Saturday, June 8, 2013

The Walcott Tornado!

This tornado hit Colorado August 20, 2006. No photo exists of the Walcott tornado

The following paragraph was discovered and taken from the internet:

A tornado struck near Walcott, North Dakota, on this date in 1955. Although rated an F4 on the Fujita scale, the National Weather Service claims that the tornado probably reached the wind speed and size of an F5 several times before it dissipated. If true, it would be one of only three F5 tornadoes to hit the state. Two people lost their lives in the storm and many rural families lost their homes and farms. Those who lived through the storm still remember the tornado’s fury.

 ****

My memory of this storm, though with me daily, escalates a bit as the anniversary date approaches, and escalates even more upon hearing of such devastations as the recent storm in Moore, Oklahoma. I think especially of the children, and the fear I know they felt—and will continue to feel—because I have been there.

This is a chapter taken from my memoirs “Dying to Live.” Before this chapter I was talking about my naval career and said, “Before I go on with my naval career I will touch on one of the other most important things that ever happened to me.  You remember that loud Bang! the very first word in my story, well, you’re soon going to hear it again, only it’s louder, much louder…and it was terrifying.”

It was July 2, 1955.  I was ten.  Cool that morning but the afternoon turned sweltering.  My nephew, Curtis, five, my very best friend at that time and who I considered almost my brother, and I, had been cleaning out the south side of the tar paper-covered garage.  The plan is to set up a table or two for our farms and toy soldiers.  It was a good plan.

    By five-thirty we had finished sweeping the dirt floor.  Mother calls supper.  We head in.  Huge thunderheads are rising over tall spruce trees in the southwest yard.  Rain sprinkles.  Sunrays make brittle contrast against the white house and dark clouds.  Nothing about the changing weather seems really serious but we hurry faster anyway.  We’ll be safe inside.

    But my dog, Pal, very small, somewhat Collie-like, stops, whines softly, then turns and lopes in the opposite direction, toward her refuge under the hoghouse, where she has raised several litters, and, as a puppy herself, hid on the day of her arrival to the farm.
   
  But it has rained before and Pal has not gone to the hoghouse.  (Did she already detect the changing barometric pressure?  Or was it the sixth sense that some animals, and some people, have?)  To Curtis and me, nothing seems serious.  Nothing at all.

    We slip through the east porch door and are greeted by the squeal of 13-month-old Celi, my niece and a jabbering bundle of smiles.  She sees us and, propelling herself with crossed legs and feet, comes scooting over the floor on her bottom.

    From the corner of the porch floor, with crayons and paper, three-year-old Becky, another niece, a beautiful and intelligent child with reddish-brown hair and bright blue eyes, asks my mother, Lois, “I’m so hot, Grandma, can I take my dress off?”  Without waiting for an answer she snatches the hemline and peels it over her head.  She does look more refreshed in just panties, so Curtis and I remove our shirts.

   Later, all of us, including my dad, Russell, and sister, Gerry, 16, sit to eat.  A special affair tonight for Mother has just returned from a Ladies’ aid bake sale.

    Supper is mostly finished by twenty to seven.  Anxious to counsel Pal, probably still cowering under the hoghouse, and also to move my toys into the garage, I am first to leave the table.  But upon reaching the porch I see a yellow glow outside.  Unexplainable dread stops me.

    The barn is about thirty feet high and sixty feet long.  Beyond its peaked roof the sky is pale blue.  The barn is bright red against the blue; its silver cupola is gleaming.  The yellow glow fades.  Outside begins to darken, fast, yet the sky beyond the barn remains friendly-looking mid-summer blue.  Fears stabs at me as I hurry back to the kitchen.

    Everybody is already up, standing silently at the double kitchen windows facing north, toward where darkness is spreading, covering the farthest treetops quickly, as if a sky monster is swallowing the sun.  It is so quiet.  Nobody is talking, and outside not even the sound of a bird.  Nothing.  The quiet is so intense it’s becoming a pressure beginning to hurt my ears.
  
  A roar is becoming apparent from the west, like a distant freight train, usually a pleasant sound but now insidious, rumbling, approaching nearer and nearer, faster.

    From where there is no railroad.
    “Boy, we’re going to get an awful hailstorm,” Mother announces, “Hear that roar?”
    “I think so too,” Dad agrees.
    But it’s more than a roar.  It’s a sound I’ve never heard, nor imagined, and it’s beginning to terrify me.
   
    It’s terrifying all of us.  We keep staring at the silence and calm right outside, at the green of our farmyard, at the blue sky where ragged fingers of black cloud are finally edging into view, looming over our thought secure, tree-surrounded farmstead.
    
From the floor, Celi, sensing terror from the rest of us, begins to whimper.  Gerry immediately kneels and gathers the usually happy baby into her arms.
    
