Laura Erickson's For the Birds

On September 20, I drove with one of my sisters from Chicago to southern Indiana, to a family reunion. It rained the entire trip, sometimes a steady downpour, other times in sheets that made it hard to keep going. But there was no lightning or thunder and little wind the whole trip.

The rain was pouring steadily and we were about 15 minutes behind our other sister, not far from Bloomington, when we heard a loud whining sound. At first I thought it was my car, but when I rolled down the window, I realized it was a tornado warning siren. And right then my sister and I both actually saw a tornado, maybe a mile away, that looked just about exactly like the tornado in The Wizard of Oz. It appeared to be lifting up from the ground and getting sucked back into the gray clouds overhead. But this didn’t seem real to us the trees in our vicinity were barely stirring, and even with the windows open there was little wind. We didn’t hear anything remotely like a freight train, and the sky was the same murky gray it had been all day.

We figured our eyes and ears were deceiving us. But at just about the same time, traffic completely stopped. Fire trucks and police cars started ripping past along the shoulder, and then going the wrong way past us in the oncoming lane, where oncoming traffic had eerily disappeared. Instead of the four or five emergency vehicles we’d expect to see in an accident, we saw four or five dozen. When we turned on the radio, we learned that a tornado had hit in the small town right near us, right when we figured our sister would be driving through it. We were panic-stricken about her, and didn’t learn for several hours that she was okay. This turned out to be a whole spate of tornadoes. One news report said that at least 38 had been confirmed, some more powerful than Indiana has experienced in decades.

Although the rain continued, the tornadoes didn’t. But there was an enormous amount of damage along some major thoroughfares, with live wires, chunks of houses, cars, and trucks, and fallen trees actually blocking several roads and highways. We were on a stretch of road that was closed, though we and a couple of miles of cars ahead and behind us had nowhere to turn around on this narrow road with deep ravines and ditches just beyond the narrow shoulder, and emergency responders needing the opposite lane anyway, until we finally reached the roadblock itself at an intersection with a small county highway.

We inched along that road covering a couple of miles in just over an hour before we were rerouted yet again by emergency responders who didn’t realize that the roads they were diverting us to had also had to be closed. All in all, it took us 9 hours to reach Bloomington, normally little more than a 4-hour drive from my sister’s.

Local TV stations covered little else that night or during the next two days. And the visuals were dramatic. But somehow none of that prepared me for driving home two days later, when the roads were open. Trees twisted and ripped apart were sad enough­. Fortunately this isn’t the nesting period, and I can at least hope that the vast majority of birds flew out of the major storms. But many of the broken apart houses I passed made me think of bird’s nests torn apart by a destructive bear. And one huge black SUV was sitting on its side on the roof of a two-story building–as shocked as I was, I couldn’t help but think that carried on a cyclone’s wind, it had gotten better mileage for that short distance than it had ever achieved on its own power.

In the face of what nature can dish out, we humans are small and pitiful creatures. We use a big chunk of our intelligence to devise ways to thwart nature to kill disease, protect ourselves from weather, and harvest plants and animals that our bodies were simply not designed to take without mechanical help. We can’t travel long distances on our own power easily-not only do we use animals or manufactured machinery to do the actual work of moving us here and there, we also rip up the countryside to build roads to do that traveling in.

We humans are hard on this earth’s landscape, though perhaps overall we do little more damage than tornadoes. The sun was out the day after the storm, and as I drove past could see people working together in a concerted effort to clean up the damage nature had wrought. It made me look forward to the day the sun comes out and we work together in a concerted effort to clean up the damage we ourselves have wrought.