Growing up, I’d heard that just before it struck, the tornado had hit transmission lines, cutting power to the town and silencing the sirens. Later, I read it was a bolt of lightning that did it. Recently, I was told there were no sirens at all in Barneveld at the time. In any case, emergency sirens were powered by electricity back then, so even if they had existed, they wouldn’t have sounded. The town had no warning. It was an invisible monster that struck in the dead of night, another rarity when it comes to tornadoes, and no one saw it at all. And in the end, the Barneveld Tornado, as it came to be known—which a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Madison called “the worst one I’ve ever seen”—wiped out 90 percent of the town. In a matter of seconds, it was responsible for nine deaths and left more than two hundred people seriously injured. It killed cows and horses and pets, and it caused an estimated $25 million in damage.
After carving a path through the center of town, the tornado traveled toward the Blue Mounds and ended in the nearby town of Black Earth, where it ripped through cornfields, damaged houses, and destroyed several farms. It traveled for about thirty miles and was on the ground for nearly an hour before dissolving back into the clouds.
Growing up, I’d heard the story that after hitting Barneveld, the tornado had barreled directly toward Mount Horeb. That it had made a straight shot east to west, hit the Blue Mounds, and jumped back into the clouds before touching down again in Black Earth, barely missing us. And this was the story that would be told for years to come, that would become part of the mythology of Mount Horeb and its people—a legend as large as the trolls, as fateful as Moses on his mountain: that the Mounds, or maybe God himself, had protected us. A town just a few miles to the west was in ruins, but we on the Mountain of God were spared.
I’d find out later that the tornado was never actually headed toward Mount Horeb. It came close, missing us by a matter of miles. But like most storm systems, it didn’t move west to east, the path that would have led to us. Aerial photographs and maps show a line traveling from the southwest to the northeast, an almost perfect forty-five-degree angle. Tornadoes do possess the ability to shift direction, but this one stayed on a pretty straight course. It didn’t head our way and then skip us, miraculously diverting course, by the will of God or the magical properties of the Mounds. It’s true that the town eight miles away—a community of our neighbors and family, our coworkers and friends—was destroyed and ours was not. But I’m not sure you could call us saved.
In the Barneveld Public Library, there are scrapbooks, photo albums, and newspaper clippings—items once kept and cataloged by residents—housed on the bottom shelves of a small back-room cabinet. It’s spring 2019, in late May, just before the thirty-fifth anniversary of the tornado, and I find myself inside this library, which, like the rest of the town, was rebuilt after the storm. Later I walk along Main Street and see the houses and the businesses and the churches and the bars that were rebuilt too; their prefab siding still looks new. I drive along the back roads and see the houses that were never hit, then walk to the park and find a plaque dedicated to the nine people who died. But I spend most of my time in the library, in that small back room, blowing dust off photo albums. I turn their pages, the plastic sticking together, and pore over yellowed newspaper articles and Polaroids carefully pressed inside and captioned in fine cursive. Sue and Charlie’s place. The implement. The Lutheran Church. Identifiers scrawled below photos of crumbled foundations, bed frames and lampshades and trailers, metal scraps wrapped around light posts, trees torn leafless and permanently bent, like they’re still being blown by the wind. I spend hours in that room, thinking about the people who died. But what I have really come here to do is to find the people who lived.
We’re sitting in Al Wright’s feed mill, on the opposite end of town from his first property, which the tornado ripped away before it had even opened for business. Al is seventy-seven and wears a plaid collared shirt, wire-framed glasses, and a white baseball cap. His white sideburns peek out below the brim. He’s fit, with a strong nose and chin, slate-blue eyes, and the skin of a man who spends his days outside, hauling bags of feed to the truck beds of farmers, chopping wood, and tending to the greenhouse he keeps in the summer. His smile lines and crow’s-feet are deep. The shop is small, with wood-paneled walls, large windows, and a few shelves stuffed with tools and suet and farming supplies. Anchored to the wall in one corner of the room is a TV playing an afternoon soap opera, and we have to talk loudly over the sound of it. Al sits in a chair behind the counter while we talk, his hands folded on the desk in front of him. I stand, leaning over the counter to hear him.
Al has been running the mill for thirty-five years. It’s the busy season, he told me over the phone before I arrived, but only one person comes into the shop while we talk. When I’d pulled up to the mill I’d spotted a younger man, tan and strong and shirtless, in the woodpile behind the mill. This, I find out later, is Al’s son Jerry, who works with his father. He lived through the tornado too.
Before the tornado hit, Al was just a few days away from celebrating the grand opening of his feed mill. He was also an EMT. On the night of June 7, 1984, as the clock ticked over to midnight, he was out on call. What Al remembers most about that night, in the hours just before the storm, is that it was hot and muggy. He might have had the windows in the ambulance down. He had just dropped off a patient at a hospital in Madison and was on his way back home to Barneveld, the tiny town in which he had lived for his entire life, when the call radio clicked on.
The dispatcher asked for Al’s location. He was on the west side of the city, he said, not far from Mount Horeb.
“Get back as fast as you can,” the dispatcher said. “Your town has been destroyed by a tornado.”
When he got back to Barneveld, fighting through police tape to enter, he was handed the body of a small boy. Everyone knew everyone in Barneveld back then, like they do today. Al knew the boy, and he knew the boy’s parents.
“Protocol tells you that you decide who to transport,” Al tells me. It takes a second to realize what he means: In a disaster situation, an EMT must make a call on who to take to the hospital and who to let go. He knew the boy was dead.
“But how do you say, ‘He’s gone’?” he asks me. He fights back tears as he says it, blotting his eyes with a handkerchief he’s pulled from his pocket. It’s not typical, out here, to see men cry, let alone men like Al—men who toil, men who work the land. I think of my grandfather, a man who was born on a farm and worked on the line at the GM plant in Janesville—a man I never once saw cry.
That night, Al took the dead boy to the hospital. He continued to transport bodies of the dead and wounded until morning and was only able to stop by his own house briefly to check on his family and assess the damage. He shined a flashlight on the wreckage and found a house without a roof, but his wife and children had been spared. He wouldn’t gather with them until daylight, when the night’s work was done.
On June 7, 1984, Jerry Wright was fifteen years old. School had just gotten out, and summer vacation had just begun. His skin was already tan from the sun, and the days were spread out before him in the way summer days do when you are young, the whole town and surrounding fields and farms and long hours of daylight seeming limitless, all yours.