“What’s a hailstorm, Grandpa?” Curtis asks.

    BANG!

    The crash is the east porch door, flung open.  But there is no wind.  Outside is still absolute silence, stillness except for the intensifying roar.  Everybody gapes.  Nobody knows what to do.  Time is passing too quickly to be able to do anything.  Dad heads for the porch door.  Everybody watches him.  Eyes wide, Curtis follows, “Grandpa, look at your car!”

    We press against the kitchen windows.  Outside the house yard fence the car is bouncing up and down.  But it’s so calm outside.

    We couldn’t know that fluctuating pressure preceding the storm is making strange things happen seemingly without substance.  Dad didn’t know.  Mother didn’t.  Much too early in the century.  The media blitz has not yet hit, consumer weather forecasting is still in infancy.  Our communications is a radio not listened to during meals, a hand-powered telephone not ringing.

    But nobody in the community yet knew either, for the storm had first formed several miles west in uninhabited pasture, then the tornado that came from it had hopped and skipped causing little damage, to escalate a mile west of our farm.  There would be no warning.  No time to get to the cellar.  One entrance outside, another under linoleum in the kitchen.  And still we have no realization we even need better shelter.

    Like a balloon filled, the pressurized car pushes its weakest point, a poorly latched door, and pops it open.

    “Mother, you didn’t get the car door shut,” Dad exclaims, “Now it’ll blow open and break!”

    Dad does not leave the house to close the car door, for the unknown fear grips us all, but he does step out slightly, grips the porch door, pulls it shut.

    BANG!

    It explodes right open again, harder, seeming to shake the house.  The roar now seems right on top of us.  The trees north and west of the barn begin straining, leaning east as if a mighty magnet pulls them, yet the house itself still feels no wind.  Little Becky stands among us, as in nonthinking awe we watch the trees bending so far as to touch the ground.

    Then the barn and other outlying buildings begin leaning east, again as if a magnet pulling in slow-motion, not wind pushing.  Everything close is still so quiet.  Farther away everything is happening so fast, and it’s so hard to believe, and accept.  We still have no full realization of a dangerous wind.  No realization we should do anything but stand, watch, in shock believing that nothing so bad as what’s happening could really be happening.

    Suddenly the unseen magnet is winning.  Everything beyond the house yard gate begins breaking apart, sending boards, shingles, branches flying around and around.  The terrible roar now sounds like ten freight trains about to crash into the house.  The pressure in my ears feels like I’m going under water.

    The car door blows open, then wrenches and twists itself around to the front windshield, then it’s moving on its own across the yard.  The 60-foot windmill, like a matchstick, topples east.  The barn and granary roofs lift, and are gone, disappeared.  The barn, like a stand of dominoes, collapses to the east, its siding and insides erupting like a hail of arrows.  Like a cardboard box, the wooden granary rolls across the yard, west, opposite everything else.

    An animal, small and dark, hurries across the yard, toward the disintegrating barn, looking for a place to hide.  Pal!  I know it’s Pal!  But my mind cannot concentrate, cannot conceive anything but recognition of my beloved pet.  The image of her, small and frightened, ingrains in my mind.

    Pal disappears as dirt and other flying objects fill the air.  Mindlessly I run for her.  Dad grabs me, returns me to where everyone has moved away from the window.  We’re now clustered in the center of the room.  And still we continue witnessing, dumb-like, the unimaginable disaster occurring outside.

   Suddenly the house is shaking, furiously.  Dishes are falling from cupboards, clattering, crashing, breaking.

    “Everybody into the west bedroom!” Dad shouts, then begins guiding us there.  But I glance back.  The east porch is breaking away from the house.  Wide-eyed Curtis is still there, engraining more memory, then disappears into a curtain of dust and debris.

    The rest of us crowd into the small bedroom, my bedroom, where I’ve slept in safety all my life, awakening happily to birthdays and tooth fairy visits.  I look back once more.  The kitchen linoleum has bubbled halfway to the ceiling.  The refrigerator is rocking back and forth as if dancing, crazily.  Everything, everywhere, is moving, falling, breaking.

    The horrible sound outside is like a brutal sandblaster crunching the walls.  The only other real sound is Celi in Gerry’s arms, crying, not in paralyzed shock like the rest of us.

    Everything outside the west window is white, all white.  The house groans, cracks, moving and twisting beneath our feet.

   “Here goes the house.”  Dad says it calmly, resigned, for there is nothing he can do to stop it, nothing he could have done.  No time.  No warning.  No prior experience.

    The house is actually lifting into the air, doing the impossible...and breaking apart.  The west window shrieks as it bursts from its casing, smashes into my back, ending my awareness for I don’t know how long.

