There’s a murky line between story and myth. When I was a kid, my mother told me stories about tornadoes. She told me the story of the Barneveld tornado, the worst she’d ever known, and about tornadoes of her youth. She told these stories so often I felt like I had been there: watching those fast sparks of green through my bedroom window, watching a twister dance across a cornfield, scrambling for storm cellars, hacking at latches and hauling open heavy wooden doors, running down muddy stairs and hiding underground until the storm had passed. She told me decades-old tales that her mother and grandmother had told before her—of towns and trees and trailer parks demolished and others left untouched. She told me of the skies turning green, and she told me of the sound—like a freight train, she said, its low groan in the distance, growing louder and higher to a deafening teakettle whistle.
She told me of the tornado that hit her grandparents’ farm, just outside Monroe, and of picking through the wreckage afterward: finding a potted plant that had been lifted from the porch, carried a few hundred feet, then set back down in a nearby field—upright, undamaged, the soil and leaves intact. And she told me the story that had gone down in family lore for generations, that would carry on with each new one—about a single blade of straw that had been lifted and tossed from a nearby barn and had somehow, impossibly, pierced the glass of a sliding glass door.
I wondered about this story—about the physics of it, if such a thing was even possible. I wondered if the story had been misremembered or made up entirely. If it began as a story to spook children around a campfire in the summer, and eventually, somewhere along the unreliable line of memory and time, had become the truth. I wondered about other stories too: if tornadoes actually sounded like freight trains, like everyone always said; if debris could be carried hundreds of miles away; if cars could end up on top of houses—or if these stories, like the blade of straw, were just tall tales that had become the truth over time. Or perhaps they had become something even more true than the truth, the way stories often do—when tales of fear and fragility, of warning and awe, function to protect or prepare us for danger.
I could have researched these stories, but I never did. I chose to let them live on, as my mother and my grandmother told them, as my family remembered them. I chose to believe them.
In the house where I grew up, a 1960s split-level ranch, we didn’t have a storm cellar. No small stone fortress buried in the backyard, like young Jo had on her family farm in Twister, no fortified cavern like the one beneath my grandmother’s house—a dirt-floored root cellar where she kept her canned goods next to the boiler. We had only a partial basement, halfway underground, with a dozen ground-level windows.
In a land so at risk of severe weather, it’s strange that so many houses were built this way. It seems almost like defiance, as if saying to the weather, I dare you. Maybe it’s willful ignorance. It couldn’t possibly happen to us. Or maybe it has something to do with hope—that tragedy will keep its distance, that God will keep us safe.
There was a closet beneath the stairs. A small windowless passage packed with old luggage, tangled Christmas lights, piles of Sears shirt boxes, a curtain of musty coats on a rod, and a single bare light bulb on a chain. This was where we went, our small family of three—heads ducked low, backs bent at odd angles against sloping walls, the cat unwillingly clutched to my chest—when the sirens went off, when the watches turned to warnings. And this, back in 1984, long before my obsession with the weather began, was where my mother would take me after plucking me from my crib, when those green flashes in the distance got closer, when the wind began to bend the trees.
Technically, Barneveld was not a town. In 1984, with a population of only 580, it was designated, like Mount Horeb, a village. A speck, a spark, an almost indiscernible flash tucked away in the hills and valleys of southwestern Wisconsin. It was home to farmers, factory workers, waitresses and bartenders, hairdressers, mechanics, roofers and plumbers. It had a farm equipment dealership—referred to simply as “the implement.” It had a feed mill, which was just about to hold its grand opening. Most of Barneveld’s inhabitants had been born there, had grown up there, had families of their own there. Most of their parents and siblings lived there, too, sometimes in the same farmhouses that had been in their families for generations.
On the evening of June 7, the people of Barneveld might have walked back to their houses from their barns, having finished the evening chores. They might have closed up the implement or grocery store, the post office or bank, gotten into their trucks just as the clouds were beginning to build. They might have noticed the wind picking up; they might have noticed a stillness in the air. They probably all noticed it was humid—the air so thick they could slice it open. They might have turned the radio dial to get a better signal as they drove toward home. It might have been fuzzy out there, just over the western border of the Blue Mounds, where the signal was never great. They might have flipped on the TV when they got home to catch the forecast before dinner.
In 1984 there was no Doppler radar, no David George. There was a kindly old weatherman named Elmer who wore slick suits and patterned ties and talked about the weather the way most Wisconsinites did back then, and how many still do—in terms of how it might affect the crops. You might hear some thunder tonight, he might have said with a smile. So batten down those hatches. But it’ll mean good news for the corn! After the ten o’clock newscast, there was no one at the station with their eyes toward the sky. And when the airwaves went dark, there was only silence—but for the black crackling fuzz of a deadened television screen.
It was a Thursday. Earlier that day, by midafternoon, severe storms had developed across Kansas, Missouri, Minnesota, and Iowa—part of a system that would go on to produce an outbreak of forty-six confirmed tornadoes in less than a day, including three F3s and one F4 that traveled over a hundred miles from northern Missouri into Iowa, killing three people. After dark, the storm shifted toward Wisconsin—and at around 11:00 p.m., the National Weather Service issued a tornado watch. This might have taken the form of a few long, loud tones on the radio had anyone been listening. It might have been a scrolling red ticker on the bottom of a television screen or a small cartoonish outline of a tornado in the bottom right-hand corner. But at that time of night, after Johnny Carson’s monologue, most people had turned off their TVs and gone to bed.
The sirens never sounded.
Just before the tornado hit, there was a loud crack of thunder and a massive bolt of lightning. Power was cut to the town. Some people got out of bed, flipping light switches to find only darkness. But the sky, they said, was a strobe light, lightning striking more than two hundred times per minute. And then they heard the sound—like a freight train. For most people, it happened before they even had time to act, before they even knew what was happening. And in those early-morning hours, just before 1:00 a.m., an entire town was destroyed.
At its peak, the tornado was a quarter mile wide. Semitrucks and tractors were hurled into the sky; cars were tossed like pebbles. Trees were stripped bare of their leaves, and some were torn up from their roots. Walls and ceilings and stairways caved in; foundations were crushed to nothing. People were pinned beneath doors and drywall. Some rode their beds through a collapsing floor, all the way to the basement. Others were pulled straight out of their homes and flung into fields forty feet away. Barns, sheds, and silos were razed. Roads were ripped from the ground. The roof of the school was torn off, and a barn was deposited in the gym. More than ninety houses were leveled, and sixty more were badly damaged. Seventeen of Barneveld’s eighteen businesses—including the grocery store, the municipal building, the bank, the library, the post office, the feed mill, the farm dealership, the American Legion Hall, the Village Bar and Restaurant, and the Thousand Curls Beauty Shop—and all three of the town’s churches were demolished. Only the water tower, with the name BARNEVELD freshly painted in black against the white, and a brick bell tower in front of the Lutheran church stood standing.