This is Part 2 of a continuing story about my house meeting a rather large tornado.

for Part 1 -- The Tornado, click here.

Part 2 -- The Trip to RoEllen

Let me backtrack a bit -- let's leave the Explorer idling in Tommy's driveway for a minute with "Midnight Rider" cued up and ready to play -- in order to explain a couple of humorous aspects in the back story that I completely ignored earlier. Immediately after digging herself and my sister out from under the chimney, my mother made her way to the unmolested farm across the road from our house. Amazingly, the farm's rotary telephone was working fine, no problems. (God bless South Central Bell!) After some rudimentary first aid from Old Man Viar and his wife (I honestly believe that his first name was "Old Man" -- even his wife referred to him thusly) my mother asked for the phone to let her family know what had happened. Bloodied from the bricks and totally disoriented from the experience, she could only pull one phone number out of her head. She steadied herself, dialed extremely slowly (rotary, after all) and waited for the phone to be picked up. Yep. She called her nephew, Todd.

Here's what's amazing about this: at this time, my mother and my uncle Tommy talked on the phone twice a week, AND he's had the same phone number since 1977. Also, because of the long distance charges from my dorm (coupled with my incredible lack of money) my mom actually called me -- dialed my number -- at least once a week. Did she call Tommy? No. Did she call me? No. She called Todd. She had never spoken to Todd using the phone before . . . what's more, Todd and his wife Tracy had only lived in their house about a month, so their phone number had recently changed. But Todd's house phone was the only number her leaky mental Rolodex could produce after a live burial at four in the morning. Mom called him and asked him to contact Tommy and me.

Todd expressed his concern for their welfare, hung up, and called Tommy. No answer. He called his brother, Tom Jr., who tried calling Tommy's cell phone. No answer. Tommy was dead asleep, and my aunt Carole (who would normally shout him awake like a good Marine roommate) was up in Tennessee visiting her ailing sister. Tom and Todd conferred and decided they had to go to Tommy's house to wake him up. Yeah, to Tommy's house, where he slept with weaponry.

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Todd and Tom arrived at Tommy's (alliterative, isn't it?) at about 5:45 Eastern, scarcely forty minutes after the tornado. They rang the doorbell; they knocked on the door; they shook the garage door. No answer. At this point, Todd mentioned that the downstairs window over the living room couch had a rusty catch, and if they felt lucky they could probably break in. Tom expressed reservations -- my uncle is a gun nut, after all -- but Todd assured him that he had entered the house late at night many times during his teenage years by using that very window. Go underage drinking! Woo-hoo!

Todd slipped the catch, lifted the window, and fell into the house with Tom following close behind. Both of them have spoken of the profound terror they both felt as they made their way up the staircase, each of them yelling like an idiot: "Dad, it's us, your sons!" "Ha-ha-ha! Don't kill us, father!" "We love you, don't bust a cap in us!" and so on. When they were about halfway up the stairs, my uncle Tommy emerged in his pajamas with a Glock tucked in the waistband . . . he looked at Todd and said, "I knew it had to be you, you're the only one who has ever entered the house through that window."

"WHAT?"

"Don't pretend you didn't used to sneak in that way all the time, youngster."

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Tommy asked if I had been called -- I had not, but he didn't know that yet -- and neither Todd nor Tom knew, so he decided that I must be informed quickly. But how? He didn't have my phone number.

Oh, but he had Jami's.

(For more information about the crazed year of 1997-1998, click here.)

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Jami was getting ready to go into school that day. She had finished her student teaching the previous semester and was employed as a substitute teacher by the Lake County (FL) School District.

So, here's the scene: the phone rings at Jami's house at 5:56 AM. She's in a bathrobe, applying mascara, when her mother runs into the bathroom.

"It's Brad's uncle Tommy. There's been a horrible occurrence."

So Jami goes to the phone, only to hear Tommy say: "Jami, it's Tommy. A tornado has struck and destroyed Marsha's house in Dyersburg . . . there are four total dead. I've got to get in touch with Brad immediately, and I need his number. Now."

Jami reads off the number, and asks, "Is there anything I can do?"

"You can pray." CLICK.

