climbed under the axle of the silage wagon. Peter didn’t feel safe there, in case the entire pole barn collapsed down upon us, and so he sprinted outside, lied down in a ditch, and held for dear life onto the long grass growing there.

The noise was so ear splitting that we couldn’t hear each other. The tornado transformed grass, straw, and metal into missiles. Pieces of straw and hay penetrated telephone poles. The undulating winds ripped birds from the sky and sliced them in two. Tractor tires ripped through the air, as if driven at high speed, spinning and vibrating towards their target. An old bathtub rotated on a platter of wood, and fell unexpectedly with force into the horse pasture. The piercing high-speed winds leveled the barbed-wire fences and drove the cattle and horses out into the open acreage where they galloped with terror for miles.

Through the last leg of the onslaught, I laid in the muck under the axle of the silage wagon and waited expectantly for the winds to calm down. The screeching turned to a whistle and I dared to climb out from under the silage wagon, and Peter arose out of the ditch. We peered around at the devastation. My body shook so violently that I couldn’t utter a word. Peter’s eyes reflected blank-stared saucers.

We shook ourselves out of the immediate state of shock, and hurriedly jumped on a tractor to round up the cows and horses. I grabbed my bridle and felt to see if I still had a ready supply of carrots in my back pocket, and I did. I eyed my magnificent American Saddlebred horse, King, a half mile away. Peter dropped me off as he sped after the cows on the tractor. I hiked out to King, who felt nervous and hysterical with fear. After a few sweet carrots, his outlook calmed, and I could bridle him. I assured him that the distraction of working would ease his tension. I threw myself up onto the giant horse bareback, and galloped my gallant steed to the far side of the field where the majority of the cattle dwelt. King and I jumped the ditch, circled the cows around towards the one standing fence, and then slowed our pace as we guided them back to the confines of our farm. We blocked the hole in the fence with the tractor and wagon, and focused desperately on reestablishing our routines with the animals.

After we had milked the cows, and fed all the animals, father returned home to survey the unexpected destruction. He asked pointedly, “Why were you out in the tornado?” It was then that we realized that mother must have seen the approaching tornado out the window, and became frozen and mesmerized by its power. She could only speak when she witnessed it careening through the fences and chasing the cows. That is when she yelled at us about the cows, and that’s why she sounded so unnatural.

All of us learned to fear tornadoes that day, and undertook the gathering of information about clouds, atmospheric conditions, and safety measures. We needed peace of mind that we would be able to handle the extreme chaos in the future for we felt that history would most certainly repeat itself, and it did.