****

Even after 58 years, reading that first segment of mine and my family’s own story always brings tears. I have to stop to wipe my eyes and blow my nose. Again I think of the children of Moore, Oklahoma, and all the other children in harm’s way and the fear they feel, and the helplessness of not being able to do a thing about it.

****

    The next thing I remember is continuous thunder and lightening.  Rain and hail is pouring in cold, terrifyingly-cold, torrents driven by fierce straight wind...and my screaming voice, “God, I don’t want to die!”

    From the night-like darkness, sitting though with her back broken, comes my mother’s voice, “Jimmy, you’re not going to die.”

    Dad struggles from the ground, pulls me up to sit, then stands, stares at an incinerated landscape, “Everything is gone.”

    Not a hole remains where several huge boxelder trees stood south of the house.  The now fenceless lawn is bare dirt, scorched, as if a fire has swept by.  The few remaining trees on the outskirts of where the thick grove had been are stripped of bark, and have a burned appearance.  No sign of buildings.  Nothing.  Only smashed and slivered boards.

    The sound of galloping hooves comes from the north.  The two black draft horses, Dixie and Daisy, are followed by ten wild-eyed, panting milk cows, running not as fast but bucking, kicking, their flopping udders swelled, unmilked, then are gone, disappearing into the gauze of shock surrounding us. (Just days earlier a particularly mean Holstein bull had been sold.)

    From beneath a section of wall comes Gerry’s cry for help.  Though his arm is cracked, Dad lifts it off as if cardboard.  Then, strength gone, he sinks to the ground.  No grandchildren in sight.  Nobody with the 
strength or even presence of mind to search for them.

    “I’ll go get help,” Gerry says, now sitting up.
    “You can’t,” Dad answers, “Where would you go?”
    Still crying I ask, “Daddy, are we in a dream?”
    “No, Son.  This is really happening.”

    So we lay in the cold and rubble of our farm with unknown injuries and dirt ground into our skin, thinking—if thinking at all—that everybody would be like us, helpless, that there would be no help.

    Headlights appear on the road.  Always heavy foliage growth had prevented seeing lights except in winter, but now the grove does not exist.  We watch the headlights until they stop right in front of us.

    “Where are the children?”  They ask.

    Nobody knows.  Three men have arrived.  Art Blair, Dad’s cousin, and his visiting sons, Woody and Johnny.  They live one mile north, have watched the tornado destroy the farm, and came as soon as it was possible.

    They load us.  Becky and Celi, covered with dirt, are found almost immediately because the car had barely missed them.  But no Curtis.  Two men will stay to look.  Curtis can’t be seen because of day-darkness and because he is so covered with dirt, but within two hundred feet a frightened little boy is buried in sand to his waist, arm broken in three places, shouting and frantically waving his good arm.

Another bout with tears as I think about how that little boy must have felt right then, watching everybody leave without him.

    Little talk occurs as we ride up to 100mph toward the nearest hospital at Breckenridge, Minnesota.  I sit in front between Woody and Dad, who announces, “I’m freezing to death.”

    Mother and Gerry ride in back with baby Celi between them.  Becky lies face down on the floor.  Mother, unable to move herself, asks Gerry to move Becky off her face.

    “No, I can’t.”  Gerry holds her neck and head, unaware her neck is broken, “It hurts too bad.”

    Neither knows Becky’s head is nearly crushed in several places, worst in back, and that lying on her back might have killed her.

    Between them little Celi moves once, takes one breath.

    “Little Celi is gone.”  Mother speaks with no emotion.  There are no tears from anyone.

    Six miles from the hospital a rear tire blows out.  Passers-by have it changed in minutes.  While there a 
woman announces that bad weather is coming.

    “Oh, no!” Gerry cries out, “We can’t go through it again!”

    Minor damage did occur in the Breckenridge, Minnesota/Wahpeton, North Dakota area.  Whether the same storm cell is unknown.

    At the hospital the undertaker pronounces both granddaughters dead and asks Woody to take them to the funeral home.

    “No, I can’t.  There’s a little boy back there who hasn’t been found, and I’m going back to look for him!”  In fact, Curtis had been found and already was at the hospital.

    The undertaker, Joseph Vertin, then picks Becky up.  When he turns her over in his arms she moans, prompting him to carry her four flights to the emergency room.

    Our wounds are attended by Doctor N.R. Kippen, a kind man who continued to attend my parents until they died in 1996 and 1997.  Later I hear that wire brushes were used to clean our sand-pitted skin, especially Curtis’ and mine, as we had been without shirts.  I remember pain, hearing myself and Curtis screaming, but nothing more during those early hospital hours.

    My other sister, Helen, has arrived.  A young girl stays by her side throughout that first night.  Helen later describes her as a guardian angel, and does not see her again.

