Why am I driving in a tornado?!

I believe I drove in a tornado last night. It was one of the most frightening experiences I've ever had. We have a lot of severe weather here in Minnesota and also back in Vermont where I grew up. Usually I can take it in stride and I feel proud of myself once I've made it home, but last night was really scary.

On Wednesdays, I sometimes don't get to see A.J. at all because he stays at his dad's midweek. If I can, I like to schedule things so that I can pick him up from soccer or basketball or school and spend a bit of time with him on the way to dropping him at his dad's house. That was the plan yesterday. Very straightforward. Looking back at it today, I can see that the reason I found myself driving in a tornado wearing dark glasses last night was motherly love. Ok. That's my reason. That makes perfect sense to anyone who is a mother, I'm sure!

We had a very hot day on Wednesday. It was 89 degrees when I picked up A.J., and there was something on the radio about a tornado watch for Stearns County, which is not our county. I figured we were in for a storm, 'cause there's a cool front coming and you just expect that when it hits the 89 degree front, there will be a storm.

A.J. and I finally left his school at around 6:20 and I got him to his dad's at 6:40. By then, the sky had started to grow really dark. Now here's the problem: I was wearing my prescription sunglasses. I had left my regular glasses at home. And it was getting really dark out...and I can't see to drive with no glasses at all. So I rushed A.J. on into his dad's house and hit the road for my place. There is so much road construction right now that one of the main roads I need to get home is closed at parts, so I took a self-imposed detour, driving a big loop to head toward my neighborhood. It should take me about 20 minutes to get from point A to point B, but it could be more like a half hour using this detour. I was worrying about how dark the sky was getting and I was having some trouble seeing well because I had to keep those dark glasses on.

Of course the storm hit suddenly and hard, while I was driving. Heavy rain and hail, and horribly strong winds. The reports today are that the winds where I was driving were about 60-70 mph. I believe it. There were things blowing across the road! I tried to keep going in my little Volkswagen Golf. I tried not to look at the sky too much, but when I did, I saw some strange shapes up there. At one point there were three vertical sections coming down from the sky...funnel clouds? I don't know. There were reports of a funnel seen in Brooklyn Park, and I was near there at the time.

The driving was really scary. I started to shake really hard. Slowed down, of course, then I had bigger vehicles passing me constantly (what else is new?) and I just drove very carefully. When I got to my town of Plymouth, the sirens were sounding. Spooky. It got so that I couldn't see a thing. By feel more than by sight, I pulled over into a parking lot of a business on the street just before my hill. The office building there was closed, but I sat in my car trying to get the courage to finish the drive home. My dog was home alone and I knew she'd be scared, and frankly I didn't feel so safe in my car. The sirens were LOUD! I pulled it together and drove up the hill and into my neighborhood, made it to the underground parking garage, and got myself parked and climbed out of the car. That's when I realized how hard I was shaking.

A neighbor had just arrived home at the garage too and she and I comforted each other. We were both petrified from having driven in that storm. We talked for a bit and then (dumbly, out of habit) got into the elevator to go up to our floor. Dumbly because we could very well have had a power failure from the storm and found ourselves stuck in that elevator! But we were both anxious to get into our apartments and check on our dogs. As we got into the elevator, there was a young woman getting out, headed to her car. We warned her not to go out into the storm (it's hard to realize the intensity of a storm like that when you're safely inside; I think she had no clue what was going on outside, really. She didn't listen to us.)

We made it upstairs safely and oh, I was never so glad to be home.

Polly was frightened, but mostly she comforted me. We plopped ourselves down on the floor and cuddled and watched the reports come in on the tv. Tornado. Straight-line winds. Flash flooding. A man dead! (a tree fell on him in the street in front of his house in north Minneapolis, striking him in the head and killing him, kind of near the part of town where I was driving actually). Power outages. Shingle Creek up over its banks. Sirens. Roofs blown off.

Scary. But then, comparing it to hurricane Katrina and now Rita, it's not so serious. Still, when you're in it? It's terrifying. Of course I called A.J. to see how they were faring (they were fine, riding out the storm inside their big old house). The storm continued for a couple of hours.

At one point, the winds and hail were so intense that I got scared about staying in the apartment. We are a top floor corner unit and have so many windows; also there is a large electrical tower quite near to our building and I was a bit afraid of that (as my mom always said, "I don't trust electricity", no, that's not right, Mom would say, "I don't trust that outlet" about specific electrical outlets in her home. I guess I am my mother's daughter, after all...see also the new wig postings...my mom was ALWAYS playing around with her hair color!). It seemed like a good idea to go to a safer area in the building, so Polly and I took refuge in the stairwell for a while. She seemed to like it there. It was a long night.

Today things are very much cooler, the ground is sopping wet, and I'm sure there are trees down all through the area.

I hope tornado season is over. Fall begins today, at least by the calendar. Hope hope hope. And I know this is all SO trivial compared to hurricanes. It sure makes me understand why people have to evacuate those areas. We really are at the mercy of weather, and it is so much more powerful than we realize.