To the Cellar … or not …

As I am writing this column, the television in the living room is beeping, a “crawl” of information is moving across the top of the screen, and the map of the area is taking up a large portion of the northwest side of the picture. With closed captioning and the station logo crowding in, I can hardly see Nora O’Donnell trying to give the national news.

That’s OK, for there is a tornado on the ground about one hundred and fifty miles away, headed into Oklahoma. We are watching with undivided attention. After all, it could be us. It has been us and it could be us again any day. You see, it’s Tornado Season in Texas.

Tornados seem to pop up around news time. At five or six o’clock, the warmth of the spring day rises into the cool of the moving front coming down from Colorado, and it begins to whirl in Tornado Alley. By midnight, it is usually over, with the strongest winds, hail, and torrential rains coming down about bedtime … nine o’clock. For those of you from somewhere else, that alley runs basically across West Texas, along the Red River and into Oklahoma. Some years, a tornado will dip down on the edge of the Panhandle and not dissolve into the clouds until it hits central Oklahoma. These tornados are deadly. So, we are concerned.

We watch and pray for those under those bright red and green radar views, but we don’t go to the cellar. We don’t go because most of us don’t have a cellar. There are cellars in some parts of Wichita Falls … but it’s probably more true in the parts of Wichita Falls that were flattened back in 1990.

We didn’t have fancy radar back in the 1950s when I was a kid. My family didn’t have a cellar, but our neighbor four doors down had a big cellar out near the alley. The whole neighborhood gathered there on the bad nights. Of course, we kids had it the worst.

My father would wake us up, hand us some newspaper or a towel to put over our heads and proceed to lead us out into the storm. We’d mud through the backyard and trail down the alley to the Whatley’s gate.

Others had already arrived. The women and children were immediately directed down into the bowels of the Hell. The steps into the cellar were dirt, the cellar door was open, the rain was pouring down, and rivulets worked their way down the steps, turning the clay soil into slime.

I wanted to be a boy more on those nights than any other. You see the men and any boy who’d been weaned was allowed to stay up on the “land” so they could help to watch the storm. They didn’t have to move cobwebs to find a seat. They didn’t have to sit on the low shelves where the okra from three years ago was growing mold. They didn’t have to worry about snakes … and mice … and spiders. Mother said cobwebs were not made by spiders, but I knew she sometimes lied to calm me down. You see, I was a sensitive child … high strung … afraid … and periodically out of control. So, she lied.

When the cellar door opened, we could see images of the men and boys flashed by lightning against the black sky. The cigarettes in the hands of many of the men glowed and danced as they told of other storms and worse conditions.

I hated those cigarettes tips, I hated my brother who occasionally called down into our dungeon and told us about the storm that was going to blow us away, and I hated that dead spider I found on shelf above my head.

Tornadoes are dangerous. Be glad for those weathermen, the radar, and a place to hide that doesn’t have a dirt floor.