



	The Tornado: June 8, 1966 An Excerpt from Buddy Holly Is Alive and Well on Ganymede (copyright 1991 by Bradley Denton) . . . Christians, Jews, or Muslims might conclude that this Religion of Rock and Roll is either facetious or deliberately offensive. It is neither. Mother and I relied upon our Church and our God just as any other religionists rely upon their Churches and their Gods. Of course, everyone believes in the superior power of his or her own particular God . . . but for those who doubt that the God whom Mother and I worshiped had any power at all, I offer my memory of Wednesday, June 8, 1966: I was six and a half years old. The U.S. manned space program had been proceeding rapidly and magnificently (except for a minor malfunction that had cut short the mission of Gemini 8), leading me to the conclusion that human beings were in control of Nature, that the Universe was under our dominion and command. All we had to do was go out there and take it. On that Wednesday evening, the sky darkened early. A few minutes after 7:00 P.M., the temperature dropped sharply. Civil defense sirens went off. Mother turned on the TV, and an announcer told us that a tornado was heading for the city. We had no basement. Mother put me into the bathtub, then brought the mattress from my bed and covered me with it. "Stay there," she said. "Don't move for anything." She started to leave, and I poked my head out from under the mattress, asking her where she was going. She stopped in the bathroom doorway. "It's stupid," she said. "It's awfully stupid. But I have to go to the roof." She left, and I waited. The wind picked up and the lights went out. I yelled for Mother, but she didn't come, so I got out of the tub, stumbled through the weird green light, and clambered onto the fire escape through the living-room window. The walnut tree beside the fire escape was trembling. I climbed up to the flat tar-and-gravel roof, and there stood Mother, her hair blown back, her dress snapping behind her knees. She was facing southwest. I tried to shout to her, but either I made no sound or it was lost in the growing rumble. The wind rammed down my throat; the noise of a bass drum the size of a mountain shook me; and I saw what was coming. Tornadoes occur in any number of sizes and in a surprising variety of shapes. There are funnel tornadoes and diffuse tornadoes, needle-shaped tornadoes and waterspouts. Most people who have never seen one assume that they all look like the one in The Wizard of Oz. Long and snaky -- a twisting, dancing devil. The tornado in The Wizard of Oz is a mewling infant. What I saw coming toward us that evening was the king of kings, Odin, Yahweh, Allah, and Shiva; it was the rage of every madman of every race of all history, compressed and raised to the billionth power; it was a churning mass that laughed at the puniness of volcanoes and earthquakes. It was an impossibly immense, unswerving cone of utter black insanity that covered a third of the southern sky. The cruelty of the universe had come down to Earth again. Seven years before, it had killed Buddy Holly. Now it would kill Mother and me. It wouldn't even notice. Mother raised her right middle finger to it. I ran to her, pulled her arm down, grasped that finger, and strained to drag her toward the fire escape. Instead, she picked me up and carried me, and then we were in the bathtub, the mattress heavy and smelling of my nighttime accidents. The tornado's rumble lived in the porcelain that pressed cold against my cheek. Mother began singing "Love Me Do." I joined in, my voice a panicked squeak. I knew all of the words. By the time we finished the song, the building was shaking. Mother began singing "Everyday," yelling so that I could hear her over the rumble that had become a dragon's roar. "A-hey, a-hey, hey!" we shouted in unison. We alternated between Buddy Holly songs and the Beatles, taking turns singing at the top of our lungs into each other's ears, yelling the choruses into the mattress. We stayed there and sang for a long, long time, until a distant siren sounded an all-clear, and it was over. When we came out from under the mattress, both of us so hoarse that every breath hurt, we saw that the window over the tub had exploded. Neither of us had heard it happen. Nor had we heard the mirrored door of the medicine cabinet fly open and shatter. Shards of silvered glass were stuck in the top of the mattress. Every window in our building had broken, and the walnut tree outside our living room was stripped of its leaves and most of its bark. The buildings on either side of ours, and across the street, were gone. Dead birds and splintered boards lay all over the street. Four people on our block had been killed. The tornado had not left us untouched, however. Mother wrote, It is an omen. Nothing that enormous and malevolent can be meaningless, and it came right for me. It is only because of my son and the songs that I still live. But because the thing could not have me this time, it will try again, perhaps by trying to take something I love. I will not let it take Oliver. Mother's belief that the tornado was an omen of more bad things to come was soon to be strengthened. For one thing, Bob Dylan suffered a motorcycle accident in August that was to silence his increasingly vital voice for more than a year. And then, soon after Christmas, we learned that Uncle Mike was being drafted. By the time Mother could arrange for time off work to visit him in Des Moines, he had already been shipped to boot camp. But on June 8, I knew neither that Mother saw the tornado as an omen nor that her brother was destined to be sent to Vietnam. All I knew was that on that day, I had been saved by the power of prayer. So you pray your prayers to your God, and I'll pray my prayers to mine. May the best chorus win. *** Contact: braddenton@aol.com Best viewed with Internet Explorer Making it up as I go since 1958