Iben Browning’s Chagrin

We grew up in tornado land, going to the basement for an hour, sometimes during dinner, Hamburger Helper on TV trays, or in the middle of the night, spirited from our beds by our parents, who would carry us there in our pajamas. Because of this, Midwesterners trick out our basements with tiki bars and televisions, comfy couches and plush rugs, places our families are OK hanging out for a while, listening to the transistor radio, waiting for the all clear.

When we heard sirens, we’d look at the sky, searching for that sea glass green that meant if you were driving you should pull over, consider lying in the ditch.

Once we were at the mall when the sirens blew and all the shoppers were ushered into secret interior halls we never knew existed. A lady had been getting highlights at a salon and she stood there, hair wrapped in foil, the hairdresser’s cape still wrapped around her. I wondered how her hair would turn out; if it would fall out from over-processing while we waited for the tornado to pass.

At school, we had tornado drills, teaching us the best ways to weather a severe storm. We’d kneel in a kind of child’s pose against interior walls, making ourselves as small as we could, hands up over our heads, to protect ourselves, in case the roof blew off, or in this case, the entire second floor. This drill was the same as the bomb threat drill. Although everyone knew with nukes, it wouldn’t matter if we covered our heads with our hands.

There are few earthquakes in the Midwest; we’d heard of them, of course, and there’s the New Madrid fault, but we only joked about that; no one worried about an actual ‘quake in Missouri. We laughed when Iben Drowning, who wasn’t even a real climatologist, predicted the big one back in 1990. He sounded like a nut back then in every TV and radio interview. That’s what our parents said, anyway, so we forgot about the fault line, and focused on the regular threat of tornados, choosing our homes and jobs for the sturdiness of buildings, the availability of basements, making sure we had flashlights, batteries, and radios. In a warning we listened for the sound of a train. The most unfortunate heard it. One the houses two streets over got hit, the roofs peeled off like dollhouses. A ceiling fan from one of them ended up in our back yard.

On the first Monday of the month as they tested the sirens, before we turned on the radio, we always got to a window, judged the color of the sky, just to be sure it wasn’t real.

When we heard the sound, like a train, but different, the floor shook, and the windows shimmered, though the day was clear, the sky a robin’s egg blue. We headed for the basement. On the steps someone said earthquake, as we held the railings on the way down, the steps shifting, but all we knew was tornado, so we crouched in the basement and covered our heads, which is how they found us in the rubble, pockets, mouths, and hair full of debris, crushed skulls and broken hands, while everyone raised beyond New Madrid knew to get under something sturdy, knew to get outside.