there are at least three possibilities when it comes to tornadoes, the first being that they're totally random, with no prearranged plan, no reason in particular they might hit one person and not another. this is kind of scary, so people like me like to believe that there is some order to the universe, thus there would be some huge karmic reason, given the big picture, that a tornado would touch down here, say, and not there, for example, the irish catholic church in one town, but not the german catholic church or the czech one in the same town which are just five or ten blocks away (this actually happened in iowa city). ok, and the last one, which i've more or less dismissed. is that god is really and truly in charge, much as i'm in charge of my class, and decides who goes & when, who passes and fails, and has some huge but very stern and specific reason for everything he with a capital h, does, including take any given baby at any given moment.

now as i've said in this very blog, a tornado passed through this way on leap day or somewhere thereabouts, 4 in the morning, we were all in our shelter, and it was killing six people in a small town about thirty miles away, people who didn't have a shelter, or a basement, or enough warning to go to where there would be one. so this area has rallied around and helped the folks who are left wondering, and pitched in & started the process of rebuilding. it's one more chapter in a fairly long story, and it leaves my international students with their jaw dropped to hear it. about three years ago we had what was called a "straight-line" tornado which left everyone going, what's up with that? is there such a thing? and is this a new trend? nobody had ever heard of such a thing but meteorologists said, oh yes, they're rare, but they happen. nobody died in that one and the world kind of forgot it and we were left with hundreds of fallen trees, broken roofs, crashed in houses, lost cars, no power for about a week, that kind of stuff, and we felt rather put-upon especially since the rest of the world just went along on their business like what happened to us was just a blip on the screen, didn't have much to do with the price of tea in china.

the bottom line, though, was that anyone with more than seventy years of memory knows that this area also had the worst tornado ever, 1925, killed a number of folks and since everyone is already related to everyone, just about everyone lost someone and that's ingrained in people's minds pretty much forever in these parts, even five generations later (a generation is only about sixteen years here) it's far from forgotten and you mention the word "tornado" and people will stop to listen to you, even if you don't have jack to say; everybody is a little jumpy and eager to hear any news that someone might contribute.

i mention this because i lived in kansas for six years, and this was in the southeast corner of the state, but kansas is a place where a tornado sucks up a town every once in a while and people say something like, there used to be a town up there, but it's gone, and they probably won't rebuild it. they lost one on leap day, and along with branson and our town it all made the news because hey, it was an entire town. but tornadoes were a fairly regular event out there and the movie 'wizard of oz' did nothing to temper that general image that it was the home of them, as if they were all born out there. once one came through our town, pittsburg, and ripped some aluminum off an arby's and then headed over and roughed up a trailer park and after that i started asking if there was some scientific reason tornadoes headed for trailer parks since lord knows, nobody in the midwest would deny that 90% of the time, that's exactly where they head. nobody will deny that tornadoes head straight for trailer parks, it's a well-known fact. deep in the back of our minds of course is this moral judgment issue, as if god is saying, don't get pregnant too early or you'll end up in one of those trailer parks and then look what happens. ok i'd like to avoid that kind of moral judgment though bringing up my kids in the wide open midwest, tornado country, i'm pretty quick to tell those kids, live anywhere, but not in one of those trailer parks. anyway my scientific theory, that there is something electrical about those tornadoes that is attracted to aluminum or the charge that sits around it (you can tell by the sickly-bruise color and the feeling in the air that something electrical is going on) didn't have many takers. one woman, a born kansan, just outright said, forget it, it's all economic. the rich people study the plats, play the odds, buy the hilltop land, get away from the tornadoes, while the guy that makes the trailer park buys the low river valley because he doesn't care, he's just trying to make a buck fast. and the tornadoes come right down the low flat land seeking out the lowest flattest surface.

now a final theory would be the media theory, namely that a trailer park makes a better visual graphic of mangled aluminum, and looks more mangly on television and frames the crying faces in such a way that all the mangly aluminum is more memorable and influences our midwestern perception, already heavily jaded by the contrast between mangled aluminum and wide-open plain. so it burns in our consciousness in such a way that it stays with us forever. doesn't stop some people from living in trailer parks though.

so i'm showing this television news movie clip to my news class the other day, and it's about this girl in indiana, who got picked up and heaved a hundred yards over to a muddy field by a sawmill, and she actually lived, at least for a little while, until finally her luck ran out and she died. a neighbor woman said basically that they'd prayed to god to save their family, and god did indeed save their family, but then i think she realized, if that's true, than god also threw this poor little girl a hundred yards, let her live a while still, and then took her? and the girl's name was angel, i seem to remember, so that could give you comfort, and make you feel that maybe god had some kind of plan, whether it included this intense sudden dramatic cruelty to a young baby or whatever. i'm just saying, if you go with the order-in-the-universe idea, you've got some explaining to do, because there doesn't look like much order outside of the usual trailer-heads-straight-for-trailer-park and doesn't care if you have a double-wide. the guy in the story will forever have to live with the fact that he thought his double-wide would be safer than their little trailer so he talked them into coming over with him, but it didn't work, and they all got sucked up and thrown over by the sawmill where he actually lived, barely. but my point is, well, i don't know, i forgot my point, don't know why i've been staying up nights, trying to put my finger on it, trying to find some kind of order in the universe.

then it turns out that pittsburg kansas, the night of the harrisburg/branson/harveyville kansas tornado, got hit by one of those straight-line 100-mile-an-hour wind, not only got hit, but this thing seemed to be directed at the very street i lived on for six years. it didn't kill anyone, but some guy was trapped in his house just barely a house or two away from one of the ones we lived in, and it tore the roof off some houses, damaged a school, etc. now this was twenty years or more ago that i actually lived in this town, in a little corner of it tucked away on the south side, kind of between the university and the hospital, a little street that curved around and had a bunch of tract-houses that looked alike. the thing is, life was pretty sleepy there overall, but now they're all standing around going, what's up with this "straight-line" jobby? and the meteorologists are scratching their heads and saying, well, they are known to happen, here and there, though we don't know much about why there would be so much wind and no rotation...my point is that this is all kind of an echo to us illioisans who found out what they meant by "derecho" before we even could figure out how to pronounce the word.

didn't mean to pass over poor angel so quickly, fact is, though, i didn't know her, except the picture i saw as i reran the movie (we always watch them a few times, thus etching details into my mind a little better, but not really doing much to help them actually figure out what was up with that tornado). no sooner than the woman said, god saved her and her family, answered her prayers, did she realize, and then she cried, what's that saying about angel and hers. they didn't pray right? i'm not sure why she cried, of course, i didn't know her either, maybe she knew angel, or maybe she just kind of realized what she'd have to be implying. i myself would like to watch out what i'm implying, i'm not implying anything, except that that wide yellow swath that came directly over these tiny houses i used to live in, directly over, made me wonder, who i still knew in the area, who might be out there, sawing up trees and pulling the cars out from underneath them. a son was born on that road one year, one saturday in february, another time i taught a kid to ride a bike in the school parking lot and he fell, and remembered it forever. they would climb trees and slides out there in kansas and that was a pretty big deal because, you got any kind of altitude, you could see quite a ways, missouri was only five miles away but you could see farther than that easily sometimes, and hear the train for miles. i still hear that train sometimes, kins of miss the way it flattened out going west 'til it got up into the high plains and then, then, they wouldn't mess around.

stability, you might think, would be a steel-beam plate shelter, dug well into the ground, always accessible, etc. i would agree, yes, i would wish everyone had one. here i am though, and wind is picking up, and i'm getting tired, i've had enough, and i'm going to bed.