The '74 outbreak. I was 8. It was April. I had a mini-bike and a red leather jacket. It was probably Naugahyde. I longed to ride every day after school...wearing the red leather jacket, of course. It smelled like dye. Naugahyde.
That day my mother had a doctors appointment in Lexington. I went to school like I always did, got off the bus at my Mamaw Adams' house in town (that being West Liberty), and waited for dad to pick me up to take us both home to the country (Malone it's called) where I could ride my mini-bike.
Mamaw had a thing for weather. It was the same thing she has for colds and diseases; they are things to be feared yet immortalized in some fantastically obsessive way. As if talking about them in the worst light will make them go away, not realizing it's more like that game where you whisper a sentence to someone and marvel at how inaccurate it is by the time it gets to 10 people. A simple cold is suddenly a death sentence.
And so it was with the weather that day - as Mamaw tended to her chores around the house listening to WLKS 1450 (one four five o) and their up-to-the-minute weather reports. They were streaming in slowly but surely - unusual given the lax communication in the mountains in the early 70's. But even an 8 year old could feel something amiss that day. It was saucy. The birds were still. The clouds were evil. Everyone spoke in whispers. I was assured mom was fine more than once, not by Mamaw, of course, since she tended to fear the absolute worst. Dad reassured me.
And so, once I was home with dad's reassurance, I rode my mini-bike to Mark's house. I rode it in the tobacco field across the road. I rode it down Jones Creek, hitting pot holes on purpose. I stopped on the old iron bridge, turned the motor off and looked up the holler to the west. The world was tight just over the ridge. Even the chickens at Ade's farm buckled down early. I rode more. As afternoon turned to late evening, claps of thunder rumbled in the distance, wisps of rain slapped my red leather jacket like the devil's tongue. It stung my face. I loved it.
But when I had had enough riding and yet mom wasn't home, I began to panic. Mind you, I wasn't prone to panic - that was Mamaw's job. In fact, she was to be avoided in certain situations...like illness and weather. So it was particularly odd that I broke form and took on "Mamaw" traits. I tried to maintain composure and dad helped me do that with his reassurances that everything was fine (I always, always believed him).
The evening news; Walter Cronkite announced a day of deadly storms from Texas to Canada. An event like no other in recorded history. More panic. Xenia, Ohio, home to my mother's Uncle Randy, suddenly appeared on screen...in pieces. It didn't even look like a town. It didn't look like anything except scared people in a garbage heap. Panic panic. Quickening of the breath, heart rate up, too-much-Vietnam-over-dinner images running through my head. Poor Uncle Randy. Mamaw calls, once, twice, Uncle Randy, where's Shirley?, Uncle Randy, Where's Shirley?
Just when I couldn't eat one more bite of my Swanson meatloaf TV dinner (a la aluminum tray), mom pulled in our gravel driveway. I bolted. Dad kept eating (he rarely broke form). Mom stepped from the car surprised at a swift welcome home. It's not like she was oblivious to the weather, she just didn't know how bad it was. She absolutely didn't know I knew how bad it was. And she didn't know about Xenia. She had sat through heavy rains and wind, heard news of bad storms in Ohio and Tennessee, but that was about it, she explained...as she casually pulled from the back seat bag after bag of Hills, K-Mart, and J.C. Penney goods. I still had on my red leather jacket. It smelled like dye. The air was deathly still.
Fast forward to 1987. October 1, 7:42 a.m. Whittier, California suffered a 5.9 on the Richter scale. A month later I was sleeping in the Beverly Comstock Hotel (same hotel where Freddie Prinze killed himself...same room for all I know). I awoke to see the walls breathing like a human. In, out, in, out, slow, rhythmic, fluid. The TV was dancing across the table. The windows were rattling. The bed was bouncing like a cheap hotel quarter bed. I looked at the clock. 7:31 a.m. I went back to sleep.
When I woke up at 10, I asked my roomie if they noticed anything odd that morning since, after all, when I woke up the walls were intact, the TV still on the table, the windows in one piece, and no quarter slot for the bed. That's when I found out I had just slept through a 5.1 aftershock.
Last night, as the unusual tornado outbreak bore down on my house, literally, I heard the cop sirens at 12:30 a.m. That in itself is pretty remarkable. I woke up, turned the TV on, went right back to sleep. I would have slept through the whole thing had a friend not called from her closet to wake me up an hour later. I looked out the window. It was raining so hard I couldn't see the end of the garage. I went back to sleep. 30 minutes later another friend called to say she had a twister go through her back yard. Two trees down, fences missing, garages torn apart, siding peeled like a banana skin. I went back to sleep.
Trauma = sleep.
Oh, and in case you're wondering about the uncle in Xenia - here's a picture of the store he was in when it hit. Groceryland.
As he tells it, the sky looked ominous and green. He stopped at the grocery for a gallon of milk before heading to the bowling alley for League night. As he neared the front door of the store, someone yelled to him that there was a twister headed down main street. He turned to see it barreling at him. He ran into the store screaming at everyone to get down. Being a grocery there really was no place to hide. One guy made it to the walk-in cooler while my great-uncle and the other customers lay one atop the other against a block wall in back. He was laying on a small boy, maybe 10 years old, he said. Women were screaming, glass was breaking, the wind was whirling, then nothing. Dead silence. When he looked up all he saw was sky. Every person in that store walked away without a scratch. He found his car sandwiched vertically between two others. He walked home.
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