This will likely be a stream of consciousness ramble, so be aware of that and skip it if you want to.
It's been a really long two weeks. I feel bone tired. Not just physically, though there is some of that, but emotionally. Mentally. As I told a friend a couple of months ago, it's stressful to live through an Oklahoma spring even under normal circumstances. Severe weather season starts and you have to be paying attention all the time.
I have three weather apps on my phone. One is The Weather Channel app, which I use for basic temperature, humidity, and forecast information. Then there's the MyRadar app, which is a very simple radar - that's all it is - that comes in very handy when you're not near (or don't have) a television or a live stream and need to know where a storm is, how close it is to you, whether it has nearly passed you, etc. Finally, there's my local NBC affiliate's 4WarnMe app, which sends me texts when severe weather watches and warnings have been issued and/or when something notable is happening with the weather in my area.
I'm aware of the possibility of severe weather when I see the tweets of local meteorologists. Both the May 31 tornadoes and the May 19/20 tornadoes occurred at the end of three-day blocks about which we'd been put on alert. I'm aware that I need to be watching the weather closely when I get a text from the 4WarnMe app or when I see a meteorologist's tweet that contains a specific time frame or when I know there's a chance for severe weather and I start to notice the weather itself changing. Then I turn on a television or, if I'm at home, the KFOR live stream, and watch. Sometimes that means watching for hours because you never know when a storm cell is going to turn tornadic and you definitely don't want to be caught unprepared if that should happen. So you sit and you watch. And when terms like "hook echo" start to be used, your ears perk up and you start to consider where you'll go if you need to seek shelter.
As you may know by now, most homes around here have neither basements nor storm shelters, so the safest place is the innermost windowless room on the ground floor of a structure. On Sunday, May 19, I sought shelter (for only the second time in my life) with my neighbors in the office of our apartment complex. If we'd actually been hit by a tornado, we'd have crouched together in the men's restroom off the main lobby. On Monday, May 20, I had someone else's children with me, so instead of waiting it out in their house's safest room or waiting for the neighbor with the storm shelter to get home (she thought she'd be there in about 20 minutes), we packed up and headed to the underground parking garage of a nearby office building. I wouldn't normally have taken that most drastic option - and, as is usually the case, the storm nearest us dissipated and we were never in any real danger at all - but better safe than sorry with children who aren't mine, you know? And we couldn't have guessed at the time just how serious the second storm, the southern one that was entering Moore as we were leaving the house, would end up being.
All those people down in Moore were making the best choices with the information they had just like we were. In some cases, that meant saved lives. The father of some Plaza Towers Elementary students pulled them out of school as the storm approached - against the urging of the school officials, who said that surely the school would be the safest place for them. Where was he going? What if they were still in the car when the tornado hit? Please, please, stay here at the school. And to be real with you? I'd have stayed at the school. A school, with its size and all its interior windowlessness must be safer than the closet of a house and certainly safer than a vehicle, if, God forbid, you should get trapped in one. But he insisted on taking them out of the school, and that choice likely saved their lives. On the other hand, a mother of three left her job to head home before the tornado hit that day and was killed in the 7-11 where she'd sought shelter when it hit before she could get home. But she didn't know, you see? She wanted to be home with her children, to keep them from facing it alone. She probably decided at the last minute that she'd dash home, just in case. And that choice cost her her life. She zigged when she should have zagged, as every one of us risks doing any time a tornado touches down. In a moment of split second choices based partly on what experts think the atmosphere will do and partly on sheer intuition, we all risk making the wrong choice for that particular moment.
Some people who aren't from around here have spent a lot of time wondering why every home doesn't have a basement or a storm shelter. Well, partly because of expense. You can scoff and say we should care more about our lives than about money, but if you don't have the money, you don't have the money, simple as that. One of the families who lost a child in Plaza Towers couldn't afford to bury their daughter. They certainly didn't have a few extra thousand sitting around to put into a shelter, especially when the actual need for a shelter is so very rare.