    Dad is seen by Helen first.  His face appears as if a hot iron has rubbed across it.  “Helen, we couldn’t find Curtis.”

    Mother, lying on her stomach while her deeply gashed hips are worked on, is next.  “Helen, your baby is dead.”

    Turning to leave, Helen walks past Gerry, who is cut so badly Helen doesn’t recognize her.  Gerry sobs helplessly that she had been holding Celi and lost her.

    Helen does not see Becky now, but she’s been told Becky is not expected to live until morning.  So Curtis and I are next.  “Mommy!” Curtis cries out, “Grandma and Jimmy can fly just like birds!  Can Grandpa and Grandma come live with us, Mommy?  Because they don’t even have a house, everything is gone!”

    “Yeah, we’ll figure out something.”  Helen does figure out a lot of things in the next weeks and months.  She becomes our strength to go on.

(I cannot even begin to imagine the pain Helen was feeling as she walked through the hospital learning the fate of her children, and the rest of her family.)

    “And then they left me, Mommy.  I hollered and hollered to Grandpa but they just drove away.”

(My little nephew, Curtis, how he must have felt right then, with Grandpa, and all of us, just leaving him, just breaks my heart.)

    Helen counsels her little boy as best she can.  “Curtis, your little sister Celi is in heaven, and God might want to take Becky too.”

    Curtis thought for a second, “I hope He doesn’t, Mommy, but if He does, we’ll just have to try to understand and be brave.”

****

    God didn’t take Becky then, but her head had been badly injured.  She was rendered unconscious for seven weeks, to awaken helpless as a newborn and to never fully recover mentally.  But thick brunette hair came to cover her scars, and with bright eyes, though one blind, a clean and clear complexion, pretty smile and jolly laugh, she became our beautiful little girl anyway.  She loved crafts, the music of CHARLIE PRIDE, and baking chocolate chip cookies for all her favorite men (me included!).  She sometimes frustrated our attempts to communicate, but she always gladdened our hearts with her presence, until she died in her sleep in 1983, at age 31.
    We did get a house to live in, provided by Edwin Overboe of Kindred, North Dakota.  Helen lived with us, nursed us, and her working husband, Clayton, joined us every evening.  The Red Cross, churches, organizations, hundreds of families and individuals aided us and other storm victims who lost everything, giving food, money, countless hours of labor.
    What happened with everybody’s future (my family) I will share near the end.
    Returning to the tornado experience, my family and I remember that terror, The Storm, that period in our history where everything else happened either before The Storm, or after.  But now we have a comparison point, something to weigh against every other bad thing that could ever happen again.  The experience instilled in me that bad things can and do happen, that they can be that bad, so I try not to take good things for granted.  For fifty-eight years I have experienced only rare days without remembering.

****

    Two weeks after The Storm, after my cuts and bruises were well on their way to healing (I was hurt the least, the worst being a sprained ankle) I would see what was left of the farm.
    Nothing.
    Rubble.  Piles of splintered trees and boards.  Unbelievably twisted machinery.
    Helen and Clayton brought me.  I sat between them in a 1950 Ford Coupe.  Never could I have imagined the utter devastation.  This place had been my playground, a storybook farm.  I buried my face in Helen’s side and cried.  For months afterward many things would frighten me, even things unrelated to the weather.  I guess I must have thought a tornado lurked around every corner.  At the age of ten I knew my home was invulnerable to any threat.  Now, fifty-eight years later, I know that no home—in fact, nothing—is invulnerable.
    Twice, in the years since, about a mile distant and during stormy weather, I have seen what looked like huge whirlwinds (likely tornadoes that did not fully form) maybe two or three hundred feet high.  Both times west of me, so, of course, had it been the real thing it would have came toward me, because vicious weather comes from the west, not the east, at least here in North Dakota.  And both times they lasted just seconds.  Twice more I have seen clouds directly overhead whirling and twirling, boiling, but no tail came down.  Twice more I have seen tails hanging in the sky, far, far, up and away (A thousand feet high?  Two thousand?  More?) and not moving, just hanging there doing nothing, basically, and finally disappearing.
Later I learn that they are what are known as cold weather funnels that can, possibly, grow and become violent.  Many more times I have seen clouds rolling and tumbling over and over each other, always from the northwest to the southeast.  But never have I seen a live tornado, except on television.  I guess I should count myself lucky.  But still, whenever storm clouds darken the sky I go outside and watch them, until rain or straight wind forces me inside.  (I used to think that rain would mean the violence was over, but I guess that’s not exactly true.)
    And when the weather comes at night, if there’s any sign of red or purple on the TV radar, and close to me, I cannot sleep.  I keep watching through the window until the thunder and lightening is just distant noise.  A few years ago National Geographic had an article about tornadoes (April 2004).  On pages 18-19 there is a map of the US of variously-colored lines showing all known trails of tornadoes since 1950.  If you look at North Dakota, notice in the southeastern corner the two straight yellow lines.  Yellow means F4 and F5, the biggest and meanest.  One I’m sure represents the Fargo tornado in 1957.  (One of the most heart-breaking photographs I’ve ever seen appears later in The Forum newspaper, Fargo, ND: A rescue worker holding the body of a small child, one of six children killed and all in the same family.)
    The other yellow line I’m pretty sure represents my tornado: the 1955 Walcott tornado.  What I’m trying to get to here is that I’ve watched the formation and dissolution of dozens, maybe a hundred storms in these years since 1955.  And many times I have been frightened—yes, frightened, maybe not terrified but frightenedwatching, these, freaks, of nature.  So why do I do it?  Why don’t I just take shelter and wait it out?  I’ll tell you why.  Because if one of these freaks of nature is trying to kill me again I want to see the mutherfucker coming!

