There Was a Tornado

A story from growing up.

I am working on my book today, so here's an example of a chapter in process. I know, a book, from a guy who writes this much anyway? Yes, that's what's happening in the background. This is a story. It's true. The book is non-fiction and an autobiography. Buckle up people. It's gonna be exciting. In theory.

“It’ll be fine,” said my mother after I asked her to turn down the radio in the car.

We had just heard the news that a tornado was coming. Like, coming to where we were. Morris, Connecticut is a very small town. It’s basically a four-way intersection with a pizza place, and that’s about it. Driving from Litchfield, where I grew up, to the bustling metropolis of Watertown, which I call a bustling metropolis because it had both a Marshalls and a Stop & Shop, would take you through Morris. We were driving, in a green Subaru outback, the official car of people who have to drive in the snow and well-marketed segmented lesbian couples.

“A tornado?”

My experience with tornadoes was limited to the Wizard of Oz. Tornadoes were things that started movies, and took you off to magical lands. It sounded exciting. 

“V, I haven’t eaten“

My grandmother was 76 years old by this time. Her name is Victoria. She was also a V. The V my grandmother was referring to was my mom, Vita. Two marriages after her naming, she went from Vita Roberta Bivona—a respectable name for a Perillo, Victoria Perillo’s maiden name—to Vita West Muir. This seem to me to be an upgrade.

Grandma Vickie and my Sister Alison.

“Mom, it’ll be OK. You have your insulin?”

My grandmother had diabetes. I didn’t really know what that meant at the time. I knew it meant she had to eat sometimes, and that she had to take insulin, and check her sugar.

“I have my insulin, but I actually already took some this morning. I thought we were going to eat lunch.”

The sky darkened. And when I say darkened, I don’t mean “got darker because it’s closer chronologically to the end of the day and the sunset that happens with it.” I mean darkened abruptly, over the course of 1 to 2 minutes. Attenuated sunlight was coming through the clouds and created a parody of dusk, as if dusk got sick to its stomach. The sky became an unwell shade of green, and there was the slightest hint of a swirl in the darkness.

Had I been older than six, I would’ve thought about the word apocalyptic. I would have compared the abrupt change in the sky to an imagined end times. It would be two or three years before that word would come immediately to mind. Upon further examination, the sky seemed like it was definitely going to throw up. Thunder.

There was a crack, and another, and another. The sky began dancing with light, diffuse lightning bolt glow after diffuse lightning bolt glow, and the time between the flash and the beat at which we heard the crack became uncomfortably close. You learn really early on, if you live in the country, that the distance between the light and the sound tells you how far away the lightning hit. At this point there was a little rest between the two, but not the kind that made you feel more comfortable. More like kind that made you feel like you were driving into lightning at that very second.

At that moment, the center of the four-road intersection I mentioned before came into view. The Morris pizza restaurant was on the left. Its lights were out. All the street lights were out.  

It was one o’clock in the afternoon. We shouldn’t have been able to tell the difference between illuminated and non-illuminated street lights.  

“Ma, we’re only about 10 minutes from home. I’ll take a left. Let’s listen to the radio, we can keep track of what’s happening.” said my mother to hers.

My sister was four. She was in the back seat next to me. She looked over and her eyes narrowed. She took every opportunity to torture me.

“Brub is scared, Mommy!”

My sister wasn’t wrong.

“I’m just gonna turn here and will keep—” said Vita.

Flash, crack, flash, crack, flash, flash, flash, crack, crack, crack.

The lights on the Subaru turned on. The sky got dark enough that this was necessary. Rain fell down fast and hard. The wipers worked ceremonially but not practically.

About a quarter-mile ahead, I looked out over the dashboard, and in the millisecond of wiper-clearing that allowed for any vision out of the front of the car, I could see that there was a tree down in the road. The tree had taken down some power lines. The entire road was blocked.

“Let’s turn around, V” said grandma Vicky.

“There is a tornado warning for all of Litchfield County, with a tornado watch in place for…” the radio mumbled.

Flash, crack, flash, flash, flash, crack, crack, crack, flash, crack, flash, flash, flash, crack, crack. Echo…. echo, echo, echo. Distant crack.

I could barely hear the radio over the flashing and subsequent cracking echoing all around us. The rain sounds made it really hard as well.

The radio jumped back to life: “The national weather service recommends staying indoors, and away from the windows. Warren, Morris, and Goshen are expected to be where the tornado touches down.”

We were in the center of Morris.  

“I gotta go…” I say.

“Mommy! Brub has to pee!” my sister cackled.

We drove down the second of the four roads leading out of the center of Morris, but only for a minute, because another two trees were down in the middle of this road, and another series of power lines had been ripped from their moorings.

The third road we tried also proved impassable. No power lines on this one. Just an old pine tree. Driving back down the road we originally came from revealed the same thing. We were stuck. And the rain was relentless.

As soon as it began, it was over. This is the kind of thing people say about things that begin quickly and end quickly. As quickly as it began, it was over. It’s probably not true. It probably began at a slightly different time scale than it ended. But we want to get a sense of things being symmetrical, of palindromic time, of some sense of the beginning and the end have some relationship to each other. So we say this. I am saying it right now. But, to really lean into this for a second, it’s not literally true. Things begin and end the way they begin and end. You don’t get a choice. A story you tell yourself? It doesn’t change this reality.