Lessons from the Tornado

Lesson 1: Sometimes the Bad Thing Does Happen

When the phone alarm started blaring at 1:30 in the morning, I wasn’t sure what was going on. I tend to wake up and come to alertness pretty quickly, but it still took me a moment to get oriented. It was only as the siren started wailing across the neighborhood that I knew what was happening.

There had been a Tornado Watch in effect when we went to bed, but this was not all that uncommon where we live in southeast Michigan, and I didn’t think much of it. I had not prepared a little pile of things to bring to the basement, as I had done some of the previous times when it seemed like a tornado might come our way. After enough false alarms, one’s sense of urgency tends to wane — the ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ and all that — so this time when the alarms sounded and we bounded out of bed to shepherd our kids down to the basement, I just grabbed my laptop, keys, and wallet off my desk. After we all settled in on our basement couch and chairs, I went back up to grab shoes for everyone, just in case, and flashlights, and I wondered if we should try to corral the cats down with us, but this seemed like an unnecessary process, since they’re good at hiding when they want to, and for all I knew they were already in the basement somewhere.¹ And besides, even though the National Weather Service had upgraded the Watch to a Warning, it wasn’t clear that there had actually been a funnel anywhere near us.

This was the third or fourth time in the twelve years that we’ve lived in Michigan that we’ve sheltered in the basement during a tornado warning, and so far none had touched down anywhere particularly close to our house, and I assumed that this would be the same. But once we were down there it did feel different. The light outside of our opaque glass block windows flashed an uncanny shade of green when the lightning struck, and there was a very ominous creaking and rattling noise issuing from our basement bathroom. I actually went in to see if something was loose and moving around, but I think the noise was coming up through the pipes, echoing along from some greater disturbance beyond our walls. And then the lights flickered and went out.

Our neighbor texted to make sure that we were down in the basement. He grew up in Tornado Alley, but still said that this approaching storm was one of the worst he’d ever tracked. We sat in the dark with our flashlights, wondering what was happening above us; wondering when it would be safe to go upstairs, and wondering what we’d find when we did.

Even though the storm was intense and the light was wrong and the sounds were ominous it still seemed unlikely that an actual tornado was going to touch down near us — it just seemed improbable that something like that would happen. So we waited and we waited, and refreshed the weather app and the NWS website, but there wasn’t any kind of all clear alert, or announcement that the threat had passed, but after a half hour or so we went back upstairs. I glanced out into the yard and the giant Black Walnut trees were still standing, so I figured all was fine.

In the morning the power was still out, and the schools were closed, but I texted my family and friends that although we’d had to shelter during a Tornado Warning, we all were fine, and though the storm had been bad no twister had actually touched down. And then I found out that it had.

Tornado Aftermath

Lesson 2: Sometimes the Bad Thing Misses You, But You Still Feel the Effects

Since our power was still out and the schools were closed, I took my youngest out for a walk to see what was what. During power outages, we tend to walk to the local branch of the public library, which is like a half mile away — it’s a good place to get (absolutely necessary) coffee and charge my phone, etc., but when we got to the major road that connects our neighborhood to the rest of the city, it was closed. Not just the four lanes of car traffic, but the sidewalks too. Even the cemetery which forms the eastern boundary of our neighborhood,² where we love to stroll, was inaccessible. There were utility trucks parked across all the lanes and caution tape wrapped around just about every surface. We couldn’t get too close, but even at a distance it was clear that there were power lines down all over the place, and lamp posts askew, and the tops of most of the tall trees in the cemetery had snapped straight off, and a few of the bigger ones had totally toppled over, smashing into the black wrought iron fence that surrounded it.

I wish I had taken more pictures of the destruction because we ended up heading out of town shortly thereafter, and by the time we got back, the crews had cleaned almost everything up. As it turned out, the tornado touched down basically at the entrance to our neighborhood, and then moved almost perfectly down the major road, rather than into the neighborhoods on either side of it. It hit the cemetery hard, but missed Westgate shopping plaza, which is home to our library, bagel shop, Middle Eastern sandwich place, and local bookstore. It did plow into the local ice rink which sits catty corner from this plaza, and knocked one whole wall down. It then sped off toward the downtown, but lost enough power that it didn’t cause catastrophic damage (though it did pull off pieces of the roof of the University of Michigan’s Ice Arena (apparently this tornado held anti-hockey biases?)). All in all, the destruction was not nearly as bad as it would’ve been if it formed a half mile further west, or if it had moved even a couple blocks north or south as it swept along.

In the aftermath of the tornado, what I was most struck by was how grateful I am for working infrastructure and a local government that was capable of taking care of things, because I certainly wasn’t going to fix the power or the lights or remove the broken tree limbs or lampposts. And while now, a few weeks later, you can still see the impacts here and there (the wrought iron fence around the cemetery is still bent in places, and a few pieces had to get removed entirely, and the ice rink is closed for the foreseeable future), if you didn’t know that it happened, you probably wouldn’t be aware that a tornado had touched down inside the bounds of Ann Arbor. But I know that in other parts of the world, heck even in other states, the response isn’t so swift or thorough. It was a good reminder of how very fortunate we are to live here.

And it also reminded me, again, of how awful the ongoing assault on functional government actually is. People like to complain about paying taxes, and they like to rail against government intrusion, but there are lots of things that we do need a functional system in order to address, and it does feel like we are as a country undermining a lot of this.

Tornado Cleanup (ongoing)

Lesson 3: After the Bad Thing Happens, Everything Is More Fragile

When we went for a walk in the woods after the tornado we noticed that, even though the tornado didn’t directly hit the woods, there were a lot more trees down all over the place. A few blocked the paths, and a few were tilting precariously. But then we went out of town, and when we got back the Parks and Rec folks had come through and cleared the paths and taken down the obviously dangerous limbs. Again, the functional government did its job, making things safer for everyone.

But then a few weeks later another strong storm system blew through and a lot of trees that had not looked particularly precarious after the tornado still came down. I’m guessing the first storm upset their roots, and they didn’t have time to get dug in and resettled before the second storm. So they came down hard and took out other trees and blocked the paths entirely, and this time the response from the parks department was less swift than before. Since it wasn’t the same kind of attention grabbing storm, people and resources were not mobilized in the same way, but the aftermath, at least in this one forest, was actually worse.

Second storm aftermath

This all really happened, but I do find the metaphorical nature of it all to be inescapable. Sometimes we just assume the worst won’t happen, whether we’re thinking about national elections or personal health issues, but as we’ve all seen for the past year and a half, there are times when the worst does happen. And sometimes we think that our personal privilege will isolate us from the worst kind of fallout (and sometimes this is true!), but we are still, all of us together, part of a community, and we need to do what we can to help each other through the bad times, but we also need systems in place that will provide support and resources. Individualism and communitarianism are great, but we also need a functional government, and infrastructure, and health care, for all of our sakes. And sometimes we will make it through the worst of something and then think that we are going to be fine, but we still need to also be alert for aftershocks and aftereffects. Getting through the worst moment is not necessarily sufficient.

In the days and weeks after the tornado hit, I have found myself repeatedly coming back to the necessity of the ending lines of Philip Larkin’s “The Mower”: “we should be careful // of each other, we should be kind/ while there is still time.”

Care and kindness. There are worse mantras to embrace, whether we are in times of turmoil, in times of recovery, or in times of ease.

1. Besides we have a little cat door cutout in the basement door, so I can’t keep them down there anyway without putting up some kind of barrier, which they usually just knock aside.

2. I wrote about my love for walking in this cemetery for the Jesuit Media Lab.