9-11-2002

I like thunderstorms. I love the smell of the rain, the sounds of thunder and lightening, and the pretty TV pictures of color Doppler radar.

I’ve seen ducks floating in a pond that hadn’t even been there 10 minutes before. I’ve seen hail being moved by snowplows. I’ve seen hailstones the size of Clint Howard’s head.

I’ve stood under a galvanized trash can lid and deflected hailstones that could’ve rendered me unconscious. I’ve collected these iceballs and stuck them in the freezer to be used later, to, uh, I dunno…I never could think of anything to do with them, other than to heave them at my sister. Mostly my mom just threw them out when I was in the other room, too engrossed in watching the zany antics of Bugs Bunny to notice that my prize collection of heavenly missiles was melting without fanfare underneath the marigolds.

At each of the local elementary schools, they had these big yellow speakers that my grandma called the “air raid si-reens”. For some reason, we never had an air raid in the middle of Kansas in the 1960s, but we all knew what the sirens sounded like. During storms, they’d fire ‘em up whenever there was an official “Tornado Warning”. You could hear those things a mile away. Okay, maybe only 8 tenths of a mile, but that’s still pretty far. With all the elementary schools in the neighborhood, we were NOT going to miss a twister.

When the siren sounded, it meant that a tornado had actually been sighted by a reliable and sober witness. Anyone who heard the sound was supposed to immediately head to their basement, stopping only long enough to collect a transistor radio, a flashlight or some candles, and any babies or grandparents that happened to be lying about. In my family, we took advantage of the extra protection provided by crawling under a card table. Huddled together on the floor under the table, we’d listen to the weather guy on the radio until the “all-clear” was given. I always imagined the weatherman huddled under a card table with his microphone during his report, then bouncing up and running to look out the window during commercials. How else was he going to know what was going on outside?

If we knew a tornado was likely, we were allowed to gather up our favorite stuffed animal and take it into the basement with us. Mine was Yogi Bear, my brother’s was Boo Boo Bear, and my sister had some sort of stuffed pink and gray elephant/dog hybrid thing. Yogi gave me much comfort during these times of stress. But we never had time to bring any other valuables…the good china and “company” silverware would just have to ride the storm out. And it always did.

The air raid sirens were awesome, and probably saved many of us from the same fate as Dorothy and Toto. For some reason, though, they also used to set these banshees off at 12:00 noon on the first Monday of each month. They said it was to test the system, but I think it was only designed to scare the crap out of kids playing on the school monkey bars. More than one local mom had to do an extra load of laundry on those days.

I don’t think our home was ever damaged by the weather. Years later, in the first house I bought as an adult, we had a windstorm that left someone’s swingset in our back yard. Funny thing was that none of the neighbors seemed to recall owning a swingset. When I was a kid, we had a swingset behind our house, but it didn’t even last until the storm season; an obnoxious and enormous neighbor girl sat on it, snapping the top bar in two.

My wife’s parent’s house in a different part of Kansas had the garage flattened and a tree blown up, but otherwise I’ve had no personal experience with weather damage.

One neighbor had their tree split and burned by lightning. The newspaper said that the local golf course, about 3 miles away, had actually experienced a tornado, but the visible damage could be written off to divots made by the insurance salesman who lived in the grody puce house a block away.

My grandma was often at our house during the summer storm season. She had her own storm vocabulary, calling the basement “the cellar”. She also called tornados “cyclones”, and for some reason always said “boo” when something bothered her. But she sure made good cinnamon rolls. Too bad she didn’t live to see color Doppler radar.