THE FINGER OF GOD
You have not come to a mountain that can be touched and that is burning with fire; to darkness, gloom and storm.
—Hebrews 12:18
It was a warm night in early June—the midwestern kind of warm specific to spring, so humid it’s hard to breathe—when a tornado struck and destroyed a small Wisconsin town eight miles west of my own. I was just over a year old. My mother, who was not yet thirty, younger than I am now and still figuring out how to parent her only child, came into my bedroom as I slept. She stood at the window, looking out into the darkness of the west. It was the same window through which I would look for years to come, whenever the clouds began to build—my face and fingers pressed to the glass, cranking it open to get a better look at the sky. But that night, it was my mother who watched.
It was sometime after midnight.
Maybe the wind was howling. Maybe there was thunder. Maybe, more likely, there was only silence—that still, strange calm Midwesterners know so well, the kind that heralds the most violent of storms.
And then my mother saw them: fast, bright sparks of green, a second or two apart—like flashbulbs in the distance against the dark. It took her a few seconds to realize what she was seeing: a massive tornado, invisible in the black of the night, striking each pole of the power lines that ran along the highway—a road that connected a small doomed town and our own.
Soon she would pick me up, press my body to her chest, and hurry us down to the room beneath the stairs, where we would huddle together and wait out the storm. But for a second or two, she just stood in the dark, looking out into the night—struck still with fear, and maybe wonder, unsure if she was awake or dreaming—as a great, unstoppable force tore through a sleeping town, destroying everything in its path.
It was June 8, 1984. The town was called Barneveld, and the tornado—the largest in Wisconsin history—was an F5. On the Fujita Scale (since renamed the Enhanced Fujita Scale), which rates the intensity of a tornado from zero to five based on wind speeds and the severity of damage—from “minor” to “total destruction”—the F5 is the largest, rarest, and most powerful tornado. It carries winds of up to three hundred miles per hour and can stretch a mile in width. It has the power to rip entire houses off their foundations, crush steel-reinforced concrete like it’s tin. It can pluck trees and livestock from the land and toss them into the sky; throw cars, trucks, tractors, and train cars a mile away. The F5 is dangerous, unpredictable, and unforgiving—a force of nature so destructive, so incomprehensibly powerful, that even the most scientifically minded among us can’t help but think it biblical.
In the ’90s action movie Twister, a group of storm chasers—led by Helen Hunt and the late Bill Paxton—pause around a dinner table in the Oklahoma stretch of Tornado Alley when someone asks what an F5 is like. Commotion at the table ceases; conversation comes to a halt; forks are placed gravely onto plates. One of the elder chasers on the team, a character nicknamed Preacher, stops in his tracks as he serves up a round of coffees. Stock still and serious, he says:
It’s the finger of God.
I grew up in a small, God-fearing town in southern Wisconsin called Mount Horeb. A blue-collar place dealing in livestock feed and John Deere tractors, it was a farm town on its way to becoming a suburb, with a population back then of around three thousand. Mount Horeb is perched on a hill, surrounded on all sides by long, rolling fields of corn and wheat and soy. About eight miles to the west is Barneveld, a sister town; the two communities share feed mills, farmland, and a lumber co-op, congregations, families, and a high school football team. Between the two towns are the Blue Mounds, a stretch of low, tree-dotted mountains—a geological anomaly in that part of the state, in a region known as the Driftless Area—housing a network of caves beneath them. As kids, we were told that the mountains protected our little town like a castle’s defensive wall: from storms, from spirits, from whatever dangers might come our way. We were told that there was something about the Blue Mounds—some inexplicable property of physics, maybe; something magical or even godlike—that kept Mount Horeb safe from tornadoes. If a tornado was moving in from the west, they said, the Mounds would stop it. The Mounds would protect us.
Mount Horeb takes its name from the Torah—specifically, from the book of Deuteronomy—as the mountain upon which God relayed the Ten Commandments to Moses. Though in the Christian Old Testament the mountain in question is Sinai, the pastor of our small Lutheran church returned to these biblical origins sometimes, reminding us during his sermons that the name of our little town meant “The Mountain of God.”
My parents were both raised Catholic—my mother the oldest of eight, a fourth-generation Wisconsinite in an Irish-Catholic farm family, and my father the youngest of four, a second-generation Italian from New Jersey. There’s a good chance some of my maternal relatives were Jewish, but because my great-grandmother was adopted—and because our family is so massive that the wires of shared history are constantly getting crossed, our stories told and retold like a generations-long game of telephone—no one knows for sure. (For years, above my grandparents’ fireplace there hung a portrait of my great-great-aunt, a woman named Ida Feldman; my late grandfather, a GM line worker whose Swiss surname was Neuenschwander, famously insisted our family was neither German nor Jewish.) I was baptized Catholic, but when I was young my parents grew tired of fire and brimstone. They had both gone to Catholic school—had been put in coat closets, had their knuckles rapped with rulers by nuns, had been told too many times they were doomed to hell—and they wanted something different for me. So, like all good Midwesterners, we became Lutherans.
I went to church every Sunday, sang in the choir, and went to Sunday school until I left home at eighteen. I was confirmed at thirteen, which required two years of classes led by a young pastor and former UPS driver in the musty church basement on Wednesday nights—one particularly rigorous unit involved deconstructing Joan Osborne’s chart-topping 1995 pop hit, “One of Us.” I was in a youth group, part of a national organization I’d find out later had been sued at least once for employing cultlike recruiting tactics. In this club, or maybe cult, which was a signifier of both virtuousness and popularity in our small hometown, I sang songs about Jesus and the importance of abstinence. I listened to the older kids (called “leaders”) give talks about avoiding temptations like drinking and drugs and sex. I eventually became a leader, too, and gave the same kind of talks about the same temptations—even as I, like so many kids in that group, was enthusiastically partaking in them.
I went to Christian camp every summer, where we assembled each night in August-hot theaters while well-groomed, white college kids paced around a stage with microphones spouting sermons disguised as personal stories of self-destruction and redemption. They played acoustic guitars and sang songs about Jesus, and invited us to stand up and commit ourselves to Christ. When I was sixteen, we went on a weeklong hiking trip in the Colorado Rockies. I carried a fifty-pound pack on my back, hip bones bloody from the pack digging into my skin, and was awoken one morning before dawn and instructed to find a large rock, carry it to the top of a nearby peak, and hurl it into the chasm below. This, they said, represented my sins, which I could cast off into the proverbial abyss only when I let the Lord and Savior into my heart. I climbed to the top of the mountain as the sun came up, raised my arms above my head, and launched the rock from that peak—casting off my teenage-girl sins, which back then seemed taller than the mountains. On the last night of the trip, I was led out into the forest and left there to spend the night alone. With only my sleeping bag, a Bible, and a flashlight, I was told to ponder the power of Jesus’s protection. At some point, as I sat trembling in fear of bears, praying to God to make the morning come faster, my flashlight battery died.