Night of the Twister, A True Story

Or, Be Careful What You Write About

      I survived a tornado this week. That in itself is a pretty powerful statement that not many people can say. But when you add in the fact that I wrote about the tornado before it happened, now what are the odds of that?

     I’ve been fascinated by tornados since I was a child, and one touched down a block from my house while I was away at summer camp. About a year ago, I wrote about one for the first time, in a short story entitled Blown Away. It tells the tale of volunteer firefighter Gable McCoy and teacher Erin Richards, who meet when a tornado destroys Erin’s woodland cabin. I based the cabin on my own home, and I patterned Erin, in part, on myself (except she’s younger and cuter and more talented, of course). Blown Away and a couple of short sequels were quite popular online, so I revised and expanded the story into the novel Force of Nature, which is due to be released in September by Bold Strokes Books.

      It went to press about two weeks before I experienced my first (and hopefully last) tornado firsthand.

     The twister first touched down right on my property line. It awakened me at 1:30 in the morning when it took down massive trees on all four sides of my house. One tree, an enormous white pine hit the edge of my roof and then took out my propane tank. Several more trees hit my power lines. The snapped trees next to my house suggest the tornado passed directly overhead, about ten feet above the top edge of my roof.

      It took firefighters several hours to cut through all the dozens of downed trees on my dirt road and in my long driveway, to reach me. I haven’t yet counted all the trees on my property that were uprooted or torn apart, but I would guess it’s near 100 or more. After it left my property, it destroyed more than 80% of the adjacent forest. I flew over it today in a helicopter, and marveled again that I survived.

     Although my house was spared and my character’s was not, there are a lot of incredible similarities between our stories. Trees snapped like matchsticks, a hissing propane tank, the main character’s response: it happened too fast to be afraid, and the only thing you feel at first is just damned lucky—and blessed—to be alive.

      Though I got a lot right, there are a few things I missed in my fictional account, but then I guess sometimes you can’t know everything until you experience it yourself. I didn’t imagine the lingering, pervasive sweet smell of newly split wood. I didn’t know that a tornado victim finds everything in their life kind of surreal for a while. Turned topsy-turvey. Priorities re-evaluated in an instant. And I may never again view approaching bad weather with quite the same blasé nonchalance as before.

      In the book, I have Erin saying she’s going to rebuild because “what are the chances that tornados will hit the same place twice?”

      That is the way I feel, despite the rather creepy coincidences between my fiction and my life. I hope I’m right. Because the one thing my cabin doesn’t have, that Erin’s did…is a basement.

Kim Baldwin © 2005

For more pictures, visit my website: www.geocities.com/woodsbard/tornado.htm