Shaken and stirred

For those of us who would prefer to aestheticize nature instead of remembering that it is fearsome, and powerful (I don't know anyone like that; do you? Ahem.): Last Wednesday night, my daughters and I returned home to our boys after grabbing a bite to eat, just as it started to rain hard. The sky was strange, dark to the north and blue to the south. Within thirty minutes, the sky turned entirely dark (as seen in this picture), the wind whipped up, and the tornado siren a block from our house began to blare. My husband and I joked around as we led the kids to the basement and its windowless interior room, but they were quiet and serious. The power and cable stayed on as we watched the local stations, waiting out the tornado warning. The newscasters on the channel we were watching (broadcasting from a television studio located about two miles away from our house, and about a quarter-mile away from the restaurant where we had decided not to eat that night because of the thirty-minute wait) suddenly vacated their seats; a funnel cloud had been seen outside the station's windows and they needed to head to their basement. We watched the Doppler. It showed that the storm was moving away from our side of town. After less than a hour the tornado warning turned into a thunderstorm watch. We came upstairs and picked up where we had left off. The kids were still jittery. My husband and I were still trying to be jocular, telling them it was okay to be scared but, really, at least we didn't live where there were earthquakes anymore. In the morning, there were several areas within a two-mile radius of our neighborhood where rows of old, old trees were snapped like twigs, as they say, but our house didn't even have a planter pot overturned. The news reported that a string of "weak" tornadoes was responsible for the mischief. Four nights later, I was tossing and turning through my nightly 1 A.M.-restlessness-phasing-into-insomnia routine, when I felt the house move with a quick but solid jolt, followed by the continuous rattling of the drawer pulls on the bedroom dresser for an entire minute afterward. Half-asleep, I thought: Where am I? The bed's facing the wrong way! Then: No...I don't live in San Francisco anymore. Where do I live? That's right. Madison. This is Madison. And that was an earthquake! In the morning, we found out that we'd felt a baby quake, Richter scale 4.5, with its epicenter near Ottawa, Illinois, about a hundred miles away.

Comments

[Fazia Rizvi]

Yipes! I'm glad you and your family are okay!

[Chan S.]

Thanks, Fazia. The tornado was scary in retrospect, given the damage it could have caused if it had just touched down a couple of miles in a different direction, but not as it was happening (except to the kids), and the earthquake was harmless (although quite a *shock*, heh) and the kids slept through it. Nice to get a little wake-up call about the order of things without having to pay the price, as it were.