Day 172 - Hear Tornado Sirens

Date: June 27th, 2010

I have, on a few occasions, completely flipped out.  Its rare, but it happens.  One of said flip outs happened this weekend as yet another wave of big storms came rolling in.

In the past month, tornadoes and bad storms had decimated neighborhoods in several states, killed people and wrecked havoc on Ann Arbor and the surrounding area.  For the longest time I operated under the naive fallacy that Ann Arbor was in this small pocket of protected zone.  Sometime back during my freshman year in college when, let's face it, I essentially believed everything I was told, someone came to me and explained that tornadoes never hit Ann Arbor.  Apparently, I was to believe, there was some magical atmospheric force field around the town that wind and destruction could not penetrate.

I'd like to say I scoffed at the idea, but in all seriousness, I both believed and repeated it for the better part of a decade.  Now, in the wake of storms across the mid-west, I redeveloped a healthy fear of tornadoes, thunderstorms and the power they have to tear down even the most heavily reinforced man-made structure.  That new found respect for the power of weather was still sinking in when the Emergency Broadcast cut away from the show I was watching.  It was not, as I'd previously assumed, the monthly required test.  No no, it was a weather warning showing a bright red patch of storms whizzing across the horizon.
Even so, the little voice in my head repeated the ever more dangerous lie that tornadoes don't hit Ann Arbor and I tapped my fingers impatiently waiting for the television to snap back to my program.  Then I heard it.  The tornado sirens.  My heart skipped a highly inappropriate number of beats before getting back to the business of pumping blood and I felt my cheeks go white with fear.  To the more seasoned mid-westerners who read this, I'm sure that sounds incredibly silly.  To me, however, it was the first time I heard sirens outside of a movie.

Each time I blinked I pictured scared, cut-up people on the news talking about how thankful they were for tornado sirens and how lucky they were to have a basement.  I remembered the house-less foundations we were surrounded by just a couple weekends ago and the surreal knowledge that people had died just a few feet from where we were working.  Luckily, Justin was with me and his significantly calmer head prevailed.  We gathered socks, his laptop (for access to a radio), our phones and shoes and walked (briskly without running... the only thing I remember from school fire drills) down to the basement.  Forty-five minutes passes pretty darn quickly when you're scared out of your mind, that's for darn sure.

And even though there was no touchdown in Ann Arbor that day, I felt good about the fact that we went down to the basement to wait.  Better to lose forty-five minutes to fear and boredom than to lose everything to hubris.