The Mad Minstrel

June 9th, 2001- Just west of the Kansas boarder. It was on those desertous plains that I first gained an understanding of what it meant to work in service of others, what it meant be in healthcare, and what it meant to live in Tornado Alley. And it was then, on that seemingly innocuous day, that I lived through one of my greatest fears.

It sounds ominous to start a story this way so let me tell you, the day you encounter your greatest fear will never feel like a significant day. That day will most certainly begin like any other, and in my case, it started with me sweltering in the hot sun and volunteering to sit stand-by with the ambulance at a rodeo.

I kept cool by maintaining an unhealthy blood to Mountain Dew ratio and got to feel good about myself for volunteering, while secretly just feeling important enough to sit on the sidelines while not having to pay.

A few hours in, I remember hearing a kid as she walked behind me, she couldn’t have been more than six years old.

“Look daddy, a tornado.”

I looked to the sky and while it was painted a familiar dim green, it was summer in southern Colorado and nothing special. I looked back to the child, her father hadn’t reacted and she was happily devouring a cone of blue cotton candy, so I brushed it off.

Hindsight- I should have at least stood up.

A minute later, a 4×4 truck carting a horse trailer screeched into the entrance of the rodeo, it kicked up a cloud of dust that floated into the stands and caught the attention of the crowd. The driver announced over his PA that an F4 tornado had touched down a few miles away and was headed in our direction.

Pandemonium.

The roar of panic that swept through the crowd was deafening as a sea of people ran from the stands in a race to get to their children, their animals, and their trucks.

As the rest of the ambulance crew finished loading the equipment, I was overcome with the need to see the tornado. I had seen the occasional F1 or F2’s and so many funnel clouds I couldn’t count, but never an F4. I climbed the fence enclosing the arena, and for the first time in my life truly understood why people were so afraid of Tornados. The powerful black rope stretched down from the sky and danced along the plains with fury and grace. It was the most beautifully terrifying thing I had ever seen and I was completely mesmerized.

The warning sirens finally began to wail (better late than never, I suppose) and they pulled me from the moment. I leapt off the fence and readied myself for what came next.

In the event of a tornado, rescue teams were assembled and sent outside the perimeter of the storm to spot for the National Weather Service. It wasn’t always that way but back in 1991, an F3 tornado took out the entire town and the emergency vehicles were trapped inside the garages.

Cheers to lessons learned the hard way.

Back at the fire house, the teams had gathered and were setting off into the the hailstorm that had just begun. Being the safest place around, my mother came to wave me off and wait it out.

Pulling away from the fire department and looking out the back window of the ambulance was when it happened, the five seconds that taught me more about my life and my chosen career than I would ever learn from my studies.

As my mother stood there waving, a funnel was spiraling down from the angry mass of clouds above her. I frantically pointed skyward, but as we rounded the corner she vanished from view and I had no idea if she saw my warning.

We had to keep going.

That was the deal, that was the lesson. There was more at stake than the safety of one girl’s mother and I/we couldn’t risk the lives of countless other’s because I wanted to make sure my mom was okay.

We kept going.

Parked safely on a hill several miles outside of town, the driver, who just happened to be my father, picked up the radio to call the fire house.

This is where my memory plays tricks on me, because I feel like the radio silence lasted an eternity. I just knew she wouldn’t answer the call. My heart pounded in my ears, I tasted copper, she was gone, I knew it.

And this is one of those times I couldn’t be happier for an anticlimactic ending. She answered and was perfectly fine. The funnel came down, very noisily shook the roof, and quickly dissipated. She was lucky. I was lucky.

There have been many times over the years that I’ve thought back to that moment, the moment I sacrificed my mother. I know I didn’t, not really, but if things had gone differently…

It was so many years ago, I’m not sure if either of my parents remember- or if they ever knew how significant it was to me- but I do know that they would expect nothing less. If we had to live that moment all over again and they both KNEW she would die, she would demand we drive away and my dad would do it. Because that’s the kind of people they are, my mom would never risk the lives of other’s to ensure her own safety and my dad would want to save as many people as possible, and that’s the kind of person I wanted to be.

After the storm, we had recorded a half a dozen tornados and nearly twenty-five funnel clouds. One family lost their barn but there were neither deaths nor injuries. A few hundred miles away, a city in Oklahoma was not so lucky. The same storm passed through in the still of night, leaving a handful dead and countless others injured.

There’s no way of knowing who will get hit and when, but if you live on that stretch of plains in the heartland, it’ll happen eventually.

But hey, that’s life in Tornado Alley.

Image Credit: Image by skeeze from Pixabay