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Show Twisters . . . 104 east on 1-80, promising to get her to safety. True to his word, he took her to a safe place. That it was 150 miles down the road was a bafflement to all of us. During the next few weeks, all that the people in Grand Island could talk about was Black Tuesday. "Did you get hit?" became the official greeting on the street, and "Would you believe-?" was the surest way to get a conversation started. Everyone had a story to tell. There was also no end to the comparing going on. After the official investigation, our storm was labeled a first-class freak. The six or seven funnels that touched down didn't follow tornado rules at all. Not for size, direction or velocity. Most tornadoes are less than half a mile wide. Wouldn't you know the one spooking the countryside near our town of Phillips reached five miles in width? And in spite of the fact that 99.5 percent of Northern Hemisphere tornadoes turn counterclockwise, two of ours spun the other way. Even Dr. Fujita, the great tornado wizard, was baffled. "I've never seen anything like it in my twenty-seven years of tornado investigating," he said in the Grand Island Daily Independent. "I've never seen such a complicated tornado." I was hearing something else as the days went by, something that proved itself true again and again: "What happens after a tornado is the real story." If you'd been in southcentral Nebraska last summer, you'd have to agree. What do you do, for instance, when the city's water supply is polluted, when you aren't allowed to drink what isn't in the pipes, even if you had a faucet to turn it on? Morning, noon, and night we guzzled root beer, Pepsi, the uncola drink or Dr. Pepper. Whatever we could get. I never thought I'd get sick of drinking soda pop, but I did. |