One may follow the Way like a main road,
Fearing only to leave it;
Following a main road is easy,
Yet people delight in difficult paths.
(Tao Te Ching, verse 53)
It has been a cold and windy week here in Washington, DC. My apartment supposedly has thermal windows, but the wind has been howling through them all week. That sound disturbs me.
It disturbs me because of what happened on Palm Sunday, in 1965 when I was ten years old. That day, my father drove my mom, my brother, Ken, my sister Joan, and me from our home town of Mishawaka, Indiana to West Layfayette, where my two older brothers, Al jr. and Bob, were studying at Purdue University. It was unseasonably warm, and puffy, cottony clouds hung in the blue sky.
On our return, the sky began to darken. About 20 miles south of the town of La Paz, my dad told us to look, because there was a tornado. We kids in the back seat looked forward and were stupefied by what we saw. Above the horizon, the sky was divided into a white and a black band. The black band was a layer of low-lying clouds that formed a sharp squall line. On the underside of those clouds, three funnel clouds had formed. We watched as the middle one grew larger and descended all the way to the ground, and then the two smaller one merged into the larger one.
The tornado moved slowly from West to East, crossing the road severals mile ahead of us. In my mind's eye, now nearly 45 years later, I can see it hitting barns and watching them explode. It was god-awful, and we were amazed that my father didn't slow down the car to stop. Instead he continued driving straight for it. He was a volunteer fireman, and of course he wanted to get to the scene to see if he could help. We switched on the radio, and emergency weather announcements said that many tornados had been spotted.
We watched the tornado as it continued along its inexorable path, eventually going out of site. I found a map of the tornado's route. This map shows the path of the tornado that destroyed La Paz, which started in Hamlet and travelled all the way to Dunlap, just south of Elkhart. Some websites say it was a category F3 and others say it was F4, with maximum wind speeds between 207 and 260 miles per hours.
In the town of La Paz, an overpass takes the road above a set of railroad tracks. At the bottom of the overpass, a sheriff had parked his car in the middle of the road to block traffic. My father pulled up and rolled down the window to ask what the matter was.
"We've closed the road."
"Is it passable?" my dad asked.
"Yes, but you don't want to drive it. There are people smashed in cars. You don't want the kids to see that."
"How are we going to get home."
"You'll just have to wait, or find a place to stay."
My Dad rolled the window back up and said something like "forget that." He turned the car around and when he got out of sight of the trooper, he turned down a side street that lead out of town towards the East. Mom asked him what he was doing. Dad said we had to get back for work and school on Monday, so he was going to have to take back roads home.
"It's crazy," Dad said. "If he had let me go straight up route 31, we'd be home in less than an hour."
And that started what for me was the worst part of the trip. We continued to listen to the radio. They broadcast reports of additional sightings of new tornados. Many times my father would exclaim "that's where we are right now," and we would look out the windows frantically, expecting a funnel cloud to descend on us and carry us away. My brother ken, who was three years older than me and well-read on disasters, would chime in from time to time with some fact about tornados.
"Did you know," Ken asked, "that the winds in a tornado are so strong that they can take a piece of straw and embed it into a bark of a tree without bending it" Later, he told us the story of how, during a tornado, some farmer was running with his son in his arms to safety, when the winds from a tornado peeled off a piece of corrugated steel from the roof of a shed, carried it through the air and brought it down between the arms of the farmer, slicing his son in two.
I was so scared by this point, that I crawled into the back of our Studebaker station wagon, and pulled a blanket over my head. We were goners, I was sure, and my Dad was taking hours to get home.
We passed barns that had been reduced to a pile of kindling and houses that had been broken in two. They looked like doll houses with the furniture intact in each of the rooms on each floor.
After what seemed like an eternity, the rain started and with it hail as big as peas. By this time, we had fallen into a caravan of cars who were inching along the back roads. We were not far from my Uncle Earl's house and about 15 miles from our own home. The lead car turned into the parking lot of a large, brick school that was near an intersection where some friends of my parents lived. Dad followed the suit. The lead driver dashed from his car and tried to open the door of the school. It was locked. He picked up a rock and smashed the window and opened the door. He turned to give a signal and all of us jumped out of our cars and dashed through the rain and hail into the school. We found our way to the basement and huddled there for a while. Eventually, the rain stopped and when we emerged from the school, the squall line had moved on to the East and the sun was shining again as it started to set in the West.
We went home. The next day, the President declared Indiana a national disaster area. We heard from my grandmother that Uncle Earl's house had been spared as the tornado had slid behind his house narrowly missing his barn. Unfortunately, his brother, Carl, who lived across the road, had not been so lucky, and the tornado had hit his house squarely, killing him.
The pictures of the devastation in the newspapers were stunning. Here are two pictures of the tornado Pic1 and Pic2 and an aerial shot of the devastation of La Paz. According to reports, 31 people died in La Paz and 252 were injured. In the state, 138 died and over 1200 were injured. The outbreak of tornados that day also hit Illinois, Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin, killing a total of 261 people.
It turns out the sheriff had not been overly alarmist in wanting to shield us kids from the destruction. Here's a picture of a car that was smashed by a tornado.
My father will be 95 years old next month and we had to take away his car in 2008 because he was starting to get confused and we feared he'd get lost or put himself or someone else at risk. He had always been a good driver with an amazing sense of direction. I now know he earned that reputation, because of what happened that Palm Sunday. He was able to get us home safely by taking back roads that he'd never been on before. That journey bonded my family together, and every time I return to Indiana to visit Dad I end up driving past the school where we hid.
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