Storm run

While riding around Texas yesterday and today, the weather was rainy and vaguely stormy looking. It made me think of my father. I often think of my father when it storms or even when it just looks like it might.

Dad died in 1984, when I was 19 and he was only 42. He was a brilliant but troubled man, and had been my hero in my childhood. By the time I was a teenager, our relationship had changed, but when I was younger, he was all things wonderful to me.

I grew up in a town not far from where I live today. It was a small town of about 1,000 people, built next to a river and ringed by the kind of tree-covered hills for which the Ozarks are known. Our house was snugged even further into the hills in a little holler. When it stormed, thunder would crack and the sound would echo off these hills in looping rumbles, making the thunder seem an endless grouping, rather than a singular event. I miss the thunder. Nowhere else has it sounded the same.

Though we had much stormy weather there,  a tornado has never actually touched down in the town, to my knowledge. I suspect this is due to the protection of the hills. Even when a tornado formed in the sky, it died quickly when reaching for the ground.

My father grew up in Oklahoma’s tornado alley, and the fact that he no longer lived there did nothing to deter his concern for our safety during every thunderstorm. In the middle of the night, if the sounds of the storm itself didn’t wake me, then my father would. It was time for a storm run.

We didn’t have a storm shelter, but my aunt and uncle did, so in order to be secreted safely from the storm, my father believed the best course of action was to drive across town and join them in their shelter. It would be 2 a.m. and my father would shake me awake, throw a coat over me, and drag my mother and I out to the car.

The storms would always be at their height while we raced across town, the wind rocking us, the rain beating loudly and heavily on the car, and the windshield wipers making no noticeable improvement in visibility. Dad would hastily rub his sleeve over the fogged-up glass and focus determinedly on what he could see of the road. The flashes of lightning would illuminate my mother’s disgruntled features as she sat, arms crossed, in a disgusted posture in the front seat. As for me, I felt a strong mixture of excitement and fear, though I felt perfectly protected, as we sped our way through the storm.

My aunt and uncle’s house sat perched on one of the surrounding hills. To reach it, you had to drive up a steep, curving dirt road, which when it rained, was a rutted mess of fast-running rivulets of rain water. More than once, it seemed this road would thwart our race to safety.

But, with wheels spinning and mud and rocks flying, we always made it. Once there, we’d find my aunt and uncle awake, expecting us. I would be put, half-soaked, into a bunk in their storm shelter where my two cousins had been lying awake waiting for me, then my aunt and mother would head to the kitchen for some coffee and a bitch session about their crazy husbands. Meanwhile, my uncle and father would pace in the living room, in front of the huge plate glass windows with their spectacular view of the valley and sky, expecting a tornado at any moment to come crashing through our lives.

It never happened, of course. The storms usually died out less than 20 minutes after we arrived. We’d usually stay a good hour, though, I presume to be on the safe side, or perhaps to simply make the trip seem more worthwhile. Then back we’d troop to the car, and drive across town on quiet, wet streets. Once home, Mom and I would drop in bed while Dad made the rounds of the house, looking for damage from the storm.

By the time I was nine or ten years old, my mother began to refuse to accompany my father on these storm runs. She, having grown up in the area, had no fear of tornadoes, nor did my aunt, her sister. My aunt, though, was always up for a little excitement, and so while she still thought her husband was crazy, she never minded the upset of a storm the way my mother did. I presume my mother had finally had enough.

I didn’t worry much about my mother being left behind in the house while my father and I raced through town. The thrill was in the drive and the anticipated arrival, not in any real expectation of a dreaded tornado. Only once did a storm actually do some damage to our house, knocking the back door off its hinges. My mother slept through it and only learned of it after we returned home and Dad did his usual inspection. This event did not convince Mom to rejoin us in our storm runs.

At some point in my childhood, my father decided we ourselves should have a storm shelter, so he hired a fellow to come and dig a big hole behind our house. And that is as far as the project got. For all I know, that big hole is still there to this day.

My father was a terrible procrastinator, and perhaps that’s why the shelter remained only a hole. After all, we had a fence out front that just kind of petered out to nowhere, and is also still unfinished to this day for all I know. Still, I like to think that Dad reconsidered completing the shelter because he, like I, enjoyed the dashes across town, with all the tumult and roar and feverishness it encompassed.

Because when it came to storms, the fun was in the run.