by Megan Blodgett
Written while living in Albuquerque, New Mexico
Since I was young, I’ve had this theory that tornadoes always hit the same places. When I was five years old, both my parents moved to suburbs in a part of Oklahoma referred to as “Tornado Alley,” because it is hit over and over and over again by tornadoes. The first high school I attended was hit multiple times. In the ‘90s, the school was ripped apart by a tornado, and some of the students went with it. There’s a plaque dedicated to them outside the front entry. For as long as I lived in district, that school was hit or damaged by a tornado at least three times. The town of Shawnee, where my little sister’s dad lives, gets hit almost every year. I’ve seen my little sister watching the weather channel with her phone in hand, waiting to see if the tornado forming above will touch down and wreck the plot of land her dad lives on. My Nan and Poppy live at the tail-end of Tornado Alley, so far south it’s almost Texas, and they have sent me texts every time there has been a tornado to tell me they and their dog, Sandy, are fine and safe. We have to check if our loved ones are okay.
In Oklahoma, from mid-March through early October, there’s a weather phenomenon colloquially referred to as “tornado season.” Even more colloquially, “nader weather.” (This can and should be read in a thick, put-on hick accent). During those eight months, the atmospheric conditions over the Great Plains are just perfect enough to cause thousands of tight, fast-speed air channels to form. The weather conditions required for a tornado occur when a cold front meets a warm front, high up in the clouds, and they meld together with an exact amount of air pressure, humidity, and wind to create a funnel of whipping air. More often than not, tornadoes occur in the afternoon and early evening, when the heat of the day meets with the cool of the night.
I don’t know the science of it well, but my kindergarten class did take a tour of the weather center, so I know a little. There’s no wonder for me as to why the state of Oklahoma has one of the nation’s best meteorology school when we’re hit over and over by these tornadoes. Even though we don’t know the full science of it, every Okie understands when one is coming. Tornado season is a fact of life for us, in the same way wildfires are for Californians and hurricanes are for Louisianans.
I had never thought to explain how tornadoes worked before I moved to a state that doesn’t have them. There’s a feeling in the air, which you only recognize if you’ve lived most of your life in those two seasons. A four-month calm and an eight-month panic. It makes your hair stand up on the back of your neck, and you collect your important paperwork and pets before hunkering down.
The air is, at best, sticky. Your clothes slick to your body with sweat a bit more, your hair gets a little frizzier, the warmth wraps around your body like a blanket that hasn’t finished in the dryer. It’s hot and sticky, and never in a good way. It’s hot and sticky in the way we were in a drought for two months one summer before it rained almost nonstop for a week and we were still in a drought. In the way the two-lane, pothole-riddled road between my house and my best friend’s house was flooded one day and bone dry the next. In the way the entire suburb of Norman swarms around the public pool in June, July, and August, spending most of the day there until dark clouds roll in and we all rush home, the stale air smelling of chlorine in our humid metal shelters. In the way of my childhood, when I would press the washcloth from my bath over my face, covering my mouth and nose, and try to breathe in through the warm, damp cotton. That is the kind of hot and sticky it is.
The sky changes, too, in a way a person from Oklahoma can tell something is coming. Most days, the sky is bright blue. Not as bright as it is in Albuquerque, where it feels artificial and painted-on. There are fluffy white clouds that block out the sun’s sheer brightness while still allowing for second-degree sunburns. When a tornado is forming, the sky turns a sickly sepia-tint or a pea-soup color, the way a cartoon character’s face does before they vomit. Wall-clouds are the final way of seeing the change.
The state of Oklahoma is about as flat as a state can get. When I’m driving on an incline in Norman, I can see the Devon Tower, which is the tallest building in Oklahoma. The Devon Tower is about twenty miles north of the suburb of Norman, where I grew up. When a wall-cloud forms, you can’t see more than a mile forward. The only way I can think of to describe a wall-cloud is the old-time-y photos of the Dust Bowl, where a wave of dust and dirt and debris is barreling toward a house in the middle of nowhere.