Now, did you notice anything missing in their conversation? Like, perhaps, reassurance that my mother was alive? Jami was led to believe that I had unexpectedly lost my mother and sister just three years after the shocking death of my father. She did not find out until lunchtime that my mother and sister had survived. My family? Overly dramatic? Naaaaaah.

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Back to the Explorer . . . (finally!)

I hopped in, buckled up, and we were on our way. There were two vehicles in our mini-caravan: one aging Ford Explorer (with Tommy, Tom Jr, and me) and one brand-new Ford F250 Super Duty (Jamie Rice, Todd.) We fueled up at QuickTrip, made our way to I-75, and headed north.

There was an undue sense of tension in the Explorer as we headed for Tennessee. We shared few smiles, exchanged few wisecracks, and generally indulged in great deal of negative speculation about the extent of the damage, both physical and emotional. Who knew what to expect? I cannot fully express the dread that completely filled me -- I supposed (not unwisely, as it turned out) that this experience would be the most traumatic of my mother's life, even more traumatic than my father's death, or that time that she saw Barry Manilow at Mud Island.

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Because of the vagaries of scheduling, the loading of the cars, a short lunch break, and atrocious traffic, we did not make it to Nashville until 3:45 PM. Traffic -- it was horrible, absolutely the worst I have ever personally experienced on I-24 between Chattanooga and Nashville. There was a point where I personally believed that we would just have to pitch our tents on Monteagle and wait everybody out . . .

Funny thing, coincidence. You'll note that I marked our arrival time in Nashville as 3:45 PM . . . how can I be sure of the exact time, you ask? I had finally -- haltingly -- voiced my fears to Tom and Tommy about Mom's mental health around Murfreesboro, some thirty minutes before we arrived in metro Davidson county. To their credit, Tom and Tommy tried to allay my fears. Honestly, though, who could have? My dread had grown into a tangible thing, with weight and dimension. Just as we entered metro Nashville, I had finally gotten around to expressing my greatest fear to them, a fear I had suffered from since my father's death four years previously: does God mean, somehow, to punish our family?

Now the coincidence: Tommy immediately poo-pooed the suggestion, and he offered up advice that under other circumstances would be very sound. He said, "You're just feeding off of the negativity surrounding this tornado. You need to take your mind off of it -- it's not healthy to brood about a situation where you aren't even sure yet of the details." To aid me in doing so, he clicked the radio on, and we enjoyed about two verses of a country song before the Emergency Broadcasting System tone sounded. All we could do was look up and stare at each other as the announcer breathlessly described a tornado supercell that had formed a funnel cloud in downtown Nashville at ". . . 3:45 PM on the DOT!" According to the announcer, all of the windows in her studio had just exploded into shards of flying glass, and she was uncertain how much longer she would be able to broadcast, if at all. She was able to exclaim, "This is the same supercell that devastated Manila, Arkansas and RoEllen, Tennessee, earlier today, taking the lives of at least two Tennesseans . . ." Then there was a burst of loud static, and the radio station no longer transmitted. Shocked, all three of us turned toward the downtown area where we could barely see the top of a funnel in the distance. Cars all around us pulled off the highway into the median, the guardrail area, anywhere, looking for a place to hide. As Tommy began to accelerate, weaving in and out of the sporadic stalled traffic on I-440, hoping to get us out of the path of this tornado, Tom Jr. turned to me, and in complete seriousness, said, "Holy [expletive], maybe God does hate you."

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Part 3 later . . . here's the bell. I hope I'm not being too annoying with the updates . . . now that GACS has internet again, I promise to work on the next posting tomorrow. . .

A few thoughts as I wait for my brain to recover -- Lord-a-mighty -- from a weekend of listening to Willie Nelson and reading Rick Bragg. I'm a true son of the rural South, you see. As I slopped up my last bite of grits this morning with a little biscuit and a little red-eye gravy, I thought to myself, "Wow. Did you ever think that you would live in an area with horrible traffic and acceptable dental care?"

