Читать книгу Twisted: A Minneapolis Tornado Memoir - Marie Boone's Porter - Страница 3

I'll never forget my first real exposure to life in a tornado zone.

I'd moved to Minnesota a few months before, in the middle of February. Having been born and raised in Canada, there was so much that was new to me... and so much that no one had bothered to tell me.

I was gassing up my car in Maple Grove, on a sunny and warm spring day in 2006, when the air raid sirens went off. I had absolutely NO idea what one was supposed to do in the event of an act of war, and freaked out.

While frantically dialing my husband at work and ducking, I tried to remember what I'd seen in those old movie clips. History class, about wars that had happened many decades before, kids in school - what did they do? Was that "duck and cover"? I know it's not "stop, drop, and roll" - we'd learned THAT one! Was I supposed to get under my car? Who paid attention to what they did in air raid drills in these old movies? It was Canada, and I'd never lived anywhere where that would be a real consideration.

I'd never been so scared in my life. It's one thing for something like this to happen... but to be completely unprepared and left floundering? THAT is what scared me more than anything. I'd had no cultural exposure to this, and I was missing any "air raid drill" training that kids that grew up here probably were receiving.

My husband picked up the phone, and I was so glad he was around to do so, as he worked in a huge building in the area - for all I know, it could be a target for this apparent air raid.

I'm sure I sounded like a madwoman, asking what the HELL I'm supposed to do when air raid sirens go off.

He laughed. Hard.

As he explained that those sirens weren't for air raids, they were for weather, I finally noticed that no one else was scared, they all milled about their business on this sunny afternoon. Not only was the siren NOT about an act of war, it was a regular, scheduled thing. This was the first Wednesday of the month, it was 1:00pm, of COURSE there was supposed to be a siren going off. Of course.

Of course, that would have been nice to know ahead of time! I'd never lived anywhere that had any sort of weather that required sirens to announce it, and I'd only ever heard of that sort of siren in the context of old war movies.

While my husband thought he was giving me good news - allaying my shock that I apparently lived in a place that had to be concerned about air raids - he was actually giving me terrifying news. Oh shit, I'd moved somewhere where tornadoes are frequent enough, they have sirens set up to warn about them.

I had never considered tornadoes as a concern, moving to Minnesota. Had he lived in Oklahoma or Kansas, he would have had a much harder time getting me to move. I may never have been exposed to tornadoes, but they scared the shit out of me - in theory. I'd handled floods. I'd handled never ending blizzards, and 5-6 yards of snow over the course of a week or two - snow drifts higher than the houses. I'd walked down Bourbon street during a tropical storm, not that long before Katrina.

Tornadoes, though? I don't DO tornadoes.

"Don't worry", my husband said. "They never hit in the city. You're safe!"