It's Giving Dorothy
A field guide to Midwestern emergency management, teenage survival, and other bad decisions...
A few days ago, my husband told me that he read that Tornado Alley is supposedly shifting east. My friend later sent me the same thing on FB so it must be true. Illinois, the place I call home, is one of those more “Eastern” places meteorologists are watching most closely now, which actually tracks. We’ve always had tornadoes but not Oklahoma tornadoes. Or Kansas “Wizard of Oz” tornadoes. Just the kind that fuck up your day for an hour or so and then allow you to go proceed with your regularly scheduled program. But this year so far we’ve had around 5 tornadoes. We had three tornadoes in one week alone. Last week one touched down in the town next to mine. I could see the power lines down and trees scattered over the roads only 10min from my place. But again, every spring/early summer my radar app starts going off like a slot machine and everyone in the group chat starts posting radar screenshots and hot takes. The ironic thing is that no one truly cares. They just like getting hyped. Unlike other regions, weather isn’t small talk here. It’s a full on debate.
“How’s the weather” to so many other people sounds like an awkward conversation filler but here, in the Midwest, it’s like talking about sports. Not in a scary, intense way. But because they’re fun and everyone has a weird opinion about how things are going to go with each new season. Growing up in the Midwest causes a person to not see tornadoes as something extraordinary. Not because they’re less dangerous. But because they’re familiar. The sirens go off and no one really panics. You hear the siren and look outside. Nevermind the fact that your phone is saying to seek shelter immediately and stay away from glass objects. Looking out the window is a far easier way to see if the siren is right or if it’s just being a little too sensitive that day. You check the radar to be sure. And then the inevitable group chat starts debating whether this is a storm to enjoy or a storm to respect. Storms have gotten much more interesting with the advent of social media. We don’t ignore tornado warnings so much as negotiate with them.
It wasn’t always like that for me. I even sheepishly admitted that on Twitter a year or so ago which felt like the least Midwestern thing to say.
When I was six years old, a tornado hit my neighborhood.
I remember the basement better than I remember the tornado itself. It smelled like my dad’s cigars and whatever basements smelled like in the nineties. Mold? Regret? The Creepy Crawlers thing that my brother and I demanded for Christmas and managed to break with rapid succession but never threw away?
There was a bar in the corner and an old Macintosh computer that hadn’t worked in years. It had been broken for so long it had become furniture and only when I got older and looked at an old picture did I realize we had a computer in 1996. The carpet was the kind of shag carpeting that seemed to exist in every Midwest basement at the time. I can see the room clearly, which is wild considering I barely remember the actual storm.
I remember my older sister.
My mom wasn’t home. Grocery shopping or something like that. So my sister was 16yrs old and somehow the person in charge of my brother and I. Looking back, that’s probably what scares me most about the memory. Not the tornado. The realization that a 16yr old was suddenly responsible for keeping everyone calm while the sky outside was trying to decide what it was going to do.
She was scared.
That vibe has followed me for years.
The strange thing is that this is the same sister who would later stand outside with me during storms and watch the sky turn green. The same sister who would smoke Marlboro Lights in the driveway while the sirens blared overhead. The same sister who helped teach me the art of Midwestern tornado etiquette. The act of hearing a tornado warning and immediately going outside to see whether you knew better than the siren ever could.
But not that day when she was in charge and my mom wasn’t able to be contacted. 1996. No cellphone.
There was no discussion. No looking out the window to check the sky or see what the neighbors were doing. No trying to determine whether the weather was committed to the bit.
Just the basement.
For years I shrugged it off and imagined I’d probably exaggerated the whole thing. That’s what kids do. Especially awkward and anxious ones like me. A thunderstorm becomes the end of the world. A power outage becomes a story that you’d be able to one day say you survived. But the older I got, the more I figured I’d turned a run of the mill storm into something larger than it really was. A Main Character Moment. Plot development for my current obsession with natural disasters and Midwestern rot.
Then after a podcast when I spoke with a fellow Midwesterner about it, I looked it up. The tornado that I thought I had blown up in my mind and had sent us into that basement happened on April 19, 1996. 39 tornadoes touched down throughout Illinois that day. At the time, it was the largest tornado outbreak in state history. It turns out the thing that scared tf out of me was actually worthy of my fear and I wasn’t just being an anxious kid who wanted my mom.
Or maybe it turns out my sister knew something I didn’t. At least I hope so.
To this day, I don’t know why she took that tornado seriously when she spent most of the rest of her life treating tornado warnings like the background noise we all do. I could message her now but it’s so much easier to just throw theories around. Maybe she heard something on TV but I can’t remember if the power had gone out. Maybe she saw something in the sky and knew in that split second to yell at my brother and I to get into the basement. Maybe she just understood the danger in a way I couldn’t yet. Whatever it was, it was enough to bypass the usual Midwest decision-making protocol.
Every tornado warning in my life afterward involved discussion.
That one didn’t.
Years later the sirens would go off and that same sister and I would be back outside. One afternoon she was smoking in the driveway when a tornado warning came through. It didn’t just happen to go off while she was already out there. The siren went off and she grabbed her cigarettes and checked it out. I joined her. We stood there staring at the clouds until one of us realized my older brother wasn’t home. He was back from college and a friend’s house swimming and, in all likelihood, drunk. The Midwest vibes are for real. Legit, only we see a storm and think it’s still chill to go for a swim.
Rather than head for the basement which we really had no intention of doing, we decided our priority should be retrieving him before the weather did.
So we got in our old station wagon during an active tornado warning and drove across town.
My father was pissed and yelled at us to get back in the house as we drove off.
Looking back, he was probably the only rational person involved in this story.
He took tornadoes seriously in a way the rest of us never really could. I can only assume part of that was because he wasn’t homegrown Midwest. He was a military brat who moved around 13 times before eventually landing in Illinois during high school and staying. Tornadoes just weren’t in his blood and could never be the same background noise it was for us. He heard the sirens and blindly the National Weather Service actually knew what it was talking about. The rest of us heard the sirens and insane noise blasting from our iPhones and said “we’ll keep an eye on it.”
It was only last year my husband and I found ourselves actually taking a tornado seriously. We did the thing they tell you to do on your phones and took shelter with our cat who was ready to go down with the storm. Like true Midwesterners we couldn’t resist checking it out and watched the chaos outside through our doorbell camera, checking weather alerts, monitoring radar, and making sure cousins were okay in the group chat. Everybody was doing the same thing. Gathering info. Seeing where we all were. Were you in the path of the storm. Were you out getting cheese curds. Trying to decide whether this was a storm to enjoy or a storm to respect.
At some point I realized I wasn’t the kid in the basement anymore.
I was the person checking on everyone else.
Which felt deeply irresponsible for someone who relies on gallows humor as a sole way to communicate to be the one fact checking the radar.
To be the person making the judgement call on whether it was finally time to go downstairs or hang on the porch and see soak in the vibe.
The technology had changed. The ritual hadn’t.
The sirens went off again a few days ago. The Tornado Alley thing is sounding more and more legit with each passing storm. My phone buzzed. The group chat lit up. Everybody had an opinion. Everybody always has an opinion.
I checked the radar and turned off Better Call Saul.
I looked outside.
And for a second I thought about my sister.
Then I said, “We’ll keep an eye on it.”
And went back to my show.
More Midwest bad decisions can be found in Book of David, available for preorder from House of Vlad.
