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When I was young, I was terrified of tornadoes. I guess every Midwestern kid is. Or do we all get traumatised by that early scene in The Wizard of Oz? Here, though, it's reinforced by regular drills at skills and boring hours sitting out tornado watches in the dank of the basement. And the stories--everyone you know has a story about the near miss that happened to them or (more often) a relative. For us, it was the time our great-grandmother came back from going to the bathroom in the middle of the night to find her bed studded with broken glass.
But--as my friends from the Middle East tell me--you can grow accustomed to most anything, and when you've managed to reach your teens without seeing your house swept away, you begin to grow blasé. I mean, I'll never forget my first glimpse of a real "tornado sky"--it's not a green you see in nature any other time--but nothing came of it. The mayhem also seemed to occur in remote areas, to people I had no intercourse with. And the death tolls were always so occasional and so low--not even comparable to the frequent spring floods.
Last week was the first time I can remember that a tornado struck someplace I actually know well. Five days after I flew back from Lambert-St Louis International, it was struck by an EF2 category storm. A neighbouring subdivision where one my high school buddies grew up was devastated; half the houses on his old street are gone. They were calling it a "miracle" that no one was killed, but, really, I think this is the natural result of decades of investment in preparedness. My sister lives barely twenty minutes away, but my only worry on her behalf was that she'd lost power again, as she seems to in every major storm. (She hadn't.)
So this all leaves me all the more stunned by the news from the South. At least three hundred killed? Frankly it's just not at all what I expect in this part of the world at this point in time, and it gives me queegy feelings about the future.
But--as my friends from the Middle East tell me--you can grow accustomed to most anything, and when you've managed to reach your teens without seeing your house swept away, you begin to grow blasé. I mean, I'll never forget my first glimpse of a real "tornado sky"--it's not a green you see in nature any other time--but nothing came of it. The mayhem also seemed to occur in remote areas, to people I had no intercourse with. And the death tolls were always so occasional and so low--not even comparable to the frequent spring floods.
Last week was the first time I can remember that a tornado struck someplace I actually know well. Five days after I flew back from Lambert-St Louis International, it was struck by an EF2 category storm. A neighbouring subdivision where one my high school buddies grew up was devastated; half the houses on his old street are gone. They were calling it a "miracle" that no one was killed, but, really, I think this is the natural result of decades of investment in preparedness. My sister lives barely twenty minutes away, but my only worry on her behalf was that she'd lost power again, as she seems to in every major storm. (She hadn't.)
So this all leaves me all the more stunned by the news from the South. At least three hundred killed? Frankly it's just not at all what I expect in this part of the world at this point in time, and it gives me queegy feelings about the future.