We have come halfway across the United States in the middle of one of the worst winters on record and encountered no bad weather, except for the rainstorms leaving Los Angeles. While airports all over the East Coast are closed due to blizzards, nary a drip of rain has touched our windshield in a thousand miles.
So it’s with a combination of resignation and jangly nerves that we learn via the news on New Years Eve day that we’re driving into the heart of a tornado/blizzard/hail stormfront that stretches across eight states and has already wreaked intense havoc in the Midwest.
According to the Weather Channel experts, the severe weather is expected to move upward by nighttime, leaving the Louisiana/Mississippi area where we’re heading mostly in the clear. However, we don’t want to be driving late at night because a) it’s New Year’s Eve, b) weather experts are usually wrong, and c) I know from experience that driving through a pretty bad storm at midnight is just as difficult as driving through a severe one in the daytime.
As for the tornado threat…well, that’s in league of its own. If we see any indication of a twister cloud coming, we’ll pull off the highway and run screaming for the nearest cellar, shelter, safe room, etc. Like most people from the coasts, we’re terrified of tornadoes.
We leave Ft. Worth around noon. Four hours later, we’re driving into a tornado watch.
We don’t immediately identify it as such. All we know is, the early-darkening sky has a forbidding density about it, and lightning is flashing every few minutes, all across the horizon.
We’re about 50 miles from Alexandria, Louisiana. Our last stop had been at a back-bayou service station with only one rickety pump standing alone in a yard of dead machinery. Amid the rusted-out cars and monstrous-looking detached semi-truck heads, we nervously pumped gas while a man in mud-encrusted hip waders stared at the Kizashi’s side decal for several moments, before shaking his head and saying he didn’t know how to pronounce any of the city names on it.
This would seem to be the right time for a “Toto’s not in Kansas anymore” comment, except lo and behold—Kansas is coming straight to us. Or at least the natural-disaster part of Kansas…the part that could conceivably lift up me and my dog and my Suzuki and carry us to Oz.
As the lightning increases in frequency to the point where it seems to be flashing every 30 seconds, it feels increasingly stupid to be driving toward it at a steady 65MPH. Other cars are still on the highway traveling in both directions, but this doesn’t reassure me, since I am scheduled to go another 160 miles whereas they might be making a final push home to the storm shelter.
After our weak Blackberry wireless confirms that there’s a tornado watch posted in Alexandria, we start trying to find a source of ongoing information—either on the radio or online. Unfortunately, nothing’s coming through on the radio, and the Blackberry connection dies a second later. We begin dialing family members who might have an Internet connection. A recorded operator message tells us that the country code we’re calling from is not recognized on the network. We’ve officially crossed into no-communications land.
Thirty miles out of Alexandria, we pull off the highway at another dark and scary little service stop. This time, we’re in luck—a highway patrol car is sitting under the bridge. He tells us he hasn’t heard any news of a tornado coming on his police radio, and says we should be safe to just push on through. Slowly, though, because of the fog, the rain, and the NYE drunks who will soon be out in full force.
This is a huge relief. It makes the next 30 minutes of lightning seem like slightly spooky seasonal special effects. The rain that hits about 50 miles outside our overnight destination of Lafayette, Louisiana is a minor inconvenience. The frigid wind that nearly knocks us over when we get out of the car is refreshing and surprising, not unpleasant.
New Year’s Eve is uneventful. It feels good to be indoors and safe. The next morning when we watch the news, we realize how truly lucky we’ve been. People in the Midwest lost houses and lives over the New Year’s Eve storms. A car gives you the freedom to chart a course around such things, seeing the lightning, but missing the worst part by miles.
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