The View from Mudsock Heights: Memories of an Old Vacation Spark New Appreciation of How Safe We Are Right Here

Looking at the old picture, I had to laugh. I took it in the summer of 1986 in the Texas panhandle, while on vacation with my girlfriend. She was from New England and had as much knowledge of the space between there and California as most of us have of, say, Madagascar. This is not a condition at all unusual in the northeast.

In the weeks leading up to our vacation, she grew increasingly excited. We were going to drive cross-country and back, in the summer. She would see tornadoes.

This was to me amusing, because I’d spent most of my life in the midwest, on land flatter than it is around here, and tornadoes were not a common occurrence. She seemed to think of tornadoes as being some sort of grazing phenomenon — like meteorological buffalo or something — that dipped from the sky daily, poked around in the fields, then disappeared. Oh, sure, occasionally one went on the rampage and destroyed a house or a town. Clearly, though, she thought of them as sentient beings. One would be okay around tornadoes so long as nothing was done to make them angry.

The storm approaches (CREDIT: Dennis E. Powell).

The drive from New York to Colorado was entirely tornado-free. She was disappointed. We did not expect, and did not see, any tornadoes in the Rocky Mountains or Arizona or California (where she was not eager to experience an earthquake and I was not eager to experience California, so we quickly left).

On the way back we took the southern route and were an hour west of Amarillo when the radio said — for the first time either of us had ever heard it — “This is not a test.” Storms were coming and they were veritably bristling with tornadoes. This is not an unheard of event in Texas, so the commentary was succinct and sensible. There were descriptions of the several tornadoes that had already been spotted, along with their paths and speed. It was easy, then, to calculate when they would be in particular locales, if they held their course and stayed on the ground.

“Here’s your chance,” I said. For some reason the commentary on the radio had reduced her enthusiasm for frolicking among tornadoes. We pressed on, and it was soon clear that a few miles east of Amarillo we would be within a couple miles of a storm containing a tornado. I turned off Interstate 40 an exit past the place where the tornado was predicted to cross the road and waited. I took some pictures — it was a truly impressive storm — but by now my girlfriend was strongly suggesting that we move along. (I thought that a nice picture of her, standing and smiling with a tornado in the background, would be good and would go along with similar ones of her at the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, Meteor Crater, and other picturesque places. She thought that this would tease and enrage the tornado and cause it to come after us. I got the picture, though she did not look at all happy. I’m hoping to find that picture as I dig through the slides; all I have for now is one of the storm.)

It makes me feel a little guilty to smile at the memory of a tornado when only two weeks ago several people here in Ohio were killed in a tornadic storm. Though it happened 36 years ago, the terrible destruction in Xenia, Ohio, remains surprisingly fresh in the mind.

Yet those tragedies notwithstanding, Ohio is not a leading danger spot when it comes to tornadoes. The statistics (well, the most recent ones I can find) tell us that in 2004 and 2005 there were exactly as many tornadoes in Ohio as there were in New York, eight in 2004 and four in 2005. In 2004, there were 179 in Texas, 124 in Kansas, 111 in Nebraska, and 120 in Iowa. Each of those states had more twisters in a single day than we had the whole year.

That’s probably why it is especially shocking to us when there is a tornado in Ohio. The storms surely are a danger, but they’re a rare danger.

When you stop and think about it, I actually live in a remarkably safe place. The wild creatures hereabouts do not, for the most part, pose much of a threat beyond deer in the road; we’re not often beset by hurricanes — the remnants a couple years ago being the exception — or earthquakes; blizzards are few as are life-threatening heatwaves. Any foe of the nation, foreign or domestic, would surely have many hundreds of targets on the list before getting to us. We have no volcanoes as far as I know. Flooding is about it, and we can usually get out of the way of that, most of us.

There really are few places in all the world that are safe and fertile and wholesome as is our area. That is something that I must remind myself is worth noting, remembering, and appreciating.

Dennis E. Powell is crackpot-at-large to Open for Business. Powell was an award-winning reporter in New York and elsewhere before moving to Ohio and becoming a full-time crackpot. You can reach him at dep@drippingwithirony.com.