Hiding under a blanket in a storm. Invincible.
Article by Anna Crossley Art by Liz White
Once, on our way to visit my dad’s best friend in Michigan, my family drove into tornado weather on the highway.
I was probably six or seven (maybe eight). The sky turned that scary green that flattens out the horizon and brings the clouds right to your nose, like driving through an algae bloom, the air heavy and buzzing. My dad took the next exit, and we sat out the weather in the tornado-shelter-designated bathroom of some unremarkable midwestern rest stop with a few strangers, who exist in my memory as more presence than actual people. I don’t even remember if my shorts were soaked from the dash between our minivan and the building. But I remember my gray sandals, and I know more than remember the color of the sky before weather like that.
I guess I was scared on that trip, huddled next to my brother on the bathroom floor. I must have been. I’ve always been scared of storms. I still am. There’s no controlling the force of weather like that. You can’t stop it or escape it or put it off for later like so many of the mundane things that terrify me these days. When my brother and I were younger and still shared a room, we’d crawl under the blankets on his bunk every time a bad storm came, and we’d stay there until the thunder was no more than a distant rumble. The sweaty suffocating heat under the quilt was a price I was willing to pay for safety, and even though he pretended otherwise, I think my brother needed that fabric shield just as much as me.
I’ve seen the sky turn that algae color other times: out the front window of my childhood home, blending our trees into the neighbor’s roof and bruising the sky yellowish green. I have this ill-founded conviction that when at home I’m untouchable. But in an old dorm room a thousand miles away, I’m more vulnerable than I was even on that empty highway twelve years ago. The wrong gust of Colorado wind could bury me under snow and rain and old bricks and the weight of all those years of fearing a crack of thunder.
Two summers ago, a week before leaving my hometown for Colorado, I again found myself hiding from the weather on cold, bathroom linoleum. I was shivering in a favorite ice cream shop where I’d been coming for as long as I can remember, with a friend who knew me better than almost anyone. My shorts and shoes were soaked, and my glasses were broken from dropping them on the concrete sidewalk. There was a family with us, and as the wind shook the front windows, the mother was on the phone trying to push back their dinner reservation until the tornado passed. The absurdity of it was not lost on me. She saw the storm as something ephemeral, while to me, it was my entire reality all at once. I wished then that I was back under the covers of the bottom bunk, hovering on the brink of sleep in the warm and the quiet.
Only a few days later, I left behind the pink and green tiles of the ice cream shop and the rain of Indiana for the novelty of mountains and a sky clearer and bluer and more distant than I’d ever lived under. As if to ease me in, the drive was dry and clear. It had been a year full of lasts, and it was a drive so full of ends and beginnings that I was trying to make it into something more than it was. I wanted it to mean something, that it hadn’t rained the whole sixteen hours across the country, but the weather can’t be controlled. I couldn’t squeeze significance out of dry air.
This August, it rained on that same stretch of country from home to school, just as my mom and I crossed from Missouri into Kansas. I thanked the kindness of fate that it was a gentle rain. It was familiar, but not threatening. Unlike those storms I’d had to hide from. From the highway, I could see the lighter sky to the west, promising good weather. Flat clouds and flatter cornfields are things I know, and that Kansas rain was something at least survivable if not controllable. Lightning might have struck once in the distance, made short in the tiny space between sky and earth where there aren’t mountains to stretch it out.
When I’m back in Colorado, the Front Range holds up the sky like tent poles, pinning it in place, unfathomably high. When lightning strikes here it arcs forever, nothing like the short fingers of flashing electricity at home. Here it’s something supernatural, stretching to its limit to bridge the distance before shattering like glass between the raindrops. Last weekend it stormed in the Springs. I’d forgotten what it was like. When I heard the thunder rattle my window, I thought about the way my windows at home made the same sound way back in May when I first went home. It rained for five days in a row. It was a wet and heavy rain, the kind that Colorado doesn’t have, and I reveled in it. Now a thousand miles away, watching the rain pour down out my window, the dry ground seems to spit it back.
It's like rain doesn’t belong here. When it rains at home, all the greens brighten, and our neighbor’s yard drinks in the water like it’s never seen a storm. When it rains here, the water skids off the sidewalk and skirts around rocks. As the rain came down outside my window last weekend, I thought that all the beautiful soaking mess was wasted on ground that didn’t want it. And maybe back in May I had felt threatened by the way the sky darkened or the sound thunder made crashing against the house. But now, hearing the same sound of thunder so far from home, I’d have driven all the way back home to hide from a tornado again just for the sake of familiarity. I’d have gone hours to see the flat gray of clouds I know and that terrible green sky speckled with hail that some primitive part of me read as an omen but the rest of me read as a sign. A drive away, the earth understood the rain, and I want to be there on bathroom linoleum or under an old quilt, cocooned in what I’d left behind.