****

     Neighbors and friends and other volunteers had found and buried the dead livestock, mostly little pigs, some found hanging in trees.  No kitties survived.  And the cows and horses survived simply because they had been far to the north in the pasture.  A friend, Volney Stevens, I heard, found and buried Pal, and marked her grave with the leg from a blue wooden chair.  I looked and looked but I never found her grave.
    We—Dad, Mother, Gerry, and I—would return in October.  We would rebuild in the same spot, with all the buildings just where they had been.  Actually the only new building would be the barn.  The hog house and granary (looking very much like the ones destroyed) would be found on other farms and moved in.  Our house would come from a kind man from Sheldon, North Dakota. (I’m sorry, sir, but I don’t know your name.)  Cleanup would go on for years, but we did recreate a storybook farm.  I say ‘storybook’ because that farm had everything.
    The approximately 10-acre farmstead was located directly on the boundary of east and west.  East of the house was the new calf pasture, about three acres of green grass and boxelder trees growing from the roots still left in the ground from the mature grove that had been there.  East beyond the calf pasture was flat agricultural field land.
    Approximately 100 feet west of the house began the pastures and hay meadows.  Native grass, wildflowers, wild animals, and hills.

****
    The new barn became a magical place for me.  A bull pen was located in the northwest corner, with a new bull every year.  We always had three purebred Holstein bulls, a days-old calf, a yearling, and a two-year-old taking care of the cows.  We were slowly developing a purebred dairy herd.  The bulls were named after the farmer where we got them.  Several were named Frank, one Dell, and one Terry.  Dairy breed bulls are known for being mean, but they all respected the whip.  They didn’t seem to understand that the little whip we carried would mean nothing if they were to charge.  Three calf pens held calves of different ages.  An enclosed room held ground oats and corn for feed.  Another room held a small machine that separated raw milk into skim milk—which we fed to the young calves, cats and dogs, and piglets—and cream, which we sold in town and to other farm families.
    The south side of the barn held about a dozen stalls, one for each of the milk cows: Red, Knothead, Domino, Snowflake, Cutie-face, Keyhole, Brutus, Sparkle, Mabel, Chief Kickapoo, and Tiny, a dear little Guernsey with horns.  Nearly every animal had a name.  The cats were Major (a bobcat/domestic cross), Currents, Halloween, Patches, Puff, Frisky, Tommy, and Sylvester.  Even some of the pigs had names (but naming forty piglets became a chore).
    I had four bottle lambs one year.  They were provided by Alder Helling, a dear neighbor.  They became bottle lambs either because they were too weak to nurse properly or their mother rejected them.  I gave them Indian names from The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
    No creatures on earth ever gave me so much trouble.  Imagine having just two hands but four lambs all wanting to get fed at the same time.  Normally I didn’t have help.  I don’t remember how I handled it.  Because, basically, only one could get fed at one time, because the nipple would not stay on the bottle unless you held it on, and of course the lamb is bunting the bottle (and me), because instinct is telling him/her that bunting will increase the milk flow.  And had I and the bottle been its natural mother with an udder then his/her instinct would have been correct.  There were several cuss words and much spilled milk.  But I loved them.
    And they wouldn’t stay in their pen (which was built for the much bigger calves).  The instigator was always the black-faced one I called Nokomis.  Nokomis was the leader of the lambs and also a leader in the poem of Hiawatha.  But I strongly believe that if Nokomis hadn’t been there one of the others would have led.
    And of course there were more dogs: Sport, Tornado, Queenie, King, but no dog to this day has ever taken the place of Pal.
    And I kept wild creatures: a horned lark, a great horned owl, a raccoon, a cottontail, white-footed mice, galvanized tubs for aquariums and terrariums.  And nature visited our farm: crows, magpies, ducks and geese, great blue herons, minks and weasels, deer, fox, rabbits and squirrels.  And right there on the farm I had 160 acres of trees, pastures, shelterbelts, wetlands, to explore.  If I wanted to walk west I could go for miles and miles (and often did) and never see another human being or habitation.
    I was happy.  I was satisfied.  I loved my life.  But I guess I wasn’t really learning much about life.  Because then teenage confusion set in.