That's another thing people don't get. This. Isn't. Typical. I have lived in Oklahoma for a total of 17 years and I have only felt a real need to take shelter one time - Sunday, May 19, 2013. I took shelter once in 2008, when my friend who wasn't from here insisted we huddle in the closet even thought I knew it wasn't warranted, and once on Monday, May 20, 2013, when I thought I'd rather be inconvenienced than have to answer to the children's mother should anything unexpected happen to them in my care.
Since Monday the 20th, we've all been on edge. Most Okies pride themselves on being unafraid of severe weather. We've lived with it our whole lives. You pay attention, you have a plan, you keep your wits about you, and you'll be absolutely fine 99 times out of a hundred. But I know I've been extra jumpy since the 20th, a little more anxious than usual every time a tornado watch was issued, and a little extra aware of changes in the atmosphere. I pulled out my weather apps in a panic on Memorial Day because the weather got "weird" (that's a very technical term some of us use to describe what it feels like when things just seem off), and I was surprised to find that nothing was amiss. It was my imagination jumping to conclusions.
But on Friday I realized I wasn't the only one on edge. You want to know why people jumped in their cars at the last minute and tried to run, despite all their experience and pride and better judgment? Fear. That colossal traffic jam you marveled at, Piers Morgan, you giant tool, is what panic looks like when you add it to normal Friday evening traffic. Oh, you think we should have made a smarter choice? Well, fuck you.
I turned the KFOR live stream on around 5:00, watched that huge storm grow as it got closer to me, and was out the door with a pair of pajamas, a tooth brush, and my dog at 5:30. I never flee tornadoes. Why should I? I know what to do in a storm. I know where to go, I know how to be as safe as it's possible to be. But I kept thinking of those piles of debris in Moore that used to be people's homes, and I didn't want to be here if that happened to my home. I didn't want to sit here and wait, wondering if the world would fall down around me like it had them, wondering if I'd change from alive to not like some of them did. I was lucky. I was able to turn the news on immediately and I was able to leave the moment I wanted to. But it was 5:00 on a Friday. Some people were on the road home. Some people hadn't turned on the news yet. Some people were working late. So when they saw the storm and they decided to run - and I can guarantee some of them hesitated for a few minutes just like I did, just like deer in headlights, thinking, "Should I run? No, that's silly. Surely that's silly. Surely it'll turn out to be nothing... Oh, shit. Oh, shit, I should leave. I should leave right now" - it was too late.
Most of the people who got stuck on the highways were okay. But some of them weren't. But they were doing the best they could with the information they had. They were trying to do what they thought would save them. Tornadoes aren't usually a mile wide. And they don't usually turn south. This one was. This one did. And when it lifted, another one lowered in a new location to take its place. And another and another and another. That doesn't usually happen either. Add those circumstances to our collective shell shock and we made choices we wouldn't normally make. A whole lot of people zigged when they should have zagged. We're smarter than any other people anywhere else in the world when it comes to tornado safety, but we're shaken. We panicked. As my friend Chuck said when I ran into him today, "I've never seen Oklahomans flinch like that."
I drove through Moore for the first time since the 20th today. My mom was with me in my car and we were following my dad in his truck. My mom and I were talking when we approached the damage; all of a sudden everything was flat. How bizarre, I thought, as my stomach rose to my throat. What am I even looking at? We turned a corner, drove a few beats longer, and my mom said, "Okay, here's David and Morgan's school. This was Kimberly's neighborhood on the left." My mouth fell open. "What?? But I don't even know where we are!" There were no landmarks at all. Just fields covered with piles of debris and intersected with cleared streets that led to more debris. I couldn't make sense of where we were or even what direction we were headed until my mom told me where we were - in a neighborhood I drove through every day for four years - and then my brain refused to acknowledge it. When we dealt with the fire at my parents' place, I remember thinking, "Where did everything go?" because there was so much emptiness where all our things used to be. In this case, there was a lot of stuff - piles and piles of stuff - but it wasn't the stuff that was supposed to be there. Yes, I see all of this, but this isn't what goes here. This must be someplace else. This is not a place I know.
I'm tired. We're all tired. We're weary and heartsick. 38 people have died in these tornadoes and their aftermath in the last two weeks. We're not going anywhere. You face what you're faced with and we'll do that as we have many, many times before. This isn't even the worst thing we've faced. But I don't mind telling you that we're tired. Bone tired and sad.
