Confronting a fear of tornadoes

hkronmueller

When I was a child I had two recurring nightmares.

One went like this:

I am sleeping on the couch in my living room when all of a sudden something causes me to wake. I sit up and look toward the front door just in time to see a giant, 10-foot-tall spider walking through it. It would mull around for a minute and look at me. Then the dream was over.

The other dream was about a tornado.

In that dream, I am sitting on the front porch playing with some toys when all of a sudden a baby tornado, probably only about 15 feet tall and three feet wide, appears rotating on my driveway. Terrified, I run downstairs where my mom is doing laundry and tell her about it.

"There's a tornado on the driveway!" I shout.

Then, like it was an everyday occurrence, my mom calmly walks up the stairs, out the back door and right up to the tornado.

Then she grabs the tornado, picks it up, gets a running start and throws it down the street as far as she could. It always reminded me of the scene in the movie "Revenge of the Nerds" when Lamar is running with the floppy javelin.

Then I wake up.

My recurring dreams never surprised me because in my waking moments I had a deep fear of both spiders and tornadoes.

Since I quit having those dreams, when I was about 13, I've had my fair share of run-ins with spiders.

But until Sunday I never had to confront my fear of tornadoes.

I got a call at 8:15 a.m. telling me about the storms in Marble Hill, Mo., and Dongola, Ill.

By 9:30 a.m. I was on my way to Dongola.

I wondered what I would see when I got there. Sure, anyone who lives in or around Missouri has seen their fair share of tornado damage on television, but I didn't know what to expect to see in person.

I was kind of nervous when I pulled into town and saw trees scattered like broccoli on a child's plate.

I didn't know if I would be able to walk up to someone and ask them questions about what they had been through. After all, it must have been 1,000 times worse than my childish nightmare.

What I quickly learned is that people wanted to talk. They wanted to tell their stories, not just to a reporter, but to someone, anyone.

I heard tons off stories about pets who woke their owners just minutes before the storm by barking or jumping up and down on their beds.

I heard stories about families that crouched together in the middle of their home holding onto one another for dear life. When the tornado came, they were thrown in different directions.

When the storm passed, they struggled in the dark to make their way through the wreck that was their home to find each other, hoping and praying they would be found alive and in good condition.

A woman told me how her family always heard you should take shelter in the bathtub if a storm was coming and you live in a trailer.

When the tornado hit her house, it split the trailer in two and sent the tub flying across three yards. She said it felt like a rollercoaster ride at Disneyland or Six Flags, only dark and wetter.

The most amazing thing that came out of my trip to Dongola wasn't the story about the family whose ducks were tossed across the lake but somehow survived and swam back home in the morning. It was how calm these people were.

They weren't angry. They didn't yell or scream or ask why them. They simply held each other and thanked God the only things destroyed were their homes, not their lives.

Heather Kronmueller is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian.