I left the casino and re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 3pm, check-in time at the Holiday Inn. I stopped dead, right outside the doors. It was hot – seriously hot. Not three hours ago I’d entered this warped behemoth in a jacket and jumper, and this morning had shivered with plumes of breath in a freezing Joplin. A Walgreens billboard across the parking lot told me it was in fact 87 degrees. As I stared for a moment in the kind of confusion you get when leaving the cinema in broad daylight, the ticker changed ….87 degrees….25th March….Open 7-11….1st Graders 50% off ammo today only….WARNING. WARNING. SEVERE T-STORM. WARNING….
Yet the sky was clear blue. The dark clouds I’d seen from the VIP Lounge had been blown apart by the heat. I walked out into the open to get a better view, breaking into an instant sweat. Now I saw. Enormous cumulonimbus thunderheads were rising – visibly expanding like slow-motion atom bombs going off in all directions. Half an hour ago there was nothing, just a sheet of grey, shifting cloud. This was a different planet.
All my plans went out the window. I was going to check in to the Holiday Inn across the interstate, then head back to the Hard Rock and set up my camera, film the whole scene rolling in, and after the storm maybe have a few burgers and play some craps.
There was no time for anything now. I got my rucksack out of the car, safely covered in five floors of concrete, and walked in the burning sun to Walgreens. There was no restaurant at the Holiday Inn and I wasn’t sure I’d make it back across the road alive, so took my one chance to grab some food and drink – three Coors Lights, a Mountain Dew, and a bag of cashew nuts. Seriously Walgreens? The only store in America that doesn’t sell food? Nuts would have to do. The checkout girl ID’d me. She was about 14 and on the phone, talking about a party later. She looked at my Welsh driving licence with absolute confusion, still on the phone, and just shrugged, like I was a criminal but there was nothing she could do to prove it.
Outside the clouds were getting closer, and weirder. To the north huge thunderstorms were already in full motion, the heads topping out at thirty, forty thousand feet and spreading like anvils. All different colours, the sunlight refracting in through different layers of atmosphere; bright white tops, seams of pink and purple, and a dark, snarling base. That meant rain and hail, and lots of it.
The storms to the north were maybe thirty miles away, but the others were harder to judge because a long sloping hill blocked much of the western view.
The speed was terrific. Even with no knowledge of meteorology or geography, the air itself gave warning that something was about to happen; the crazy rise in temperature, the thick, soupy atmosphere, the tangible electricity; I felt like sticking my tongue out and expecting it to snap, crackle and pop.
I packed my supplies into the rucksack and set out walking to the hotel. There was a local road that went under the Interstate, and unusually, it had a sidewalk. I noted the best places to hide in case of needing shelter – the underpass would be good for hail, not so good for a tornado. There have been many cases of people sheltering in underpasses being blown right out (the official advice, if you ever find a twister coming for you on the highway, is to hide in a ditch or even lay flat in the grass and hope it misses you, rather than be sucked out of an underpass).
Above, the blue sky had now been replaced with a high, bubbling greyness that moved rapidly from west to east. The bubbles (mammatus clouds) were dramatically lit up by the low sun, and looked like an inverted carpet of mushrooms. The air was alive. I’d been through many storms, but never felt an atmosphere like this. It had a taste. It tingled.
After the underpass I cut across a gas station forecourt and a distribution centre parking lot and then there it was, my suddenly very small and fragile looking shelter from the storm: the white and green Holiday Inn.
I walked in sweating like a fat wrestler. Another guy was just done checking in, he was handsome and suave in a perfect navy suit and smelled of aftershave. I looked back at the check-in girl. She didn’t seem to mind. She was younger than me, had bleached hair and a stud in her lip. Diana. Despite explaining that I did have a car, it was just parked across the road, the lack of a car to register seemed to be about the most extraordinary thing that had ever happened to Diana.
Finally, I was in, and before I had a chance to remove my sweat soaked jumper, the first clap of thunder shook the building. Seconds later, the lights went out.
The whole world went silent. But then the power came back, and I resumed my mad dash, starting with thumping buttons to find the Weather Channel. Just as I found it, the TV started blurting out a high-pitched alarm, and a red ticker ran across the screen: SEVERE STORM WARNING. TORNADO WATCH FROM 5.15PM. It was now 4pm.
