Tornadoes...

December is not usually the time you write about tornadoes. You write about the bad-sweater-Throttle-Rocket-holiday-dance-dance-party where you drank a little too much and danced way too hard but had such a good time you'd do it all again. You write about sitting on the floor and sending holiday cards and being completely envious of Honey's card that has a stamp with HER on it (and now you want your own stamps - roller girl stamps - or new-tattoo bee stamps.) In December you write about all of the droves of people downtown who were holiday shopping and the crazies out with their huge "you're going to hell signs" in the midst of barely cheerful, economically stressed crowds. But I want to tell a story about tornadoes.

The Discovery Channel has a series called "storm chasers" and they're a bunch of SUPER nerds chasing tornadoes across the Midwest and south central US - which I've seen about 3 or 4 episodes and the finale is tonight. I've not really been in any tornadoes in my life. When I was a kid, we had one or two touch down in Geauga County. I snuck into the basement in Denver a few times because of tornadoes that came screaming out of the mountains. I was terrified to take showers in the summertime fearing I would be in the shower when a tornado came (and somehow my family would fail to let me know.)

However, in 2000 when I had returned from the Peace Corps, my mother and I were driving across the Midwest heading in to Denver during the early summer. I had been back for maybe two weeks and we were heading to Jen's wedding. We had stopped in Iowa for an evening but had been pretty much been driving less than leisurely to get to Denver quickly.

We were on I-80 in western Nebraska before it turns down into Colorado. My mom had one of her favorite CDs in and we were rocking out through the terrible rain/lightening storm. Then it suddenly stopped raining. It became that eerie quiet - the sky was filled with dust and debris. Just then, I realized that cars were pulling over to the rest stops. There were hardly any cars on the freeway. I ejected the CD and found the lowest frequency on the FM station to grab the public radio station. By this point all of the cars were off the freeway minus us and an 18 wheeler. There was no place to pull off (all the rest stations were full) and yes, a tornado had touched down just north of I-80. I was looking at the map, looking at the town and the distance to the town we had just passed. Maybe 15 miles. Maybe less. I look at my mom and she looked at me. Gun it - one of us mumbled and my mom took off as fast as she could, passing the 18 wheeler. It was very scary.

And the show reminds me of driving in tornadoes... maybe I should tell the story about driving in blizzards... but we would need snow which we don't have - nor do the mountains.