I’m almost certainly off to see the Wizard

One in 60,000. Those are the odds a tornado will suck me away to Oz, or — far more likely in the real world — the afterlife. Those aren’t bad odds; I should be sleeping soundly at night, secure in the knowledge I’m far more likely to die of a heart attack (1 in 5), a random accident (1 in 36) or even electrocution (1 in 5,000, unless I try to install my own lighting fixtures, in which case the odds rise considerably).

Yet I’m not worried about my heart, falling off a ladder, or frying myself while attempting to remove a recalcitrant bagel from a toaster with a butter knife.

I am worried about tornadoes. Because of my new residence and my personal history. 

I’m moving this week, one poorly-packed box at a time, from my beloved lake house to Lori’s place, the Little House on the Prairie. It’s a nice enough home, but it is located directly in the middle of nowhere and has no basement.

There’s nothing surrounding this house but open fields, acres and acres of ‘em. You couldn’t plan a more enticing tornado magnet without actually drawing a bullseye on the place and opening a trailer park next door.

One in 60,000; those are the odds. That’s according to insurance company actuarial tables, the sort they use to determine how badly they’re going to gouge you in premiums. 

I should say, one is 60,000 are the odds for you and any normal person. The odds are higher for me. I don’t know if it’s because a deity hates me, I have bad karma, or whether there’s some sort of tornado-attracting pheromone I unconsciously exude in moments of stress, but tornadoes seem determined to get me.

They’ve tried. Three times so far.

The first attempt occurred when I was only an infant. My grandmother managed to get me into the root cellar scant moments before a funnel cloud swept her house into oblivion. The same thing happened again just a half-dozen years later.

Then when I was in my teens, while camping in Illinois, a tornado nearly dropped a cow on me. The airborne bovine missed my tent (in which I was, at the time, sleeping) by about three feet. I woke the next morning with a deceased, inverted cow reposing legs-up within touching distance of my sleeping bag.

So you can see that one in 60,000 thing doesn’t apply to me. You can also understand, I suppose, why I’m so nervous about moving to a basement-less home in the middle of tornado alley.

It’s just a matter of time.

But as John Denver said, “My bags are packed, I’m ready to go…” There’s no turning back now; my landlady at the lake house has already lined up a new tenant.

So, like a condemned man walking that last mile to the electric chair, I go to meet my fate. I hope the tornado, when it eventually comes — and it will come, make no mistake — spares Lori. Her only crime is loving a tornado-magnet like me. 

There’s no reason the poor kid should have to share in my tempestuous doom.

Mike Taylor's paperback, "Looking at the Pint Half Full," is available at Robbins Book List in Greenville and in Kindle format from Amazon.com.

We’re off to see the wizard, and this time I plan to get photos

Had a tornado watch in my county a couple weeks back. As usual, I did the exact opposite of what the keyed up TV weather man was telling me to do – I grabbed my camera and headed out into the open countryside, hoping to grab at least one good “twister” shot. But as has been the case the last hundred or so times I’ve done this, no twister materialized and I came home empty-handed.

I’ve been trying to get a decent photo of a tornado for the past 35 years, but so far, nothin’. I’ve never even seen one, much less caught one on film.

I’ve mentioned here before that I’m a fan of “big weather,” and weather doesn’t get much bigger than a “Wizard of Oz”-sized twister. Over the years, I’ve developed what can only be called an obsession with them. Tornadoes are the white whale to my Captain Ahab.

To make matters worse, tornadoes have repeatedly taunted me with “near misses.”

The first I was too young to remember. I was only an infant and was cowering in the root cellar with my mother and grandmother when a tornado whisked away the house above us. Not a board was left, to hear my grandma tell it.

The next hit nine years later, on a Palm Sunday I’m sure a lot of West Michigan folks still remember. Tornadoes were touching down all around us, but I was a kid and my folks – who remembered all too well the root cellar incident – wouldn’t allow me to leave the basement.

But my most memorable close encounter of the windy kind occurred nearly ten years later, while I was hitch-hiking from Detroit to Missouri. I had been on the road a couple days and had made it only as far as Illinois.

My last ride had dropped me off in a tiny, rural town; a one-stoplight burg boasting a bar, two churches, a mom & pop diner, and three-dozen indifferently maintained homes perched along a two-lane blacktop. It was getting on toward dusk and the odds of finding a quick lift out of Mayberry were not good.

The sky was overcast, and rather than hitch after dark, I opted to make camp in a fallow field just south of town. I hiked back from the road and erected my little “bug” tent near some abandoned railroad tracks.

Snuggled into my sleeping bag, I nodded off two minutes after zipping in for the night. Some time later, I woke to the sound of heavy rain blatting against the tent’s Nylon exterior. There’s nothing cozier than sleeping through a thunderstorm in a good tent that doesn’t leak; I was asleep again in minutes.

Still later I was awakened by the sound of a train passing, a big one, from the sound of it. The tracks weren’t abandoned after all, it seemed. The walls of my tent bellowed violently in and out. The train passed and I again dozed.

Sunlight dappled the roof of my tent the next morning. I crawled loose of my sleeping bag and unzipped the tent. There, not three feet from the entrance, was a cow. A dead cow; on its back, with all four hooves pointing toward the flawless, blue sky.

It took a moment to process the scene. Extricating myself from the tent, I saw the field was littered with debris – branches, auto parts, torn and dirty clothing. The ground itself looked as if it had been ripped up in places, one of those places not ten feet from my tent.

Back in town, over a coffee at the mom & pop diner, I learned a tornado had swept through the night before. No one killed; thank Heaven, but lots of property damage.

A twister had missed me by ten feet, a flying cow by three. The next time that happens, I’m getting a picture.

Missed a week? More “Reality Check” online at http://mtrealitycheck.blogspot.com or www.milive.com. E-mail Mike Taylor at mtaylor325@gmail.com.