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Here's a neat thing: neat in the sense that it's vaguely creepy. I was actually going to post about my upbringing in rural northwest Tennessee, the old 'sweet potato pie and I shut my mouth' sort of a thing, you know? I actually typed "RoEllen, Tennessee" into Google to see what might be available, and the first link that came up was this link from the National Weather Service. Here . . . I'll post part of it for those of you too lazy to click:

RoEllen, a rural Dyer County hamlet located about five miles east of Dyersburg in Tennessee's northwest corner was struck by a tornado around 4:05 a.m. on Thursday, April 16, 1998. The National Weather Service issued a Tornado Warning at 3:35 a.m. as the tornadic thunderstorm was approaching the Mississippi River from Arkansas. Thus, the warning was posted a full half-hour before the tornado struck.
The RoEllen tornado first touched down to the west of the community. Moving rapidly toward the northeast, the tornado crossed state Highway 104 about 1.5 miles west of RoEllen (Fig. 1). At that point, the tornado produced only F-0 damage. While most of the initial damage swath was to trees, one home along Highway 104 suffered minor roof damage. The tornado then passed over open agricultural land until it crossed Welch Road. A farm's machine shed was heavily damaged just north of Welch Road's intersection with Clanton Road. The tornado then increased to F-3 intensity and completely demolished a substantial brick home located along Cribbs Road and a house trailer next door (Fig. 1, #1 & #2). Both homes were occupied.
The bodies of the house trailer's occupants, a man and wife in their mid 40s, were found near a copse of trees about 250 yards toward the southeast of where the house trailer was sited. The remnants of the house trailer were widely strewn. Heavy objects such as the water heater, stove, and clothes washer were found about 200 yards to the north. The twisted remains of the trailer's frame were found about 300 yards toward the northeast. Two lightly constructed homes between where the trailer had been and where its frame landed were not seriously damaged, suggesting the frame may have flown over them.
Residents of the brick house, a mother and teenage daughter, saw notice of the tornado warning on television. They went to shelter in a corner of the home's basement. While the tornado completely demolished their home and deposited a pickup truck on the remains, they were unhurt.

Here's the creepy part: the mother and teenage daughter in this tale of woe happen to be my mother and my sister. Our "substantial brick home located along Cribbs Road" (thank you, National Weather Service, for calling our house overweight) was demolished. I mean, DEMOLISHED. Our eccentric next-door neighbors, the Kolwycks, were killed apparently instantly.

There are few things that my leaky sieve of a memory can actually recall with perfect clarity. Strangely, most of them are insignificant moments, without real weight. Isn't it strange how you can recall the exact tint of Laurie Morgan's hair in sunlight (I sat behind her and the window in first grade) but you can't really remember what color your car is when you exit the Publix? Or what your grandmother's hands looked like?

However, pure adrenal stress has burned the memory of April 16, 1998 into my brain like a brand. I was in graduate school in Statesboro, Georgia, a mere 635 miles southeast of RoEllen when my uncle Tommy Wolaver called me from Atlanta at 6:11 AM Eastern Time. I had gone to bed around 4:00 AM, and I can't recall ever being so groggy when the phone rang. My graduate housing roommate actually answered the phone, luckily, for he was a 27 year old ex-Marine who was one of the few people actually loud enough to yell me awake. I got to the phone only to hear Tommy say something about our house being destroyed by a tornado, and that my mother and sister had to dig themselves out from under our chimney which had fallen on them in the tumult. Describing the scene, he painted a picture reminiscent of a Dore illustration of Dante's Inferno. All I knew, in my sleepy certainty, was that my house was spread across most of Dyer County, and my mother and sister desperately needed my help. Tommy, the rock of our family, even sounded worried.

"We're goin', boy. How long do you think it'll take you to get to Atlanta?"

"Don't know -- four hours, four and a half, maybe? I'm gonna hit rush hour on 285, aren't I?"

"Just know this: as soon as you get here, Tom, Todd, and I will be ready to go."

I hung up the phone, packed a small bag, and arrived in Snellville two hours and fifteen minutes later. For those of you calculating at home, that's 226 miles in 135 minutes; to put it another way, I touched 138 once between Dublin and Macon on I-16. I have ridden faster, but never again have I driven that fast.

Did I mention it was raining? The whole way?

