This afternoon around five p.m., we watched from the top of our office veranda as a monsoon-like rainstorm swept across the Indian Ocean on its way toward Maputo city. Before the storm’s arrival, the electricity in the air was so charged and the air so calm that my hair literally stood on end. By the time the storm moved out some six hours later, the air hung heavy with humidity and the city sat afloat in landslides of mud. Unless you’ve lived in Africa, it’s hard to imagine what it means to be caught in a real thunderstorm.
Having said that, the steel wall of clouds over Maputo’s seas brought flashbacks of Midwest schooldays during tornado season, where we kids crouched in hallways, head-to-lockers, knees-to-head, in tornado drills or, on occasion, in preparation for the real thing. We would giggle away our boredom and, sometimes, nervous energy in single-file lines until the all-clear signal sounded. And, once received, we’d trudge back to our classrooms with a second-grade stoic kind of resolve, thankful because as our teachers liked to point out, at least we had huddled in the shadow of a tornado rather than Communist Russia’s nuclear bomb.
Fortunately, the tornado’s dangers seemed to elude our corner of Ohio throughout much of my elementary school years. By fourth grade, we spent less time waiting for the all-clear signal and more time trying to figure out how to stealthily move places so as to end up crouching next to our best friend. Tornado drills became a break from schoolwork rather than a preparation for deadly summer weather.
It wasn’t until a few years later in 1985 when a tornado cut a path of destruction a half a mile wide through neighboring towns in my own Trumbull County that we school kids began to appreciate the wrath of organized wind. Stepping through the ruins of the office building where my mom was at work just an hour before the tornado hit, I concluded that school hallway drills were futile. Furthermore, the U.S. should have put a lot more effort into getting rid of the tornado than stamping out communist governments.
Not too long after that deadly summer storm in 1985, I developed an irrational fear of tornados, which I communicated with a typical pre-adolescent vigor. During the twister season, I made elaborate topographical mental maps of ditches wherever we went in the event a tornado came at us while driving. I prepared emergency rations in cupboards that I checked in on every week. I lobbied my mother loudly to move to a house with a real tornado shelter when I declared our own shoddy condominium bathroom as unlikely to withstand an oscillating fan on full blast. I tossed and turned to the sounds of our floors creaking; convinced each was a distant rumble of thunder. All of this, until finally at the self-determined end of the tornado season each year, I would fall asleep exhausted, dreaming of sailboats on a windless sea.
The wall of clouds today in Maputo resembled what every Midwesterner knows to be “Tornado Weather” and it reminded me that I can’t explain exactly when or how I lost that irrational adolescent fear. Looking back, subsequent summers of less damaging, more distant tornados probably contributed to my diminishing concern; as well, more rational adolescent fears like whether I was popular or why a particular boy didn’t like me probably replaced it entirely. In my last summer days in Northeast Ohio as a college student, I can remember sitting with friends in basements getting drunk on cheap wine while tornado warnings raged around us. The storms seemed more romantic than threatening, inspiring a naïve return to those elementary school hallways.
And so it goes that I guess I’ve been content to stay in those hallways ever since. Maputo’s storm today, although a nuisance, was one of the prettiest African thunderstorms I’ve seen in a very long time. And not once did I stop to consider just which ditch I’d run to first.