When the air gets a little more humid, the sky becomes a little dimmer, and the wind kicks up a little stronger in Albuquerque, I text my best friend and tell her it’s “nader weather.” As soon as the weather conditions would be just perfect for a tornado if we were back in Oklahoma, we get a kind of devilish grin on our faces. There’s something intensely morbid about loving the formation of rot and destruction in the atmosphere. I don’t think we will experience that fascination in the same way when we’re back home this summer.
Other than the feeling in the air, there’s the sound of the news playing in every momma’s kitchen or living room. The location of the TV doesn’t objectively matter, as long as it’s in sight. For those eight months, we’re all a little on edge as we listen to the evening news. My mother used to switch our kitchen TV between Channel 5, with KOCO’s Damon Lane, and Channel 4, with KFOR’s Mike Morgan, listening for whichever forecast agreed with her opinion of the weather best. Mike Morgan’s introduction during the season is about as distinct of a catchphrase as a weatherman can have.
“Good evening, folks, I’m Mike Morgan and this is your 4Warn weather forecast.”
In central Oklahoma, there’s a joke that you know it’s going to be a dangerous night when Damon Lane rolls up the sleeves of his button-up and takes off his patterned tie. He only wears patterned ties on the days we’re under a tornado watch. My stepmom prefers for our living room TV to play Channel 9, with News9’s David Payne, but I haven’t spent as many seasons with her.
The sounds of tornado season would be the most distinctive way of knowing. There’s the news and the changing sky and the knowing, but then there’s the sound of the sirens. The sirens tell you definitively, terrifyingly. They’re taller than most buildings and skinny with a blaring, covered speaker on top. In Oklahoma, there’s no concern about ruining the view of the landscape with ugly poles when we’re worried for most of the year about our houses being ripped from the ground. The poles are gray, uniform, and there’s one in every square mile of Cleveland County—the county I grew up in—so that everyone can hear them when they go off. Each county in Oklahoma has their own specific day to test their tornado sirens. Saturday at noon is when Cleveland County tests theirs. In Stillwater, the small college town I’ll be moving to in August, they test their sirens on Wednesdays at noon. When under a tornado watch, the county won’t run its siren tests that day, as a way to keep people from hiding when they don’t need to yet.
As far as the sounds of the tornadoes themselves, I don’t know with firsthand knowledge. A friend of my brother’s told me once, after his grandparents’ house was hit while he and his family were in their storm shelter, that it sounds like a train is passing over your head. We were young then and curious and unknowing of the effects of trauma on a person’s emotions.
When my graduating class was in the fourth grade, on May 20th of 2013, an EF-5 tornado hit Moore, Oklahoma toward the end of the school day. The ranking scale for tornadoes goes from EF-0, with sixty-five to eighty-five mile per hour winds, to EF-5, with winds over two hundred miles per hour. Most dust devils in Bernalillo County don’t even hit fifty miles per hour. The average wind speed in the county I grew up in is just under eighteen miles per hour. In Bernalillo County, the average wind speed is a bit over sixteen miles per hour.
I was in Norman when the EF-5 tornado hit Moore on May 20th, less than twelve miles away. My grandpa had picked me up early from school to take me to their house. It was bad when kids got checked out of school. I didn’t know, then, the destruction it was going to wreak.
I only ever knew the after and the stories other people told me. My stepdad told me of tearing through people’s yards, trying to get to my older brothers’ mom’s house. My middle brother wasn’t answering his phone. The tornado was coming and my stepdad was speeding through people’s yards to avoid the cars in the street in his lifted Nissan X-Terra and my brother wasn’t answering his phone. Reception is bad during tornado season—the clouds block out the signal transmissions. My brother was fine. He was playing video games and wasn’t paying attention to anything outside of the screen and controller. After my stepdad found out about my brother, he drove over to the Plaza Towers neighborhood. The damage was unspeakable in that neighborhood.
Our long-time family friends had a home there. In the center of the neighborhood, there was a school—Plaza Towers Elementary School. It was a school and neighborhood of mainly working-class families, which meant a lot of the children were still inside the school when it was hit because their parents couldn’t take off from work to pick them up. Chase called my stepdad, frantic. He was stuck on I-35 that day with hundreds of other parents leaving their jobs to try to get to their kids. His wife, Alise, had called him and said she wasn’t able to pick up their older son, Liam, from Plaza Towers Elementary School. She said she hadn’t had the news on and didn’t hear the sirens blaring until the tornado was there. Alise had taken their baby boy, Noah, and their dog, Lincoln, to the house across the street to get into their neighbors’ storm shelter. Chase couldn’t get to Alise. Alise couldn’t get to Liam. My stepdad could.
