Trails and Tales Contest Second Place Winner
“Think it will hit us?” Dad asked. It was just after supper, and Dad and we boys were standing outside in the evening sun’s pressing heat, studying the dark blue clouds outlined with white in the northern sky.
“I hope so, but it looks as if it were going through the north.’’ I replied. We were in the second worst drought in the seventeen years we have been living here, and every bit of rain was gratefully accepted.
This, however, wasn’t the only reason I hoped it would hit us. Weather watching has been my foremost hobby for years, surpassing bird-watching in the amount of time I spend at it. Thunderstorms are perfect opportunities to learn more and can bring a great deal of excitement besides, as I learned on that hot, sticky day in May.
“Time to get to work.” Dad announced. “Timothy, you feed the cows. I have other things to keep me busy.” He started walking to the barn to help with the milking. I stayed a minute longer to add a few finishing touches to a bluebird house I had been building that afternoon. Then I, too, started for the barn, carelessly leaving it on a tire in front of the shop.
I mixed a load of feed for the cows, then went outside to see what was happening with the storm. A warm moist breeze from the southeast had sprung up. I climbed a pile of dirt to get a better view of the clouds. Here I met Thomas, my eight-year-old brother. We watched a low-hanging cloud in the west, and I joked that it probably could become a tornado. Little did we know how true that would be.
About ten minutes later, I stepped outside to look at the clouds again. They had changed shockingly fast to a sickening yellowish muddy-orange color, and were now almost directly overhead, with the wind from the east and twice as strong as before. I threw up my straw hat to test the wind. It shot straight forward, went up, then backwards and down, landed, and spun crazily. Almost frightened by my hat’s strange movements, I looked up again. Those clouds look almost like the ones described in stories about tornadoes, l thought.
I ran into the barn and looked down to the other end. The whole family, including Mom and the younger children, were crowded around the door, looking out. This struck me as strange, because they usually didn’t come out while we were doing chores. I started running the 100 feet (30 m) to the other end.
When I was halfway there, I was startled by a tremendous bang on the roof right above me, then another bang at the other end of the barn, and another. When I realized that it was hail I picked up speed. “What are you doing here?” I asked breathlessly when I reached the other end.
No one answered. They were all intently looking out, so l looked too. The wind had shifted to the northwest, and its force was increasing. A few drops of rain came down. Then suddenly the storm let loose and a curtain of rain dropped down.
Dad and I raced to close the curtains that reached from end to end of the barn. On my way back to the barn, I picked up a ping-pong-ball-sized piece of hail but let it drop when the storm grew wilder.
A few moments later the wind was blowing with such force that the rain turned into mist. It started blowing into the barn, so Dad quickly closed the door. Just then the lights blinked off, on again, then off for good. Milkers started falling off the cows, which were still being milked. Dad ran to the other end of the barn for some reason still unknown to me. I followed close at his heels to see if he needed my help, praying for everyone’s safety as I went. I don’t remember what Dad did there, but we soon went back to the rest of the family. Dad forced open the barn door and he and I watched as the trees, ghostly in the eerie twilight, were bent nearly to the ground, driven this way and that while the misty wind swirled around them.
An empty five-gallon pail, a few feet off the ground, floated unnaturally out the open door of the pole shed, turned around, and glided back in. Branches snapped off our two large maple trees as if by some unknown power. Pails rattled through the yard, and there was a ripping sound along the south curtains. My ears popped. The wind shrieked and roared like a monster in unbearable pain.
Mom motioned for us to go into the milk house, any words she said drowned out by the roar of the wind. The outside door was wide open, and papers fluttered in the wind. Dad was still at the barn door, but finally the wind became too much for him and he let it bang shut. Sticking his head into the milk house, he shouted, “Into the utility room!”
The utility room is a small room with its west side protected by the milk house and its south side by the barn. It felt a lot safer in there, but when I leaned against the west wall, I could feel it flex in and out. The storm raged on. Sometimes it seemed to let up, but then continued with renewed fury.
Finally the wind did begin to let up. Dad and my brother Micah beat me to the barn door and were just in time to see one of the pole shed’s big doors land right in front of the house. Soon the whole family crowded into the forebay.
“I’m shivering and it’s not even cold.” I remarked.
“Same here,” my older sister replied.
Dad decided it was safe for Mom and the children to go to the house, although the wind was still fairly strong.
Dad and we boys went to the field to see how far the rain had soaked into the ground. What a disappointment to find that the moisture only went down about 2-3 inches (5-7 cm)!
The rest of the evening we spent setting up the generator, finishing milking and feeding cows, and fixing things up where necessary.
Later we learned that “our” storm was a supercell already being tracked in Nebraska by storm-chasers. It produced several tornadoes; one report said there were a dozen. We know of only one tornado that did significant damage. The funnel of the largest tornado went directly over our farm and touched down a few minutes east of us. Another smaller tornado went through a little farther south, creating a wedge tornado (two tornadoes close to each other). Inside the wedge it is usually very stormy, and so we found it.
One remarkable thing about this storm was that I never heard a single rumble of thunder. Apparently the roar of the wind drowned it out. And instead of traveling from the southwest to northeast, the largest tornado went from the west northwest to the south southeast.
Eight clays after the storm, we took a drive through the tornado-struck area. It was especially interesting in the wooded areas to see how only part of the main trunks of the trees were standing with a few branches or perhaps some pieces of metal roofing wrapped around them. That is a story in itself.
There was at least one storm in each of the years of 2021, 2022, and 2023 that did moderate to severe damage in our community. The dark side of storms like that is the damage they do. The bright side is that they give an old weather watcher like me something to do. And after all, everyone needs some excitement now and then, don’t they?