Under the Overpass

COLUMBIA, MISSOURI – It was smooth sailing all through our drive on Friday. Until we suddenly found ourselves surrounded by tornadoes, that is.

It was funny because my mom’s oldest friend Carmen, who we will visit on our way through Kansas, had just given us a full Driving Through Tornado Alley Briefing just the day before. Well, maybe it wasn’t funny, but at least it was well timed.

We were about a half hour outside of St. Louis when we saw the wall of darkness rising up like mountains on the horizon before us. It was the kind of wall of darkness pilots make wide hundred-mile-long detours around if they can. A pulsing glow of lightning thumped like a thunderous heartbeat from deep within the mass of swirling black clouds. It was freaky.

Marley had just called her brother Chris to touch base and thankfully he was in front of the computer. She was just in the middle of making a joke about tornado warnings and taking immediate cover as Chris checked the local weather radars and said there was a tornado warning and that said we should take immediate cover.

There was a pause at this point.

“Are you serious?” she said

“It says one tornado has already touched down and more are possible,” he said.

Within a few minutes we found some low ground under an overpass. There was a crew of construction workers topside that hadn’t heard yet. We passed on what we knew and they scrambled to get everything battened down as the full force of the storm descended on us. They would later say on the local radio station that in the next 30 minutes it would rain 3 ½ inches and that at least three more twisters had touched in our immediate vicinity. And that another wave of storm front was moving up quickly from the south for Round Two.

It sounded like we had just enough time to make a break for it and, wishing the construction guys good luck and Godspeed, that’s exactly what we did. We listened on the radio as the next front battered the area we’d just left even as beautiful blue skies opened up in front of us.

Amelia was a total trooper through it all, scared but focused on tending to her nervous brood of cats. Noah, of course, slept through the whole thing.

We made it another few hours before settling in for the night here in Columbia. The kids had a nice long swim in the pool before bed and had another good swim just now as we prepare to hit the road.

As we sat together eating breakfast Amelia, reflecting matter-of-factly, said “I know why we didn’t get hurt by the tornadoes yesterday.”

Marley and I both looked up. “Because I prayed,” she said with a shrug, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. And of course it was.