****

    I spent my first eight school years in a one-room country schoolhouse just a half mile from home.  (Only twelve kids in all eight grades.)  (The schoolhouse blew away too.  A witness said it was way up in the sky and then just exploded.  That fall another one-room schoolhouse was moved in.)  I walked every day.  I explored the ditches on both sides of the road.  I found shiny pebbles and collected them.  I found caterpillars of all colors and collected them, and put them in bottles with weeds, and watched them continue eating, then spin a cocoon, and in the spring come out as a butterfly or moth.
    Then I graduated from eighth grade.  The next year meant the town school.  It meant riding a bus to school instead of walking.  And meeting new kids.  I don’t really know what happened.  I went from twelve kids in eight grades to 100 kids in twelve grades.  It was different.  It was a social shock.  I didn’t adjust.
    I did fairly well my freshman year.  I loved school and learning, especially my biology class, and Mr. Lensingrave who took us on a field trip, only about one or two blocks down the gravel road and ditch, but Mr. Lensingrave knew the names of plants and other stuff!  And Mrs. Lahren’s English class.  I already loved to read, but she introduced me to the wonders of reading fiction.  My favorite novel became Swiftwater, by Paul Annixter.   For many years I would read that novel again and again. Thank you, Mrs. Lahren.
    Then came the sophomore year.  I started learning that some students didn’t share my appreciation of school and learning.  Some disrupted class, and gave the teachers a bad time, and did mean things to other kids.  Once at physical-ed one of my best friends got his clothes torn off, right in front of everybody, boys and girls both.  I was abhorred, and shocked, and can still see him walking naked.  Another time a girl (not at school) got her clothes torn not off, just lifted so everybody could see under her dress.  She fought but had no chance.  I was there but I couldn’t (at least ‘didn’t’) protect her.  I couldn’t/didn’t help or protect either.  I still feel guilty about that.  Some of you reading this might wonder, was that why I quit school, because I was afraid bad things would happen to me?  I don’t know but I don’t think so.  I don’t remember ever being afraid, exactly, and also no bad things ever did happen to me.
    Then I asked a girl to a rare school dance.  She said “No,” that her dad wouldn’t let her go.  That’s what she said, but what I guess I must have heard, “No, I just don’t want to go with you.”  I’m not saying that straw broke the camel’s back either, but at the end of the sophomore year I announced I was quitting school.  Others said they would too.  But I was the only one who did.  One of those who didn’t quit that year quit the next, after his junior year.
    Mr. Deinhart, my history teacher (who just had to announce it to the whole class one day when I got a hundred percent on a test) came out to the farm to see me, and tried to convince me not to quit.  Thanks for that, Mr. Deinhart.  I won’t forget you.
    After quitting school I took my very first job.  Picking and grading potatoes for $1.00/hour.  Wow, my first money.  I soon bought a 1948 Chevy for $75.00.  (And no, I don’t still have it.)  I was only fifteen and I was the only boy in my ex-class to have a car.  Big deal.  (A 1954 Ford would soon follow, and, no, I don’t still have that either, and that was one cherry car!)
    My next job was doing chores for our nearest neighbor while he received surgery for a hernia.  For $25.00/week I worked from seven in the morning to about six at night, with a few hours off during mid-day. The neighbor’s name was Randolph and his wife Rachel.  They were one of the three neighbor families who I considered extra parents.
    I had several more jobs, all for neighbors and local farmers.  Then I turned seventeen and that teenage confusion did not let up.  In May of 1962 I gave up that heaven-on-earth storybook farm and went to see the local recruiter in Wahpeton, North Dakota.  Soon I would be earning $85.00/month.  Wow.  But if I thought going to the ‘town’ school was a social shock, I was in for a much ruder awakening.
Six months after that ‘awakening’ I would check-in aboard a navy submarine, the USS Carbonero SS337, for the next three and one half years…but that is another story….

****

Every person I have mentioned in this story is now gone to what I hope is their reward, except Gerry, my sister, and Curtis, my nephew.
Gerry moved on from highschool to NDSSS and soon had a good job with the county, then she married Don and blessed us with five children. Curtis moved to western Montana, married, and has two children who have blessed him with two grandchildren. Helen and Clayton blessed us with three more daughters. Clayton was killed in an auto accident in 1976. Helen met Duane and married again, and passed away in 2011 at age 80. Doctor Kippen is long retired.

