Weather Fear

My mother woke me in the middle of the night, and helped me put on my raincoat over my pajamas, and galoshes, while the town tornado siren wailed on and on. Daddy held the back door and the flashlight, and we hurried over the broken sidewalk to Mrs. Reed's next door. It was pouring, and so dark, but the lightning was so frequent that we hardly needed the flashlight. We stepped down steep wooden stairs into Mrs. Reed's earth cellar and sat with some other neighbors on crude backless benches placed along the two longer walls, facing each other almost knee to knee, the tiny earth cell lit by a flickering oil lamp high on a shelf occupied by spooky shapes in glass jars. I huddled between my parents, and my teeth began to chatter. Later, probably not so much later as it seemed, the "all clear" came, and we emerged to a quiet, dripping, dark night punctuated by the ecstatic shrilling of frogs. The cloud muttered and flashed at a distance. The air was sweet with the smell of ozone.

In a few weeks, men with big machinery dug an enormous hole in our parsonage back yard, constructed a wooden frame in the excavation, and poured a concrete room in the ground near our back door. I remember when it was finished, Mama and I swept it, and the handkerchiefs we wore over our mouths and noses had round dark spots where our nostrils had been. We equipped it with three army surplus cots, a card table, and some folding chairs. There was an electric light overhead. I put some favorite comic books there. The flat concrete slab top was a great place to play marbles or hopscotch. I was impressed with the metal counterweighted door. In hot summers I was allowed to play down in the cool dry stillness. When the storms came again, we dashed down the concrete steps to safety. Daddy would stand in the doorway, watching the clouds, until I begged him to come in and seal the door.

It is tornado season again in Abilene, but I don't have a cellar. I do have a weather radio that squawks out robotic warnings, shattering sleep. My emergency plan in the event of a tornado warning is if we have 20 minutes to bundle my 80-year mother and her little dog into the car and drive to the library where I work, which has a windowless basement the size of Wal-Mart. If we don't have 20 minutes, into the windowless bathroom we go.

I have memories of fear, and of care. I have a plan, but I do not suffer here in Texas the kind of weather fear I felt when I lived in Memphis, Tennessee. The trees there are so huge -- eighty, a hundred feet tall, bigger around than you can reach. And in storm season when the ground is saturated the wind uproots them and they slice through homes or fling their broken branches through power lines and roofs. Always even a small storm produces an electrical outage. Twice we experienced outages of a week. One weeklong outage followed an ice storm one spring. It was months before all the tree debris was picked up off the streets in our neighborhood. I found that as winter approached the next year, I watched the weather reports with dread. When freezing rain or snow was in the forecast, I could not sleep and paced the house, furious at my inability to protect my family. No fireplace, no generator, gas furnace with an electric thermostat. By the time we had lived in Memphis twelve years, even a severe thunderstorm warning produced the furious anxiety.

That weather fear pales before the destruction of hurricanes. I could not live on the coast. A friend in California writes me with horror about tornadoes, and I write her back in horror at earthquakes. We are accustomed to our own dangers.

The weather radio is on tonight. I hope it lets me sleep. I hope it cries out its programmed warnings in time. I won't lie awake wondering.