My stepdad is not a perfect man. He was in the military and hopped around between branches when he got injured and discharged. After he divorced his second wife, he didn’t see his three sons except for a couple days every month until he met my mother, when she made him start seeing them more. All of this, from the military service to the lack of a social support system, led to him having a lot of untreated PTSD. After that day in 2013, my mother told me he had never seen anything more haunting than the faces of those mothers trying to get to their babies as they were blocked off by police. Women were jumping the fence outside of the school and sprinting to the destroyed building, digging through the rubble to collect their children. The devastation, the lack of humanity when those police officers blocked those mothers from picking up their children who had been hit by a tornado, who had been killed by a tornado, destroyed him more than anything he saw in the military during the early 2000s.
I was a lot older when I found out what had happened to Liam. In the South, there is always a sense of walking on eggshells after something happens that isn’t Christian or isn’t what a good momma would do. There were times I overheard my parents talking about Chase and Alise fighting, but I didn’t understand what they were fighting about. I only overhead snippets of the conversation.
It wasn’t until I was in high school that I watched the movie my church helped to produce about that day, called Where Was God?. The documentary interviewed survivors of the tornadoes and congregation members. The movie featured Chase and Alise, and they discussed everything that had happened. Alise hadn’t been paying attention. My mother always said it was because she’s the artsy-fartsy type. Chase blamed Alise for not getting Liam. It almost ruined their marriage. Liam only survived because his teacher laid on top of him and several other students. He only survived because her body shielded his from being crushed by a concrete wall. Seven students died that day at Plaza Towers Elementary School, and the only reason Liam wasn’t one of them was because of his teacher, not his momma. She was paralyzed by the concrete wall. My parents had talked about her too—said she shouldn’t have gotten pregnant so soon after her injury. Gossip is as common as prayers where I grew up.
In the weeks after the May 20th tornadoes there was a sense of community, despite the gossip and the loss of faith and the destruction, which overwhelmed the state of Oklahoma. There were the people from Oklahoma, people who grew up with this phenomenon and knew what it meant to have their life ripped to shreds every year, and then there were the people who came in to “help.”
My youngest older brother, myself, and every other kid in our Sunday school class got tetanus shots after the tornadoes, abbreviated in our immunization records as T-DAP. There was an issue of sanitation. There was an issue of not knowing if another tornado as ruinous as the May 20th tornadoes, as they came to be known, would be coming through. It was early in the season. No one knew what we would be digging out of the ruins of our friends’ houses, and we prayed it never happened to us, never force us to itemize our own lives for insurance companies. For a while after, my parents drove my youngest older brother and I to the Plaza Towers neighborhood as often as possible to help Chase and Alise. I wore my mother’s pink gardening gloves as we dug through what was left of their home.
It’s a little funny, the way tornadoes work. They don’t tear everything apart—they just pick up and drop off bits and pieces. Liam’s closet was still fully intact, so he got to keep most of his clothes. They were a little water-logged and mud-stained, but mostly fine. The rest of the house was destroyed. The artwork Alise had made was strewn across the neighborhood. I found a sketchbook in which she had drawn out her sons’ names before they were born. She had told me she wanted to know what they felt like before she named the boys. It was one of the only salvageable bits of their house left.
One day, I don’t remember when exactly, it took a lot longer to get into the neighborhood. It felt like hours to me, but I don’t know how long it actually was. I know I fell asleep and woke up groggy and sweaty. When I was fully awake, a police officer was talking to my parents.
“IDs, please,” he said.
My mother fished her faux red leather wallet out of her big, chunky purse. She changed her purse every season, so I can’t be sure what it looked like. I know it had a zipper to keep everything inside, and her keys were hooked onto it with a loop made from an engraved silver spoon. My stepdad leaned forward over the steering wheel and dug his trifold out of the back pocket of his cargo shorts. They handed their driver’s licenses over to the officer. He scanned and handed them back.
“Only the people who live here and who know those who live here are allowed inside the neighborhood.”
