In an Instant

Coming close to the storm

The siren sounded late at night. My wife and I were reading in bed. We could hear the wind outside—more of a rustle than a roar. Then the siren sounded a second time.

“You think we should go to the basement?” my wife asked.

Tornado warning sirens are relatively common in the flat Midwest terrain of the southwest suburbs some thirty miles from Chicago. It’s not that the weather is taken lightly, but its more like the surge of the sea for those who have always lived along the coast. The weather for both can be volatile, but you get used to it.

“Let me look at the radar,” I said and turned to a weather app on my phone. For a stretch of ten miles, the radar showed deep red and purple. Not good radar colors.

“It might not be a bad idea,” I said. We hustled up a few pillows and the dog, and headed for the bedroom in the basement. The siren sounded a third time. After looking again at the radar, I sent a text to my younger son who lives north of us and seemingly in the middle of what now was the red and purple of an early summer storm.

It was crazy here earlier. All good now. You guys okay.

I replied. We’re good. In basement.

Over the next few minutes, the wind picked up a bit, but the storm never fully materialized in our neighborhood. My wife and I fell asleep. Just after midnight, my son on the West Coast sent a text asking if we were okay. In a groggy reply I texted that we were. However, a second text from him I did not see until the the early light of the next morning.

It hit ranchview drive and estate circle.

The weather had made the national news, the tornado touching down just two blocks from my sons’ boyhood home but reverberating a thousand miles away.

I found news reports on my phone and it was clear the twister had rumbled through the old neighborhood and others nearby, but the extent of the damage was unclear.

I texted my sons’ mother who still lived in the house. She had been out of town for a few days and I asked if she had been in touch with her neighbors. She had been awakened that morning by a flurry of messages. The house had taken a hit in the backyard. How bad? It wasn’t clear. My wife and I offered to survey what we could and got in the car for the short drive. My younger son was on Facetime with me as my wife drove the car into the neighborhood. He gasped, the visuals taking his breath away. Massive old trees downed. Sides of homes, missing. Homeowners out on the streets and lawns with saws and rakes, cleaning up what they could. A large tree trimming truck churned gigantic limbs into a wood chipper. The tornado had bounced through the yards in the dark of night, nicking some homes, and directly striking others.

Across the back deck of my former home, lay the top fifty feet of a massive old pine tree. It had crumpled a metal deck chair and smashed the tall wooden railing, its fall missing the rear wall of the house and a large picture window by a few feet. Hundreds of branches and leaves littered the yard and the stone patio. Pots of large plants had been toppled. A wooden rocker was in pieces. The top of a second towering pine had crushed a neighbor’s wrought iron fence. It was frightening, but compared to other homes, some only 50 yards away, what had happened to the home was minor. Hundreds of houses sustained some sort of damage. At least six people were hurt in two communities. The wild and violent weather had come and gone in an instant. But now, after witnessing what it had left behind, it would always be with us. Luck was present, considering what others had to face and would deal with for weeks, but there was no doubt the storm had left a personal scar.

In an instant.

This realization is what remained after helping to survey and document the damage. In an instant, all could have been altered in a far more devastating way. In an instant, a world could have been forever upended. This is not some revelation, of course. It is knowledge we carry with us always. We all know its truth. And many of us, in some aspect of our lives have experienced the seismic shift that can come in an instant—a desperate late night phone call, a brush with a speeding driver who ignores a stop sign, a doctor’s unexpected news.

In an instant.

It’s hard to define this phenomenon—what we call the instant. It can’t be quantified. But it’s understood that it is a flash of time in which human reaction with some level of analysis is impossible. Our minds and hearts cannot examine with any meaningfulness in the period we call an instant. Our true response comes only in the time afterward—the hours, days, years that follow.

What the tornado left behind could have been far more profound for me and my family. Instead, the impact was well below the level of so many others who suffered. But in the instant it was the same—the rush of the unknown, the uncertainties that breed fear and disquiet. They were right there in front of us.

Later that evening, I saw that my son on the West Coast had posted on social media how many people had reached out to him about what had occurred in his old neighborhood, about his boyhood home, about the town where he had grown up. And I thought of that, too, as I remembered the sound of the storm sirens twenty-four hours before, and how remembrances—the milestones, moments, and memories of years past could also have been changed—in an instant.

Photo 1 by Todd Trapani

Photo 2 by David W. Berner