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After the death of my father in 1994 and his mother in 1995 (Dad quite unexpectedly passed away at age 45, MeeMaw at 68; at the time my father died, MeeMaw knew she had cancer and refused treatment because, she said, with her husband and son dead she just "didn't see the use") I had few relatives left, really -- our family history is a litany of death and stupidity that causes most people to gasp with pity. I, of course, find it humorous (or even humourous, when I'm feeling frisky and British.) People have asked me where I got my sense of humor, as neither of my parents share my personal concept that everything can be laughed at . . . there are three reasons, really:

Reason 1: I am now, have always been, and will forever be the smallest kid in my class/school/family/world. I am a midget in the land of giants. I have always been short, strange, and unathletic. In our world today, but especially in rural agri-Tennessee, boys and men who are my size either develop a world-class sense of humor or an Alaskan-sized shoulder chip very quickly, 'cause we're the ones forced to prove ourselves. I couldn't carry a knife to school, but I always had my mouth.

Reason 2: Until I attended David Lipscomb University in Nashville, Tennessee, I had darkened the door of a church building maybe . . . maybe five times? Six? Three Easters, that I can recall. Christians in my neck of the woods were really more objects of fun than they were reverence (around the Denton household, anyway) so I lack an essential respect for sacred objects and ideas that I see in others around me. Strange, really, especially dealing with some of the kids in my eighth grade Bible class here at GACS . . . I have a few students (but more than you'd guess) who have enormous reverence for holy things, but absolutely no respect for authority. [NOT GENERALIZING ALERT! I SWEAR I'M NOT GENERALIZING ALERT!!!!] I have seen good kids -- great kids -- refuse correction from adults in our hallways, filtering out reprimands like so much white noise. Yet reference Jesus, God, or the Golden Rule, and they feel remorse. I was raised as an exact opposite, in some kind of weird land of doppelganger virtues, where you could laugh at God all you want, but may He help you if you ever disrespect any adult, 'cause you'll need Him when Dad hears about it.

Reason 3: You've just got to laugh if you're a member of my family, because -- not to be morbid, or anything -- everybody just died. By the time I was nineteen, I had attended over twenty funerals. Nine of them were for close family members, including all four of my grandparents (three of which had moved into our home shortly before their deaths; perhaps it was the house?) and my father who had seemed indestructible at the time. (Still does.)

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That last reason, the utter lack of family above ground, gave Tommy's words about helping family a special resonance in my mind as I made my way to Atlanta. They also gave me a kind of grim determination to not let up on the accelerator until I had established enough velocity to coast in for the last twelve miles or so.

When I arrived in Snellville, Tommy was ready. What does this mean, exactly? Well, Tommy has a $17,000 gun collection, if that gives any indication of his readiness. Tommy also happens to be one of the most successful real estate brokers in the metro Atlanta area -- he's happy to give away his trade secrets, which consist of hard work after effective planning. How do you effectively plan for a tornado? Easy. Overpack.

We had a full set of camping gear, including 14 tents and 14 sleeping bags for ourselves and anyone else who might be stuck working outside ("God bless those Boy Scouts!" said Tommy, when I asked where he had gotten them.) We had 11 Coleman lanterns, 9 shovels, 9 pick axes, 4 chainsaws, 2 buckets of fire sand, ("Better safe than sorry!") a post-hole digger, 3 12-pound sledgehammers, and, I believe, 30 pounds of peanut butter. We also had Tommy's sons Tom Jr. and Todd, otherwise known as my enormous cousins. I am not kidding you. Tom Jr. (6'4", 255) and Todd (6'2", 230) look like half of the most terrifying D-line you've ever seen. Add to the mix their good friend Jamie Rice (6'3", 270) who agreed to come along for the ride, and my uncle Tommy (well, 5'9," but he's an easy 225) and we lacked only a good defensive end for a run to the playoffs. Me? Sorry to disappoint, but at a slow 5'7", 180, I'm not really the final piece to anyone's athletic puzzle.

I parked my sporty two-seater in the driveway and leapt into the Ford Explorer.

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Looks like I'll have to serialize this one, as my planning period just ended. I'll finish this story later, for my sake, if not yours . . .