The Path of the Storm

I bow to Midwesterners.

Those of us who grew up in South Florida regard each other with a sense of kinship, admiring ourselves and our neighbors for our collective endurance of hurricane season.  There we sit, at the end of Hurricane Alley, as counterclockwise rotating storms hurl themselves in our direction in rapid succession for half the year.  But as frightening as it may be to batten down the hatches and wait out the storm, it pales by comparison to the experience of the hurricane’s leaner, meaner cousin—the tornado.

Tornadoes and hurricanes are both extreme low pressure systems, but they differ in their organizational styles.  A hurricane is bureaucratic, well organized, and well documented while a tornado is agile, like a virtual corporation or pop up store.  By the time word reaches you of a new tornado it is long gone.  

Back in 2004, while competing in a piano competition in Ft. Worth, Texas, I was enjoying a rare night of focus and solitude in my hotel room.   Capping off a day of practice, I was anticipating my preliminary round performance the following day while performing a list of childish rituals and superstitions to which I would rather not admit.  Finally, I curled up in a stuffed chair to read for a while—hoping to lose myself in the life of an intrepid woman detective and some unsuspecting criminal.

Suddenly, there was a sustained roar that sounded as if a jet plane was landing outside.  Before my mind could process that noise—another moment to think and I would have suspected UFOs—I noticed the added sound of tiny objects pelting the glass sliders in my room.  As my attention was drawn toward those doors, they began rattling in their tracks.  I recalled the strange collection of sounds that often accompanied earthquakes in San Francsico; this was similar but not quite a match.  Then there was a strange sensation, as if everything was being sucked outward:  the doors, the walls, the air.  Nothing actually moved inside my room, however the sensation was there and it was palpable.  It was the opposite of having your ears pop at high altitude.

Next was a loud crash, or maybe a pop, followed by complete darkness.  I sat motionless, taking mental inventory of my location and my faculties.  Without the hotel lights on, I became much more aware of the mayhem outside.  There was a mechanical-sounding whine, like the sounds those large trash trucks make when they lift the green dumpsters and compact the debris.  I was not sure what to do next.   Contemplating my options, I realized that I was no longer dressed in street clothes.  Fighting to adjust my eyes to nightvision, I bumped around the hotel room (darn that low coffee table!) reassembling my clothing from earlier in the day.  A voice came over a loudspeaker somewhere but was inaudible.  Carefully, I opened the door to my room and heard people walking down the hall.  Somewhere in the distance was a single ceiling light, lonely, but nonetheless illuminated.  

I grabbed my valuables: room key, cell phone, and the bag of music I was performing that week.  I ventured into the hallway, trying to remember where I was in the predictable floor plan of a Marriott Courtyard.  Fortunately, everything leads to the lobby eventually.  There I found a collection of scared souls huddling around another dim ceiling light.  The automatic sliding doors were forced open and propped into position; outside the torrential rain formed a wall around the jutting overhang.   Humidity filled the lobby space, choking out the available air supply.

People started coming in off the street, appearing through the water-wall, afraid to drive to their destinations.  There were stories of being trapped under the overpass and of driving into ditches for safety.  Finally, someone uttered the word that no one had dared to say: ‘tornado.’  A funnel cloud had not been witnessed and yet there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that this is what had just occurred.  Even the next day, when the local news reported that 500,000 homes were without power, the fact of a tornado could not be confirmed.

I was in Ft. Worth to compete in an event for which I spent three years preparing for every possible contingency.  Or so I thought.  That’s the thing about tornadoes: they can really mess up your day.

Tomorrow's blog:  Resident Evil