“You have to be able to talk about it,” Sue says finally. “If you can’t talk about it, you can’t heal. You hold everything in, and it just kills you.”
People in Barneveld don’t talk about the storm much these days. They’ve moved on, Al says, and many have passed away. And those who are left, I ask, would they rather just forget it?
“I don’t want to forget it,” Joyce says, still holding the picture of Matthew in her hands. “Because it happened.” She sets the picture down and settles back into her chair. I look at her hands as she rocks, resting on the arms of the chair while it squeaks. As a woman who spent years on a farm, taking care of children and animals, doing chores and keeping a household together, life has taken a toll on her hands. But even now, sitting in her carpeted apartment in Mount Horeb, years away from the farm she helped build, her hands still look strong. They remind me of my mother’s hands, of my grandmother’s hands.
“You know,” she says—she’s smiling a wistful smile, and her eyes are bright—“it was just part of life.”
I don’t know what I hoped to find when I went back to Barneveld. I suppose I went back, in some respect, to find the truth of a story that, over the past thirty-five years—a story nearly as old as me—had become more like a myth. In the restaurant in Mount Horeb, I talk with Sue Clerkin about stories. I talk about the ways in which a story, or maybe a myth, can carry on—how it can shape a memory or a place, how it can carry a family, or a town, for generations. She looks at me when I say this, and that tight-lipped smile spreads across her face.
“You know,” she says, “they always said, ‘The Mounds will protect you.’”
I sit for a second with this, hearing it for the first time from the mouth of someone from Barneveld, someone who survived the storm, someone who lost the very thing we never expect to lose. And I think of the way we all felt so protected, the Blue Mounds serving as some holy shoulder of God. I realize we were all told this story, on both sides of the mountain.
“That’s what they told us too,” I say. “It’s the story I was told my whole life. It’s the story I believed.”
“Well,” she says with a shrug, “the Mounds didn’t protect us.”
A few years ago, in August, my partner and I took a road trip out west. On the way home, we took Highway 70 across the middle of the country, which sent us for a full day across the length of Kansas. And that afternoon, the sky turned dark.
Kansas is situated in the heart of Tornado Alley, a portion of the Midwest and Great Plains that stretches from North Texas up through South Dakota—an area whose particularly volatile climatological patterns make a perfect breeding ground for tornadoes. The United States accounts for nearly 75 percent of the world’s tornadoes, and this is where most of them happen. In the past several years, as overall temperatures have increased and caused more extreme weather across the country, meteorologists have marked an eastward shift in that path. But the middle of the country still sees the most tornadoes each year.
All day I’d been watching the sky. Even in the morning, when the sun was out and the sky was still blue, the way the clouds were building—high and white and bulbous, great towers of clouds—had me on edge. The day was hot and humid. The sky got darker as we crossed the state line, heading toward what was to be our day’s destination, a campsite near Lawrence. And the sky kept getting darker, the massive white wind turbines dotting a landscape of cornfields set in shocking contrast against the dark blue, then gray, then green of the sky.
“This isn’t good,” I said.
And then the sun went down. The wind picked up, and the rain came down hard, so heavy it was impossible to see. Traffic crawled. The wind roared. A low, constant rumble of thunder rolled through the black night, punctuated by deafening cracks that vibrated in the road beneath us. Lightning lit the sky like a strobe. I turned on the radio and tried to find a forecast.
“Tornado warnings across the state,” a weatherman said. A funnel cloud had been spotted. “Wabaunsee, Osage, Shawnee Counties.”
“What county are we in?” I asked aloud, then frantically checked my phone to find out. We were in Shawnee County.
“If you’re in any of these areas,” the voice on the radio said, “you should immediately take cover. If you’re on the road, don’t try to outrun it.”
The rain was blinding, coming down in sheets. We pressed on for a while, crawling in the traffic, then took the next exit. We pulled over under the overpass, along with a few other cars and a semitruck, and sat in our rental car, terrified and helpless as the rain pounded and the wind howled. Thunder roared and cloud-to-ground lightning cracked every second. It was pitch black, out there in the middle of nowhere, but for the lightning. And every time the sky lit up, I expected to see it: the massive, unstoppable monster, barreling toward us across the plain, tearing through the corn. In those moments, I was certain this was the end. This was how we’d die, out here on the road, as the tornado pressed down upon us, then tossed us into the sky. And how fitting, I thought, to go this way. How inevitable. Almost as if it was fate.
When the rain let up, just briefly, we pulled back on the highway and sped toward Topeka. We pulled over once more under another overpass when the rain came back even heavier; then we pressed on again. We found the closest hotel, screamed into the parking lot, and ran for cover, then huddled in the lobby with the guests and staff until the storm passed.
In the end, we never saw it. But it had been there, somewhere, in the darkness—so close we could feel it. The next morning, there were reports of a tornado touching down less than a mile from the highway. I felt relief, of course, but in the light of day, there was also some part of me that was disappointed. As Jo says in Twister, scrambling out from under a bridge to get a better look at the tornado as it passes over, Bill struggling to restrain her: I wanted to see it.
Like God, like fear itself, like the darkest guts of grief—the cone of silence, the still and silent eye of the storm, the thing we cannot possibly know—it’s something I’ve wanted to witness for as long as I can remember. It’s something I’ve been trying my whole life to see.
Ever since the Barneveld tornado, Sue Clerkin has been afraid of storms.
“It’s the wind that drives you nuts,” she says. “The howling. You look out of the house, and you see the trees are half bent over and touching the ground.”
It’s a fear, she says, with some regret, that she has instilled in her children. Her oldest daughter sometimes calls her in a panic during storms. Sue calls her kids, too, whenever the clouds start to build. She asks them if they’re watching the weather, if they’re keeping their eyes to the sky.
Lori is scared of storms too. Joyce tells me her daughter once pulled over at a farmhouse as she was driving through a storm and asked the strangers who lived there if she could get in their basement.
Al doesn’t have the same kind of fear, he says, because he didn’t actually live through the storm. He’s fortunate, he says, to not have heard the sound of the wind or watched the roof get torn from his house, like his wife and kids did.
“She said it was just like a freight train,” Al says of his wife, repeating a line I’ve heard so often it sounds something like a prayer. And Jerry, who seemed so calm when we spoke, is vigilant during storms. He’s always on watch, Al says, constantly monitoring the skies.