Night Tornado

The far off dusky sky grew black and green, and crackled with sparks of light as the impending storm approached. The eerie silence of the night even sent the fireflies under cover. All of nature understood the warning of the hushed quiet. The frogs stopped croaking and the crickets discontinued chirping.

We had milked the cows and turned them outside for the night. The horses had their own pasture in which to mill around. We turned them outside because the animals were safer outside than inside during a storm that might produce a tornado. At least they could run rather than remain chained inside a barn that had all the potential of becoming a graveyard.

We set up our makeshift beds in the southwest corner of the basement, and settled the children to sleep with bedtime stories and ice cream. The busy day caught up with them, and they closed their eyes to sleep. We gave the older children orders to make certain that no one left the room and headed for upstairs. The bathroom breaks were completed, and so there was no need to retreat to the first floor.

The toxic storms always approached from the southwest. Because of that anomaly, the storm would hit the southwest corner of the house first, and possibly blow the house away from the sunken corner where we laid. A tornado could blow a car from the driveway and drop it easily into a room nearby, but it wasn’t as likely to happen in the southwest corner of the house. Even if the entire house exploded and lifted, that corner promised a greater chance for survival.

After we settled the children into their beds, my brother and I stole upstairs to keep an eye on the approaching storm. We judged how close the storm crept by the proximity of the lightning and the audibility of thunder and winds. We listened with prickly attention for the sound of a freight train, the sound we had heard on two previous occasions when tornadoes had hit our farm.

My brother and I cracked all the windows of the house on both the approaching and receding sides of the storm, so that the house wouldn’t explode upon impact. The storm arrived with screaming winds, heavy rain, and hail. We retreated to the basement to be with the other children. The electricity failed, and then we operated with flashlights. The onslaught subsided and the rain discontinued.

The hair on the backs of our necks stood up in the dead silence as we listened acutely to the night air. We could hear the shrieking engines of the night tornado, in the distance, as it drew near. We feared for the lives of the horses, cows, and yearlings outside. We held the smaller children in case we would have to move quickly, for some reason. We hovered as close to the southwest wall as we could get despite the spiders there. For a moment, it felt as if my heart had stopped, but then I experienced the supercharged energy of a teenager able to react at a second’s prompting.

The screeching train didn’t seem to draw closer even though we could hear it clearly. We heard the night tornado impact with something. It screamed, shattered, and sounded like the flattening of a toothpick building, and then nothing. The sound disappeared and jumped further west away from our farm, just as an unpredictable funnel will do. The truth is that we probably would have been safe upstairs, but we camped downstairs for a couple more hours simply to be certain.

My brother and I had already seen and experienced day tornadoes, and observed the path that they cut, but night tornadoes are another story. The unseen terror and unknown strike zone kept us on high alert. We knew that a night tornado was a black shrieking menace ready to shred the land of its order and disarm a man of his sanity.

What experiences do you remember from your childhood?