"I don't like it," Pa said, slowly shaking his head. "I don't like the feel of the weather. There's something . . ." He could not say what he meant and he said again, "I don't like it. I don't like it at all." —Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

All year violent storms can sweep over the Midwest, sudden onslaughts of thunder and lightning, wind, rain, snow, sleet, hail. But I remember one particular storm as if it has compressed all the others into a single mesmerizing hour. When I think about my first
marriage—what went wrong and why I left—I keep coming back to a late afternoon in June. I did not recognize what was happening until many years later. But I think I passed a landmark, a point of no return, during this summer storm.

"When the funnel hits, we'll have to crawl out a window," I remember Lawrence telling me with high-pitched firmness. "Probably that one." He pointed to a narrow slit of glass high on the basement wall. I stared at it, wondering how I would get up and through it. Climb on a chair? The window might be just large enough, I thought, unless I got caught on shards of glass. "We'll break it if we have to," he went on, "and then head for the garage. If it's standing."

The wind howled, our small house shook, and I was sure that at any moment the walls would begin to crumple. Although it was only four o'clock, the sky was so dark that it felt like night. Rain slashed sideways against the blinded windows. I could not imagine myself outside in this whirlwind of water. Through the window, I repeated to myself, then race to the garage. What would happen during that frantic dash? Would one of our trees smash across my path?

No one in the Twin Cities had expected a storm that afternoon.We had taken our small collapsible sailboat to White Bear Lake, north of St. Paul, and spent a quiet sun-baked afternoon on the water. After we came home, we carefully unloaded the lightweight boat from the top of our car and carried it to its sawhorses in the backyard. Perhaps an hour later, I went outside again. The air indoors had grown very still, the sky had begun to darken, and I wanted to check the sky. What I saw looked ominous. Not far in the west the horizon had turned a strange yellow-greenish color. Boiling storm clouds were moving toward us with astonishing speed. As I watched, they began to cross the Mississippi River, only two blocks away. I yelled for Lawrence.

He came running out. After one quick glance at the sky, he cried, "The boat! Come on, we have to get it behind the garage!" Between one side of the garage and the steep slope that separated us from our neighbors was a narrow level space, heaped with leaves and bits of junk, but just wide enough for the Klepper. Each of us grabbed an end and trotted clumsily across the yard with the boat. Together we dumped the boat and ran back toward the house. Already the clouds were almost overhead, and a sudden powerful wind had bent the trees.

"The cats!" I called out. "You get Humphrey, I'll find Paprika! Bring them down to the basement!" We ran for the house. With one vicious blast, the wind slammed the door shut as soon as I had opened it. We both rushed through several rooms until we had found our Siamese cats and carried them, meowing and struggling, down the stairs. They began to prowl the basement floor, talking and complaining, but I felt unable to move. Although I wondered if I should dash back upstairs to rescue anything else—my dissertation notes? my jewelry?—I could hear the wind howling louder and louder. So I hunched myself into the southwest corner, where I could look up at a small high window.

The southwest corner was a critical spot. When a tornado approaches, Midwestern radio and television announcers interrupt their programming with loud peremptory blasts and staccato warnings. For years, they cautioned everyone to seek immediate shelter in the southwest corner of their basements. (Now we are supposed to hunker down in various other protected places, including, bizarrely, a bathtub.) For some reason, storms usually strike from a direction that would presumably leave this corner relatively unscathed. The best position, metaphorically and physically, was flat against the cement-block wall. Waiting for the house overhead to blow away, one can feel the force of the clichés "backed into a corner" and "up against the wall."

The high window, our only spyhole, was bleared and dirty. Now, with the rain falling, we could see almost nothing. "I'll check out what's going on," Lawrence said, as he headed eagerly back up the basement stairs. Lawrence loved a crisis. In some ways he was at his most imaginative and resourceful then, because he expected the worst and began to prepare for it. He could, and did, somersault ahead to all the implications of an impending disaster.

I remember the first time in our marriage when he announced that something quite awful was about to happen. We were on our honeymoon in Europe, just a few days after arriving and picking up our new Porsche at the Stuttgart factory. One afternoon Lawrence noticed a slight clacking sound somewhere in the car. It grew worse at certain speeds. He could not locate the source of this metallic flutter, and he grew increasingly concerned. His face tightened; his voice became sharp. Recognizing these storm signs, I anxiously studied our handbook of authorized Porsche service until I found a garage thirty or forty miles farther.

As we drove on, with a noise that now had become a threatening rat-a-tat-tat, Lawrence began to warn me about what to expect. "Forget about the rest of the honeymoon," he said, looking straight ahead. His voice was very angry. "We'll have to turn around and drive this back to Stuttgart. They've clearly sold us a defective car." He paused, then added in a rush, "By the time we get a new one, and I'm not sure I want one now, we'll have wasted so much time there would be no point in going on. We'll take the next plane home." He gripped the steering wheel more tightly and added defiantly, "And as soon as we get home, we'll have to sue."