Well I did what anyone would do and ran outside.
I stood on a grassy hill separating the parking lot from the road and pointed my camera at the shifting skies. Man, did they shift. The eastern storms had risen even higher and turned vivid pink and yellows, and shook with lightning. Overhead, the bubbles had given way to a swirling monster cloud that dropped almost to the ground and rose and dropped again, a heaving black mass floating east at amazing pace, it must have been moving at 60mph.
Titanic drops of rain now came crashing down – they were ridiculous, like water bombs, and the headlights and brake lights of the trucks on the interstate was suddenly all I could see. Without noticing, the horizon on all sides had disappeared into black. And then the sound arrived, as suddenly as thunder. But it wasn’t thunder. It was the sound of hail smashing into steel and concrete, thumping into clay and thrashing through trees. I ran inside.
Flashes of lightning lit the sky white and blue, but didn’t reveal any view. The rain and hail were too thick, they shrouded everything. From my window I watched the meteorites smacking into the pool cover. I’d never quite believed warnings and stories of baseball sized hail. These were bigger.
Then the wind really came. Leaves and debris and thunder was all I could hear. Until that long, piercing, unmistakable tone started up: the tornado siren. From all those movies, documentaries and first hand accounts of what its like when it comes; I was now in it. The long, haunting call of the siren played as a soundtrack to the dance of the clouds.
An hour ago I was in blistering sunshine.
Five minutes ago I’d been thinking about heading back to the Hard Rock.
Five minutes.
Now I was in a spaceship blasting through an asteroid field. The wind increased to a continuous roar. The Hard Rock’s giant billboard was wobbling and the smaller signs down the road had disappeared altogether. The interstate had stopped. Tail lights rocked back and forth by the side of the road. The red ticker on TV flashed bigger and even more urgent: YOU ARE IN A LIFE THREATENING SITUATION. TORNADO CONFIRMED ON THE GROUND WEST OF TULSA.
The sirens continued to wail; stretched so long and patient they seemed so at odds with the Hellfire banging of thunder and hail and the clackity clacking of roof tiles in the wind. Branches flew down the road. I was east of Tulsa. The tornado was heading this way.
The lights flickered and the red ticker warning flicked off. Blackness. White flashing. Blackness. White. Black. The fire alarm went off. It jolted me out of the room without a second thought, and I was down in reception in four seconds flat. Security lights lit the room an eerie green. A dozen or so guests were milling around. The lights came back on, and I got a chance to look at everyone. There was little fear. This was Oklahoma.
Diana stood calm and not a little bored, absently asking people to stay away from the windows. Two older guys in demin jackets, one with a ponytail, went out the front door for a smoke. I joined them. The wind was side on to the door, so the porch provided relative calm. A brief lull in rain revealed the clouds, still shifting and rolling, dropping and rising all around. It looked like a tornado could drop at any second.
Lightning hit right across the road. Smoke began to rise – it was the Walgreens. One of the guys pointed to his truck, “She was caked in mud when I arrived.” It was blasted clean now.
The hail started again, but it was smaller now, and the wind began to subside. The fire alarm finally stopped. Inside, people had got on the beer at the bar or else gone back to their rooms. But the siren still sang. I went back to my room to see what the weathermen had to say. Two touchdowns in the Tulsa area, and Catoosa was in the path of one – oh, shit. Was it old news? Had the system already passed? Another channel said a tornado had hit Sand Springs, west Tulsa, and lifted. The atmosphere felt different, the weatherman’s tone was different. The danger seemed to be gone.
The rain came back in sheets, and to the south I watched a fast moving rain bomb, could even have been a rain-wrapped twister, it was impossible to tell, but I was glad not to be in it. I popped open a Coors Light and downed a few cashews.
The time was 6pm. The TV news was coming from Oklahoma City and it was a beautiful blue sky. Here in Catoosa we’d been in total darkness for two hours, and the light wouldn’t return ’till morning. The sirens stopped around 6.30, but the lightning and the rain and shape-shifting clouds stayed all night long. Rivers of brown sludge roared down every road, through the underpass, across the garage forecourt. Parking lots were lakes.
I ate all the cashews. Tried to read a book, tried to watch TV, but I was exhausted. I fell asleep quickly to the sound of thundering skies and raging rivers.
american covfefe 