****

Myself? Well, my story is continued in my memoirs book mentioned earlier. After endless jobs and much not-exactly-meaningful-travel, I have moved onto a few acres exactly two and one half miles west of the original farm site, and very likely very close to where the 1955 tornado first touched down. I didn’t pick here to be close to that site, I just liked the piece of land, so I bought it and started building.
Even so, sometimes I get a bit of a spooky feeling about where I now live.
So here is a description of the next most vicious storm (after 1955) I have ever witnessed. It happened last August, 2012. Even 12 years after beginning this project I still had not been able to afford siding for my house. (Twice people have offered me siding, but, hey, that would have meant opening a can of worms I wasn’t prepared to tackle. On an outbuilding, yes, I would have taken it, but my house—Come on!)
Anyway, my house was covered with what they call “Housewrap,” some form of ultraviolet-resistant plastic that comes in a roll ten feet wide, and held up with dozens and dozens of nailed lath. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but, hey, things take time! Oh, and good luck installing that alone in even a gentle breeze, but I did.
Returning to that most recent event, the past days had been stormy. Off and on I’d check the weather channel and/or the Internet. I could see lots of red weather coming on the radar, and some was supposed to be severe, so, yeah, I kept checking and checking to be sure of where the radar was showing red, or worse, purple, and what direction it was going. Then I would check outside. I feel I’m pretty good at doing my own weather forecasting.
Outside I could see nothing I considered threatening (and forgot [or ignored] the fact that sometimes weather can form right over one’s head) so, I decided to make a meal and relax with supper. About halfway through, the storm “from nowhere” hit.
And hit hard and fast!
I went from window to window trying to see something—anything! But it was raining so hard, and the wind was blowing so hard, that all I could see was white, like a winter blizzard. And now get this: There was a roar, a constant roar. No, it was not thunder. I know the difference! Was I reliving 1955? Yes, I was, and nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. Just like 1955. And a somewhat humorous thing while this was going on: I kept returning to my plate to grab another mouthful—couldn’t get kicked around by another tornado on an empty stomach! Right?
The rain and wind and roar went on for a long time. I was scared. I will admit it.
Then it happened. My house is one-story on the south end and two-story on the north. Where they join the “Housewrap” let go and the rain began coming in through the splice, just pouring, and there was nothing I could do.
Finally the “microburst”—as I heard my weatherman once describe it—moved on.
In the end, I couldn’t have a house that leaked, so I emptied my checking account, maxed out my two credit cards, and sold my car to pay for vinyl siding, which, luckily, I was able to install myself. So now my house will keep the rain out.
However, I still don’t have a place to take shelter.
The plan is to build a tiny enclosed room out of concrete blocks inside the house, but that has not yet happened.
I’ve always felt that once was enough, that a tornado would never get to me again.
I could be wrong.

--0—

Biography

James W. Nelson was born in a little farmhouse on the prairie in eastern North Dakota in 1944. Some doctors made house calls back in those days. He remembers kerosene lamps, bathing in a large galvanized tub, and their phone number was a long ring followed by four short ones, and everybody in the neighborhood could rubberneck. (Imagine that today!)
James has been telling stories most of his life. Some of his first memories happened during recess in a one-room country schoolhouse near Walcott, ND. His little friends, eyes wide, would gather round and listen to his every hastily-imagined word.  It was a beginning.  Fascinated by the world beginning to open, he remembers listening to the teacher read to all twelve kids in the eight grades.
He was living in that same house on the land originally homesteaded by his great grandfather, when a savage tornado hit in 1955 and destroyed everything. They rebuilt and his family remained until the early nineteen-seventies when diversified farming began changing to industrial agribusiness (not necessarily a good thing.) He spent four years in the US Navy during the Vietnam War (USS Carbonero and USS Archerfish.)
After the navy he worked many jobs and finally has settled on a few acres exactly two and one half miles straight west of  the original farmstead, ironically likely the very spot where the 1955 tornado first struck, which sometimes gives him a spooky feeling.


Books by James W. Nelson
(Digital downloads $0.99-$3.99; paperbacks $10,00-$29.95)

From the author:  In my fiction I do not try to create super-heroes, but rather bring alive common and regular people who try to find love, survive, and react to circumstances as best they can, and, usually, try to do the right thing. The books are more than one genre, from war to sex and violence to romance to humor to horror to fantasy to science fiction to adventure, I write in third-person with viewpoints by men, women, and children. 

Novels

Winter in July (65,500 words) (nuclear war drama) (the doomsday clock is ticking…it will reach midnight) Kirby Yates helps his town prepare for the ultimate war, which nobody believes will ever happen.

