("Tornado crossing Interstate 30 in Garland, Texas illuminated by a power flash" from here)
Where I grew up, in Garland, Texas, tornados were a pretty common threat. This website says that historically, Garland averages three tornados a year, altho I'm sure there are more these days thanks to climate change. I can attest that they felt like a very real threat in my childhood & adolescence.
In school, in elementary school, in the 1970s - I guess I was in first through fifth grade from 1974 to 1979 - we didn't have atomic bomb drills but we did have tornado drills. We'd sit in the hallways. I seem to remember leaning against lockers so perhaps there were similar drills in middle school. & when I moved back to Texas, to Fort Worth, in 2016, there were regular reports of tornados to the west.
But there's not a personal tornado encounter I can share. Except. A vague memory. It would've been before I even started school. On a road like Northwest Highway, which now is very developed, but which, in the early 1970s was not, nor were there lots of business lining its every mile. I seem to recall me & some members of my family - mother? brothers? sisters? - pulling over to the side of the road because of the threat of a tornado, getting out of the car, & going down into some kind of ditch, maybe even getting underneath something. That's all - a fragment of a recollection of something scary. I didn't see a funnel cloud. I didn't experience the horrors of being trapped in the path of a tornado.
Which isn't to say I don't find tornados terrifying. Or that I'm not grateful to be living in a place where tornados are rare. Not counting the one tornado that showed up about two months after we moved here...
In school, in elementary school, in the 1970s - I guess I was in first through fifth grade from 1974 to 1979 - we didn't have atomic bomb drills but we did have tornado drills. We'd sit in the hallways. I seem to remember leaning against lockers so perhaps there were similar drills in middle school. & when I moved back to Texas, to Fort Worth, in 2016, there were regular reports of tornados to the west.
But there's not a personal tornado encounter I can share. Except. A vague memory. It would've been before I even started school. On a road like Northwest Highway, which now is very developed, but which, in the early 1970s was not, nor were there lots of business lining its every mile. I seem to recall me & some members of my family - mother? brothers? sisters? - pulling over to the side of the road because of the threat of a tornado, getting out of the car, & going down into some kind of ditch, maybe even getting underneath something. That's all - a fragment of a recollection of something scary. I didn't see a funnel cloud. I didn't experience the horrors of being trapped in the path of a tornado.
Which isn't to say I don't find tornados terrifying. Or that I'm not grateful to be living in a place where tornados are rare. Not counting the one tornado that showed up about two months after we moved here...
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