Caught Inside a Tornado

Well, since you asked, I will share with you my experience of the Tornado of '94. It was Palm Sunday, so like all good little children, I was being driven to church. Halfway there I told my mother to turn around, that I had a bad feeling about something; she didn't, but I don't blame her for not wasting an hour's drive on a ten year old's precognitive revelations.

It was raining when we got there, and the storm increased in intensity throughout the sermon. The preacher was not to be outdone, pounding the pulpit harder as the thunder roared outside. He was a man of the old dispensation, who instilled in us the fear of fire and brimstone, only to be saved by the fortune of predestination. He always emphasized that God was with us in that little churchroom on the mountain, and I guess if God was anywhere on that Sunday, he must have been there.

The sky turned black; the lights went out; the branches thrashed and whipped in the wind. The storm raged...and then it stopped. The preacher stopped; the wind stopped; the rain and lightning stopped. Then the sky turned green, eerily illuminating the trees, frozen as though listening very, very hard for something...and it came. Like a freight train, as they say, but with a high-pitched whine that blew open the doors. Confusion set in; people dove under the pews, curling up and covering their heads for protection. I was still standing, staring through those wide-open double white doors, across the fields at it. It was on the ground, not twisting like the thin, snake-like ones, but thick and hard and bearing down on the earth as though with a purpose. Looking back now I honestly cannot tell you whether I was afraid; I must have been, and was afraid for a long time after that, but trying to relive that moment brings no recollection of emotion...and I watched it coming, then I watched it become two, and move apart, and one went around the church on one side, and the other went around on the opposite side, and came together again and kept moving and it was over.