Ironic, isn’t it? No one was living there anymore. There was hardly anything left of the neighborhood. No life left to be had in the houses and homes that no longer existed.
“Well, we know people who live here,” my mother said, leaning across my stepdad to talk to the officer. She did this always, the leaning across my stepdad thing. She did it at every drive-thru, at the bank, and with police officers.
“Do you have verification of that?”
“No, but we can call them.”
“Call them, please.”
“I’ll call Alise, you call Chase,” my mother instructed my stepdad.
The reception was still bad, and it took a long time to get a call through, but eventually Chase picked up the phone to vouch for my family. We were allowed through, driving slowly to avoid the rubble still sweeping through the streets. Liam and his younger brother, Noah, weren’t there any time we were picking through the refuse and residual pieces of their home. It was good. They were little and had been through enough already. We could pick up the pieces for them.
I learned later, when I was a bit older, the reason we hadn’t been let through that day was because President Barack Obama had come to our small town of Moore, Oklahoma. I was angry when I found out, and I still am. The President of the United States wasn’t going to get down in the ruins wearing already-torn shorts, junky tennis shoes, and his mom’s pink gardening gloves. He hadn’t gotten a tetanus shot, thickening up his arm for nearly a week, to prepare for the fact that his legs might be ripped into by rotten wood or rusted nails. The President of the United States was there to harp on the tragedy of the situation, to ask for money, and to shake clean, undamaged hands. It has always felt exploitative to me, like someone was using our tragedy as a talking point.
After the tornadoes in my fourth grade year, the state paid for every student to have a helmet to wear if a tornado was to hit their school. They had conducted some study showing most kids in the May 20th tornadoes were injured by shrapnel hitting their heads. The helmets were a Band-Aid situation. I remember the news stories about children dying or being injured from drowning and being stuck in a school’s basement more than I remember stories about them being struck by shrapnel. Nothing is ever tornado-proof.
Around a year after the tornadoes on May 20th, I was called into the office of my elementary school in Norman. I don’t remember why. Maybe my grandpa had come to pick me up, as he was so apt to do on days we were under a tornado watch. He has been scared of them since that day, when those children died and my grandma took shelter in a random apartment, despite having been down the street from her son’s CPA firm and less than three minutes from her house. So maybe Grandpa had picked me up. I don’t remember. What I do remember is walking in and seeing Liam standing in the front office. His little chest heaved through the sobs, taking in multiple breaths on every inhale.
After the tornadoes, our family friends didn’t rebuild their home the way many people in Tornado Alley do. Instead, they moved to a brand-new home in Norman, and they put Liam in school at my elementary. They wanted him to have a fresh start. I don’t know if fresh starts exist for people with PTSD. Liam was standing there when I walked into the office of our elementary school, talking to one of the reception ladies in the way little kids do when they’re crying and still trying to communicate. I tried to console him, but was pushed away and told to mind my business. I didn’t know how to explain to these women who had watched me grow up that this little boy with PTSD from nearly dying in a tornado was a part of my community they didn’t know.
They didn’t know that I had known Liam before my mother told Alise she thought he might have ADHD. I was the first person outside of his family to hold his baby brother, Noah, and I was the one that watched the two of them when we had backyard barbecues in the summer. I didn’t know how to explain, in my eleven-year-old language, that they knew nothing about the situation, and I knew as much as anyone who hadn’t experienced it could. I had been in the aftermath, and I had grown up more in that week than any ten-year-old should ever grow up, and Liam had a lifetime of growing up forced on him in a matter of minutes. Liam knew what was going to happen when the sky changed, and he was panicked because he almost didn’t survive it the last time. How do you explain that when you’re a child?
I moved schools shortly after that, transferring to Moore Public Schools to be in the same school as one of my brothers. Liam moved to a private school my kindergarten teacher had started, called Terra Verde Discovery School, which has kindergarten through middle school offered with a small cohort and a devoted group of teachers. He is in high school by now.