Callipygia (66,100 words) (romantic drama) (the Utopian world of Callipygia…just a legend?) (love, sex, violence) Callipygia is a place, or maybe just a state of mind, for if you go there, and partake, you will become changed…forever. Stephanie Daniels, newspaper journalist, goes on the undercover assignment of her life, and finally finds true love.

Experiments (82,500 words) (medical mystery drama) (pharmacological research gone berserk) Shea McTory, homeless, volunteers to be locked up six months for a human nutrition study, learns to deal with nine other volunteers—one a psychopath—and meets the love of his life.

Daughters (40,200 words) (abduction, crime, prostitution, love of a father (The heartbreak of human trafficking) Emotion and love in the house where Emma grew up was rare.

Boat Sailors (29,700 words) (Vietnam War action by fleet submarines) Fresh from the farm, Brice Moser, Torpedoman’s Mate, Seaman, will soon discover his rating covers much more than torpedoes.

The Bellwether (229,000 words)(economic & environmental meltdown) (the mother of all disasters) (love, sex, violence, drama, adventure) Aaron Hodges has one month to take his colonists 300 miles to northern Minnesota wilderness…not by truck but horse and wagon, but first he has to convince them to want to go.

The Light at the End of the Tunnel (68,600 words) (one theory of reincarnation) (horror, crime, drama, foster care) (if the state kills a worst-of-the-worst criminal, does he really die?)The prison chaplain recruits nurse Nicole Waters to help him find and stop the reborn worst-of-the-worst criminal, Les Paul, now rampaging through foster home after foster home.

Short Story Collections

Strange & Weird Stories (43,500 words) (the unknown: as close as beside you)
A Collection of Short Contemporary Stories (48,200) (Stories about people just like you.)

Short Stories

Waiting to Die (3300 words) Since the 1918-1919 influenza outbreak, mankind has feared return of the pandemic, an extraordinarily-mutated virus, that vicious creature that cannot be seen by the naked eye.) (Young people are dying, so many that hospitals can no longer provide for them. Staunch Derek Whitfield, 25-year Army vet, has volunteered for end-of-life hospice care. He sees nothing but darkness waiting on The Other Side, until he meets Susannah Brite, his forty-second client.)

The Commons (8000 words) )  Wilderness in a man’s backyard.  Through complaints of animal sounds, smells, and loud music journalist Kari Aldrich is led to the story.  She finds the land as it was before white man appeared…and it’s coming back.

To the Nineteenth Century (6300 words) Demolition workers Selby and Rivet see the 19th and 20th centuries at the same time (and a dangerous time warp) from the steps of their next project.  Demolition must stop.

He had it Coming (5900 words) (A boss gets murdered, and nobody, not his family, and not even one employee, is sorry.)

Nature Short Stories

One Morning at Boxelder Cove (2700 words) Not big, Boxelder Cove covers about one hundred feet by one hundred feet, plus the house where the humans live. Wildlife use its sunny canopy and leafy shade. Vociferous Tamius, the Red Squirrel, knows this sheltered enclave as home.

One Morning at Juneberry Row (3000 words) Juneberry Row is a really small place. About eighty-five feet long and maybe twenty-five feet at the widest part. It’s a tangle of twelve to fifteen-feet-tall Juneberry, Chokecherry, and Buckthorn trees, Poison Ivy, Stinging Nettle, Cocklebur, and wild Grape vines; in fact it’s a bramble patch, fitting for Brer Rabbit himself. In this case, though, it’s the home of Sybil, the Cottontail rabbit.

Nonfiction

Dying to Live (58,400 words) (autobiography) (the life & times of Jimmy Nelson)
Tornado! (6200 words) (As the anniversary date [58 years] approaches, an update.)

Thanks for reading

Author’s notes
(Digital downloads $0.99-$4.99; paperbacks $10.00-$29.95)
 In my fiction I do not try to create super-heroes, but rather bring alive common and regular people who try to find love, survive, and react to circumstances as best they can, and, usually, try to do the right thing. The books are more than one genre, from war to sex and violence to romance to humor to horror to fantasy to science fiction to adventure, I write in third-person with viewpoints by men, women, and children. 

Contact

nelsonjamesw@hotmail.com                          email
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B004GW465S   Author page at Amazon
http://morninginapril.weebly.com                   Website & Blog
https://www.facebook.com/#!/                         Facebook
http://subron7.hubpages.com/                          HubPages
https://twitter.com/PMGOLD                          Twitter

Feel free to contact me. (Response is not guaranteed) (The world is full of psychos and wackos)
A reminder for when you go to Amazon to read digital books, mine and many other authors: Amazon has a free APP download that allows you to read your book on any electronic device, including PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.

Occasionally I list one of my books as free for a  day, sometimes more than a day. Look for those announcements on my blog, HubPages, Twitter, and Facebook
One last thing: When you visit my website, please check out the Freebies page.


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