When we finally pulled into the Porsche-certified garage, Lawrence, who spoke German, jumped out of the car and began to talk with a mechanic. I could not understand what they were saying. Moments later, Lawrence motioned me out of the car. He and the mechanic got in, and they sped off together. As I loitered uneasily on the cement forecourt, I thought ahead to our trip back to Stuttgart. Then I painfully reviewed our ruined itinerary—farewell to Austria, Switzerland, Holland—and wondered glumly how I'd be able to cancel all our reservations.

When Lawrence and the mechanic returned, the mechanic got out, smiled, and said something genial in German as he walked away. Lawrence hopped back into the driver's seat and said to me, "Get in." I did, very quickly. I could tell he didn't feel like talking. But as we drove away, I said nervously, "Well? What is it? What's happened?" Since I knew nothing about cars, I could not guess.

Lawrence drove in silence for a few moments and then gave a kind of sour laugh. "It's the heater flaps," he said. I was puzzled. I knew the car's heat came from small outlets near the back seats, and those outlets had sliding flaplike metal doors. But we hadn't needed any heat. What did heat have to do with anything? "We didn't have the flaps fully closed," Lawrence went on reluctantly. "So that's what was making the rattle. They're metal. They were vibrating." The heater flaps—and the subject—were now firmly closed, but, I realized with relief, our honeymoon was still on.

So, huddled in the southwest corner of our basement, I should have known that Lawrence wasn't necessarily right. The worst might not happen. The problem was that I found this extraordinarily hard to believe. As a psychologist once told me, anyone who loses a parent in early life—I was seven when my father died—tends to see the world as an uncertain place, liable at any moment to unforeseen disasters. So when Lawrence, highly intelligent and instantly ready with strong opinions, said with assurance that the sky was falling, I was easily convinced that it was.

The sky did seem to be falling in Minnesota that June afternoon, smashing against our house and everything around it. "What about the boat?" I quavered. We had stretched our budget to buy the Klepper. I thought of it lying on a heap of rotten leaves, unprotected except for the lee of the small garage. "Destroyed by now," Lawrence answered without hesitation. "All it would take is one big branch coming down on top of it. Or anything else, with the force of that wind. Listen to how things are blowing around out there." I listened.

In minutes, the power went out. Just across the street from our front yard was a tall electricity pole with a transformer. Soon I heard a deafening crack, loud enough to be heard over the screaming wind. Then, reflected in our rain-smeared windows, I could see frightening spurts of light, as if fires were splashing into our yard. Lawrence sprinted upstairs and down again. "That's the transformer," he reported. "The live wires are thrashing back and forth on the ground. They'll probably whip across the street to your car." I parked my old Volvo in front of the house. "So get ready," Lawrence went on, with a grim zest, "because the next sound you hear will be your car exploding."

I cannot remember exactly how long the storm lasted. At its height, when Lawrence began to plan our escape, I thought it might go on for hours. I wished I didn't know what tornadoes could do. I kept remembering my beloved Aunt Ted. As I cowered against the cement-block wall, I recalled the 1957 tornado that hit Fargo, North Dakota. Although I respectfully thought of it as "Aunt Ted's tornado," the tornado, far from being a personal attack on my aunt, had devastated whole sections of the city.

Like all my mother's family, Aunt Ted, whose nickname was an unlikely variant of Theresa, had a strong will. When she and Mother disagreed about something, usually politics, I could almost hear their clashes as a muted clanging in the air. Although my mother, when she was infuriated or deeply wounded, would sometimes begin to cry, Aunt Ted didn't. So I thought of her as unusually tough. That is why I cherished the image of her during the Fargo tornado.

Soon afterward, my mother, reading a letter from Ted, described the terrible wind and rain and then, as the tornado approached, a sound like a freight train bearing down on the house. My uncle and two cousins ran for the basement. But, said Mother with an admiring shake of her head, Ted didn't want to abandon her house. Her living room, her dining room table and chairs, all her valued possessions—how could she let them go? So, as I heard the story, my uncle had to run back up the stairs. There he found Aunt Ted, her legs braced, trying to hold the front door against the wind.

Nothing too disastrous happened. Aunt Ted was persuaded to join the rest of the family in the basement. The tornado tore into a house three doors south; another house, even closer, lost its roof as if sliced by a knife. Aunt Ted's family emerged from the basement to find their roof damaged but still attached, though all their windows had been blown out. My cousin Jim remembers his surprise on finding a brick lying in the upstairs hallway and a cedar board on top of his bed. Not long ago, when I asked him about his memories of the Fargo storm, Jim told me that it was their loosely secured back door, not the front one, that his mother had tried to protect. But in my mind, I think of Aunt Ted with her arms spread out, resolutely holding the front door as the wind pushed from the other side.

As I waited for the tornado to hit my own house, I wished I could be as fearless as Aunt Ted. I couldn't imagine her meekly agreeing to climb onto a chair, crawl through a window, and stumble across a storm-tossed yard. Lawrence kept wondering aloud if we should go at once, before the storm got worse. "Any minute now!" he warned; a few minutes later, "Are you ready?" But he too waited. The wind blew, the rain pounded, dazzling flashes from the transformer lit up our windows, the darkness of rain returned. Eventually, less than an hour later—an hour measured in long, long minutes—the rain slowed to a rush, then a faint patter. The wind subsided. The windows grew lighter, then transparent. The storm was over.