Jerry was outside playing basketball with his friends. It was just a normal day, he says. It wasn’t stormy, and it wasn’t rainy. The sun was out, and there was just a little wind. But even so, like most people around town, young Jerry had a feeling.
“There’s gonna be a storm tonight,” he told his friends that day.
“Because you just felt it,” he tells me now, nearly thirty-five years later. “But other than that, it was just a normal day.”
Jerry is nearing fifty but looks much younger. He’s tan and fit with light-brown hair, and he wears a T-shirt with a pair of faded jeans and work boots. You can tell just by looking at him that he’s strong and spends most of his time outside. He reminds me of the boys I grew up with, and he has the same Wisconsin accent—nasal and long voweled, the ends of words clipped off—that so much of my own family has, that I once had too. He sits inside the shop on a plastic chair beneath the blaring TV, and I ask him what he remembers of that night.
“Well, a huge loud clap of thunder,” he says. “It woke the whole town up. I remember the windows poppin’ and a huge loud roar—so loud that you really couldn’t hear anything. You couldn’t even hear your voice, it was so loud. But just like that, it was over.”
Afterward, he and his brothers grabbed flashlights and set off through town. They climbed through the rubble in the dark, heading to the houses of their extended family and friends.
“There was this sound in town,” he says, then pauses for a beat, trying to find the right word. “There was a wail.”
He looks at his father when he says it, asks if he remembers the sound. It was a gas leak, the sound, and it was heard that night and into the morning, casting an eerie soundtrack over the landscape of a demolished town.
“Were you scared?” I ask Jerry.
“Well, you know,” he says, “when you’re fifteen, it’s like you’re on an expedition. Every corner you turn, it’s something different. You don’t know what you’re gonna find.”
I can imagine him, that fifteen-year-old boy, giddy in the wreckage. Awestruck by the destruction. To see trucks wrapped around telephone poles, to find the buildings reduced to rubble. As bodies were pulled from beneath the piles of wood that were once his neighbors’ houses, his heart might have been beating wildly in his chest. I imagine I might have felt the same.
After a while, a memory comes back to him. Around the site where the mill is now, which he says was a graveyard for cars back then, they’d found single blades of grass and small splinters of wood stuck into tires. His father’s car, which had been parked at the fire station while he was on call that night, ended up on top of a fire truck.
Jerry shakes his head and is quiet for a few seconds.
“You don’t really know the power of it,” he says.
Joyce Aschliman was an EMT, too, but on the night of the tornado she was at home. Back then, she lived in a farmhouse just outside town.
“The day was pretty normal,” she says. We’re sitting in her small apartment in a retirement community in Mount Horeb, across the street from a park where I played as a kid. Joyce is in her eighties now; her husband is gone, and she lives alone. She has a full head of gray-white hair and wears glasses. She’s calm and kind, and as we talk, she rocks back and forth in a plush pink chair that squeaks. There’s a rhythm to the squeaking, and it seems to keep the beat of our conversation. She laughs and cries often while we talk, and sometimes I can’t tell the difference.
“It was a very humid night,” she says. “The air was pretty still.”
Joyce’s father had been in the hospital, and she’d been with her mother to see him that day. It was late when they got home, and her husband, Ernie, who owned and operated the implement with their two sons, Charlie and Bill, had already gone to bed. Their oldest daughter, Lori, who had just graduated from high school, was out with her friends.
“Old mother hens never go to bed till the chicks are home,” Joyce says with a laugh. So she stayed up waiting. Then it started to storm. The wind picked up, and then the power went out. Way back before cell phones, the landline went dead too. Growing up on a cattle farm, Joyce had always been afraid of storms. When she was a girl, during a thunderstorm at suppertime just as her mother had come in from evening chores, the barn had been struck by lightning. It had taken her a long time to get over the fear. When the thunder started to roll that night, she thought it was just another storm.
“So it was nothing to do but wait,” she says.
Soon she heard sirens—fire trucks or an ambulance—and saw flashing red lights. She assumed there’d been a barn fire nearby. Then a car pulled up to the house.
“And just like that, my son come flying to the door,” she says, holding back tears and then letting them go, her voice sticking for a second, then rising in a sob. “And he told us the town was gone.”
She woke her husband and told him they needed to go find Lori.
Sue Clerkin, whose last name back then was Aschliman, was Joyce’s daughter-in-law. She was home that night too. During the day, she’d been building a fence in the yard to keep her two young boys safe.
“It was windy that day,” she says. But, she adds, it’s always windy in Barneveld.
Sue and I are sitting at a family restaurant in Mount Horeb. It’s after lunch on a weekday, so the place is empty. We take a booth by the window. I order iced tea, and Sue gets a water. She’s turning sixty soon—“too old to care what people think of me anymore”—and has close-cropped coppery hair and skin that’s seen the sun. She has freckles, calloused hands, and a wry smile. She wears a striped T-shirt and slacks, having just come from work at the hospital in Madison. It’s the same hospital where my father works, in the mailroom, and he and Sue regularly pass each other in the hallways as my father runs his deliveries. Such is the way of our small towns, unlikely intersections everywhere.
Having grown up on a farm, Sue reminds me of my grandmother and my mother and so many women in my family—tough in a way that feels specific to midwestern women: a little closed off, a little hard, a little suspicious of strangers like me, city slickers who ask a lot of questions. But when she opens up, which happens fast, she’s friendly and funny and wears no pretense. Everything she is she puts right on the Formica table in front of us, for me to take or leave as I will. I can tell she’s a woman who’s wise to the world, who long ago stopped trying to live in the way other people expected her to. I like her immediately.
On the night of June 7, Sue put her kids to bed around 7:30 p.m. She stayed up late, as she often did when she was a young mother. When everyone else in the house was asleep, it was the time of night she liked to get things done. And then it started to storm.
“I remember watching the news,” she says. “There was no storm warnings whatsoever. And when I was young, I grew up falling asleep to the rain and thunder and lightning outside, and it never scared me.” So she went to bed. It was around 12:30 a.m., and the wind had begun to howl.
“I didn’t think anything of it, you know?” she says. “Just another thunderstorm. You never thought you’d have to run for your life.”
Sue’s two boys were seventeen months apart: Michael was four, and Matthew was just shy of his third birthday. They were both in their parents’ bed that night, afraid of the storm. Sue got up to go to the bathroom, and then she heard the sound.