A perfume of dust and newly splintered wood hangs amid tangled logs and lumber; pink insulation, gummy as forgotten cotton candy, hugs the ground; the indistinguishable rest sits like a self-conscious mountain—all pieces in a game of pick-up sticks played by nature. The quiet of the setting belies the train-like fury that blew everything apart. A male figure takes respite in a swivel office chair, staring at the rubble; a woman with head in hands drapes her upper body over his lap.
Oklahoma, the place of my childhood, sits in the midst of tornado alley like a caged bird on a perch. My mother, a wartime bride transplanted from the east coast, was terrified of spring storms; my siblings and I loved them. Raised on a farm on the prairie, my father carried his indifference to them as proudly as the medals he earned on Iwo Jima; yet he indulged my mother’s need to feel secure by finagling a key to the church basement, a refuge for her with kids in tow when he was out of town. Still she coveted the immediacy of the neighbors’ storm shelters, for hadn’t a tornado destroyed a wing of the high school just a couple of miles away? My family has lived in Oklahoma for generations: grandparents and great-grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins flung wide by the ever present winds among rural farms or townships, suburban country homes, or “the City.” None has ever been in the bull’s-eye of a tornado. Until now.
Before the survivors could exhale, six twisters tore through towns near Chickasha, obliterating thirty-five homes. Without guilt the winds exploded my cousin’s house, garage, barn, cars, truck, and horse-trailer. Husband and son dove for shelter barefoot under the front porch, while rage shoved debris down on them, their horses, and dogs. Trapped until rescued by a neighbor, they endured the fears kicked up by the storm and steeled themselves for the hardship of rebuilding, just as early immigrants to Oklahoma managed the myriad adversities, or moved on.
My grandfather came to Indian Territory in 1900; at eleven years old, perhaps he looked forward to a new place to lay down dreams for his emerging manhood. Much like other Scot-Irish families, his father and his father before him had already abandoned hope across South Carolina, Kentucky, Alabama, and Mississippi. Now his family, weary of opportunities in Texas, oiled the buggy harnesses with tallow until shiny, heaved clanging chains and lanterns into two covered wagons, finally tossing in belongings and kids who squealed with excitement. They ferried the muddy Red River, navigated their fear of a nearby Indian encampment, and bore the brunt of snowstorms in March to settle on a quarter section between Arapaho and Custer City. With gratitude as bountiful as the harvest of wheat they hoped would come, they set up house in a sod dug-out carved from the side of a grass-covered knoll, removing the tented carriages atop the wagon runners for use as bedrooms for the boys during the remaining spring— and the coming summer, fall, and winter.
With shallow breath, I listened as my aunt finished cataloging what survived the tornado that hit my cousin’s place—and what did not. The horses were located at the creek bed, whinnying their displeasure, while lash-rimmed eyelids blinked lazily as if bored by how long it took to be found. One dog was discovered hurled to the neighbor’s a quarter mile away, sliced open as if by war shrapnel, internal injuries too severe to overcome. As a bulldozer untangled the sticks of the house, a bit of fur yipped and wriggled free, the second dog, unharmed.
Such is the checkered disarray of a tornado hop-scotching across the land: havoc and tragedy in one spot, miracles and rescue right alongside, not unlike the hardships that fell on my Oklahoma ancestors. Storms of bankruptcy, sibling rivalry, and “the wild ways” of some blew apart the generations of my many-branched family tree. Like the randomness of any spring tornado, my kinfolk were struck by the early death of a mother, bank failures, a house fire, the Depression, and disability from wars that ravaged its young men. So, too, it’s been blessed with long lives, success in political office, banking, and ranching. My generation is farther flung than the previous with homes made beyond Oklahoma, in Texas, Iowa, California, China, and Thailand. So while my cousin gathered together her only material possessions left unscathed: a few pieces of clothing, a couple pairs of shoes, and two stemmed glasses; some of us reconnected with others too long out of touch, passing on the news that one of our own was hit by the eye of the tornado, and all of us survive.
