Tornado!

I spent a few days in mid-October visiting old friends in Dallas. It was a do-nothing, mostly uneventful break. Joyce and I took long walks each morning, before the heat. Then Joyce, Tom and I had lunch. Then we hung around. Then had wine. Then we had dinner. Then we hung around watching something sport-y on TV. Old friends with a lot of history behind us, so lots of laughing about the old days…

On Sunday, we we weighing going out to dinner rather than eating in – Joyce is a great cook – when Tom saw that they were predicting an early-evening thunderstorm. So we decided to stay in, and Tom went out to their market to buy some snapper for dinner.

By the time we were eating, the storm was definitely brewing. By the time we had the Cowboys game on, it was brewing even more.

Then came the warnings, interrupting the game.

The winds blew crazily, the rain beat against the windows, and the warnings – which came on every few minutes – told us that there was a possibility of a tornado. We followed along, each of us, tracking different weather info sites on our phones. Then that there was a tornado. Heading our way.

From the outside, over the din of the winds and the rain, we could hear the warning sirens.

Joyce and I took shelter in their downstairs, windowless bathroom. But only for a minute or so. Mostly we looked out the windows while staying away from the windows.

We knew we weren’t at ground zero, but it was plenty noisy out there.

And then it got noisier. Power flickered a few times, but never conked out. Following along on TV, we saw that the storm was heading nearby. Very nearby.

Turns out, it set down a mile or two away, right near the plaza where the store was where Tom had just gotten the snapper. Yikes.

Soon enough, the texts from Joyce and Tom’s neighbors started arriving, the neighborhood check in chain. Then the pictures started showing up on TV. Yep, there was the little plaza. There were the houses blown to smithereens. They named the streets. Joyce has a good friend that-a-way.

Yes, her windows had blown in and they were without power, but unlike some of her neighbors, Mary’s home was intact.

The Home Depot that Tom frequents was roofless, however.

The pictures of the devastation were quite something. Think bombed-out cities.

When a tornado strikes, we tend to think of it striking a trailer park. Or some area where people have little to begin with. Not this one. The neighborhoods hit were pretty well-to-do, solid middle class on up. Way up. One of the homes destroyed was that of Tyler Seguin, formerly of the Boston Bruins, now of the Dallas Stars. A $2M dollar place that now looks totaled.

Loads of folks without power. Roads closed. Etc.

On Monday morning, Joyce and I took our daily walk around her neighborhood.

Lots of broken tree limbs, and four (that we counted) downed trees, two blocking streets.

We spoke with someone less than two blocks away. She and her family had heard more than the sirens. Where she was, they heard the “freight train” sound as the tornado passed by. They were lucky. They just lost tree limbs.

I can’t say that I was ever frightened during this. We never saw the dreaded funnel, and we knew from the news that the tornado was tracking a bit away. Still, those winds and rains were mighty fierce. And another front blew through – even stronger to my ears than the first – between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m.

I trusted Joyce and Tom’s home to survive. It’s solidly built. Then again, I suppose that Tyler Seguin’s manse was solidly built, too.

A few weeks earlier, Dallas had experienced some severe weather.There was a lot of damage to trees in Joyce and Tom’s area. And their friend Mary – she of the blown in windows – had lost a car when a tree blew over onto in. The poor thing!

That earlier storm had come with less early warning, so this time the weather folks were primed and ready.

Whatever they were doing, it worked. No one in Dallas was killed.

We don’t get a ton of tornados around here, and they don’t tend to be all that brutally destructive when they do happen. (Other than to the people for whom they are brutally destructive.) That said, there was a tornado on Cape Cod this past summer that did quite a bit of damage. And one out in Western Mass a couple of years ago.

And, of course, there was a major tornado in the early 1950’s that devastated a large swath of Worcester, Mass. I was pretty little – 3 1/2 – so I don’t remember much. It didn’t hit our part of the city, but there were heavy rains, and I remember water gushing down Main Street. And that we lost power and the ability to flush a toilet. So we had to crap in an old coffee can. (I remember my father removing my turd with a couple of paint stirrers and bringing it outside to toss into the field next to our house. My hero!)

But the Worcester Tornado of 1953 did kill nearly 100 people, including, as it turned out, the grandparents of a high school classmate of mine. Fast forward, and for a while there was a minor league baseball team called the Worcester Tornados. Which in some ways seems kind of tacky, but in another way seems quite apt.

Anyway, I guess I can say I’m a survivor of that tornado (an F-4: violent), and the Dallas (F-3: strong) tornado, too.

But are you really a survivor if the tornado just passes nearby, as opposed to right on top of you. Probably not. Still, I could do without surviving or not surviving another one. Might not be so lucky next time.

Tornados are gaining in frequency, but climatologists haven’t yet pinpointed why that is. I’ve got my candidate. We’ll see.