At my first high school, after the tornado in the ‘90s, they built a tornado-proof section of the halls. On days when the sirens were screaming, we were all crowded into that hall like the cattle outside of Amarillo, our backpacks pulling on our shoulders and our hearts in our throat. None of it was ever safe. When my graduating class started to drive, we would text our parents and ask if we could go home. All of my parents had work all day, so none of them could pick me up. But my mother or dad could call Ms. Donna at the front desk and ask her to check me out for the afternoon. They would only do so if absences were excused due to inclement weather. Otherwise, I was stuck at school until cross-country or track practice was over. If absences were excused, I would get called out in about fifth hour, so I missed a lot of Pre-AP Chemistry.
“Mrs. Simmons, will you please let this student know her parents have called and said she’s to go home?” Ms. Donna’s voice would call over the intercom. Ms. Donna sounded like she smoked a pack a day, but she always smelled good in the way all southern women do. The phones would be heard ringing in the background.
More often than not, I was at my mother’s house when the tornadoes hit. We had a storm shelter in the garage. Most houses in Oklahoma have a storm shelter somewhere on property. The shelter itself is dug into the ground, paved with concrete, and set up with rickety stairs leading into the ground with carpet-covered plywood benches that can be removed to fit more people. Every spring, my dad or my stepdad gets down into the shelter and vacuums the spiders and leaves and dust out. My stepmom or my mother then stocks it up with an orange Home Depot bucket, meant for emergencies where we were in the storm shelters for a long time and couldn’t get out to use the bathroom. Then, they place a package of bottled waters, granola bars, and other nonperishables inside. On the days we’re told to get into our shelters, we put all the pets in their houses and collect any important files or paperwork we might need as identification before piling everything and everyone into the shelter. I take my “go bag,” which is a drawstring backpack with a change of clothes, a pair of tennis shoes, an emergency blanket, Band-Aids, tampons, and a plastic water bottle. You never know what you’ll have left after a tornado comes through, so you have to make sure you’re prepared for the worst.
I don’t know what my mother and stepdad do for tornadoes anymore, but I assume it’s the same routine as it has been for as long as I can remember. We had a storm shelter at my dad and stepmom’s old house, but we moved recently. The new house doesn’t have a storm shelter. We use the pantry for now, which is big enough to fit all four of us and the dogs. We’ll have plenty of food in case we’re in there for a long time. There’s no running water connected to the room, and there aren’t any windows. My dad said he’s planning to call up the people who put in storm shelters after this season is over. During the season, it’s more expensive to get a shelter put in because there’s more demand. The people who put them in are also busier in the season. Having one put in out of season is cheaper and quicker, and it gives the family time to get ready for the next season. This cycle is always happening. Everyone in Oklahoma prepares for tornadoes at any given moment.
When thinking about moving back to this season of readiness and panic and destruction, I wish I could say a part of me was terrified. If I’m being entirely honest, though, I’m not as worried about it was I probably ought to be. Perhaps that comes with living there for nearly two decades. Perhaps it’s a form of Stockholm syndrome.
The honest to God truth is that I’m not anxious about going back to tornado season, and I know exactly what I’ll do when I get home in a couple of weeks. On the days that I’m at home with my family and a tornado warning comes through, I’ll gather my go bag and my pets and sit in the pantry with the news playing on my stepmom’s iPad until the warning is over. When I move into my own apartment, I’ll do pretty much the same, except I’ll sit in the floor of the laundry closet with my cat, who I will have coerced in there with a catnip treat, and a blanket and pillow. My laptop will be playing the news quietly as I do homework, because I can’t stop existing in those hours that are occupied with anxiety. I’ve had the anxiety all my life, and I’ve learned to cope with it.
When I tell my friends from New Mexico about the tornadoes I grew up surrounded by, they say, “Oh, my God! I can’t imagine!” And they can’t. They could never imagine over one hundred miles per hour of wind and dirt and water swirling through their cities and tearing up their lives. They can’t imagine it in the same way I couldn’t imagine a desert in the valley of two mountain ranges experiencing monsoons in late summer. Weather changes people. Tornado season wrecks us all.
Megan Blodgett is currently studying English at Oklahoma State University. She is the Poetry Editor for Frontier Mosaic, though both of her pieces published in this edition of Frontier Mosaic fall into other genres. As a writer, she is interested in exploring themes of womanhood and mental health in various genres. Outside of writing and school, she enjoys crocheting, trying (and often failing) to become an amateur gardener, and being with her elderly tabby cat, Jake.