Destruction and Perspective
By Stephen V. Smith
“Daddy, why does God make tornadoes?” That was the question from my 4-year-old son that stopped me in my tracks. It was April 1997, and our northeast Alabama town had been transformed in one afternoon by a sudden tornado. He saw the damage it did to our office, where his Daddy had hunkered in a back room to ride out the storm. He saw the city park with its tall trees laid over, the police station and several businesses reduced to rubble. And he wondered why something like that had to happen.
along its outer circle, little fingers twirl and tease, begging to get to the ground.
Fast forward 14 years and 5 days. April 27, 2011. That same little boy is now 18, looking forward to high school graduation just one month away. It’s Wednesday morning, and school is delayed due to the threat of severe weather. After a powerful storm system sweeps through the county, officials cancel school for the entire day. Meteorologists begin using terms such as “high risk” and “historic.” As the day rolls on, we hear the reports of damage in other parts of the state. The storms track all too close into the afternoon.
Among the devastation it left behind was Plainview High School, where our son had a few more weeks left in his senior year. And the DeKalb County Schools Coliseum, where he and his classmates were to walk across the stage and receive their diplomas.
And then we see it. From our front porch, across an open field, we watch a tornado rip across the landscape. We don’t know it at the time, but it is destroying homes and poultry houses less than a mile away. It dips, leaves the ground, and touches down again, over and over in its destructive dance. Moving closer, there is no funnel on the ground. Just a black hole, a hole that opens wider the closer it gets to us. “Dad, we gotta get inside!” my son shouts. “That’s the tornado!” The gaping wound in the cloud swirls and widens to a half-mile. All
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Tornadoes teach life lessons across 14 years
| JUNE 2011 | www.alabamaliving.coop
My son, wife and I huddle in a closet as the twister passes overhead, blowing down trees around us and exploding mobile homes in our community as it makes its way toward downtown Rainsville. There it grows to a monster, destroying houses and commercial buildings, and claiming a number of lives as it plows across the rest of the county and into Georgia.
In the 14 years between these two natural disasters, I’m not sure I’ve learned anything that could help me answer that question: “Daddy, why does God make tornadoes?” I still don’t know, son. This time, especially, I can’t imagine a good reason for the unimaginable terror that killed so many people and destroyed much property across our state. I wrote a column for Alabama Living in the aftermath of the 1997 tornado. In it I concluded that, “now, more than ever, I realize just how precious, how fragile life really is.” That lesson has now been reinforced in a powerful, deadly way.d Stephen V. Smith is owner of WordSouth Public Relations in Rainsville.
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