One night in May of 2003, I was in Missouri and not too happy to be there. I’d been flying all over the country for the last several months, almost non stop, and I was completely miserable.
My marriage at the time was on the verge of complete collapse (and eventually did), my friend had recently died just after I was the best man at his wedding, and I was completely burned out. I was making a lot of money, but I was ready to explode.
I had a common routine during those days: I’d fly home on Friday night, drive home from the airport (since nobody was there to pick me up), wash my clothes and catch up on bills and things around the house on Saturday (which usually involved at least a half dozen fights with my wife), and fly out again on Sunday afternoon.
I was on the road for the rest of week, and usually had several flights before coming home again on the following Friday.
Sometimes I’d be in four or five different states before coming back home. I used to have trouble remembering what town I was in, and I’d usually figure it out by glancing at the business cards of the offices I worked in.
Everytime I sat in an airplane and waited for it to take off, I’d listen to a song called “Weary” by Floater, and would wish for the plane to crash. Everytime I’d land safely in another city or another state, I’d have the tiniest bit of disappointment.
At about one o’clock in the morning on this particular evening in Missouri, I was sitting in a bar in a little no name town almost two hours outside of St. Louis. I was staying in this particular town for three days. I was taking advantage of that, knowing I didn’t need to quickly recover from whatever hangover I was exacting upon myself at that very moment. I was going to stumble back to my hotel room and, with any luck, puke.
The office I was working out of, and in turn, the hotel I was staying at for those three days, was as far away from anything as one could get in Missouri. We’re talking rural. Beat up pickup trucks, a country store, and maybe a post office. All that, the hotel, the bar, and you had a town. Or a Missouri version of a town.
I paid my tab at the bar and wandered outside, in to the wind. My hotel was about a mile or two down the road, and was really just a converted old farmhouse. It was at the end of an old dirt driveway in the middle of a field, tucked back from the small rural highway.
The hotel was touted as a bed and breakfast: luxurious, stately, careful and clean. It reminded me a lot of an old Southern plantation every time I walked down the driveway among the grove of trees on each side.
The structure was very obviously built during the very late 1800’s, or possibly the early 1900’s, with its wraparound porch and second story balcony. I’m not sure how many guests were staying there at the time, but I imagine the place had a maximum occupancy of perhaps 6 or 7 couples.
The wind was blowing something fierce as I made my way back to the hotel. In hindsight, I suppose I should have paid a bit more attention. Afterall, I’d been through several tornadoes before. Being from Oregon, though, whenever I felt a strong breeze, my initial thought was only, “Storm”, and not, “Oh god, where’s a shelter?”.
I had just about gotten to the driveway when the hail started coming down. It started out small enough; perhaps the size of a marble, which honestly, hurt like a bitch. But I noticed they were starting to get larger, and I very quickly became alarmed. I was drunk, but I’d still managed to notice a few baseball sized hail stones hit the ground nearby.
There’s nothing quite like the threat of death to sober a person up. It really kills your buzz.
Drunk, and completely in the dark, I was now in a full on sprint toward the light of the hotel. It was only about 50 yards away, but it might as well have been a marathon to my drunken brain. When I finally got to the porch, I saw that the hail was now smashing onto, and cracking, the windshields of the cars parked in front.
“Holy shit.” I said to myself, as I went inside.
There’s something eerie about an old farmhouse, over one hundred years old, being pelted by baseball sized hail and completely devoid of any human life. The attendant, an older gentleman who I’d talked with briefly when I’d checked in, was nowhere to be found. In fact, every single guest room door was open. All of them.
The place was empty.
“Hello?” I called out. “Anyone here?” And that’s when I heard it. The siren from town. It was the tornado warning. I noticed the television behind the attendant’s desk, and the cable was out.
“Hello!?” I yelled.
I heard, very faintly, a reply. It sounded like it was coming back through the kitchen. I walked back there, but saw nobody.
“Anyone here?!” I called. Again, a reply. It was less faint, but still difficult to tell where it had come from. I went out the back door in the kitchen, and there it was: the storm shelter door. It led into the ground, an upward facing door that looked like it belonged to part of an old fallout shelter. It looked like it’d been there as long as the house.
I ran up to it and called out again, “Hello?!?”
This time I heard the reply through the door, even over the screaming wind that had now picked up to an incredible speed and force. The hail was still coming down, but was becoming smaller. I realized that that was what usually happened when the tornado came.
In the darkness, I pulled on the storm shelter door and it opened up without much issue. There was apparently no latch to lock it from the inside, which honestly, concerned me right from the start.
But over the wind, and in the darkness, I heard something else come from within the belly of the shelter. I heard a voice say, “Get in here!” and just after that, a subtle, low sound. Something… familiar.
I knew the sound. I knew it. But it took a few moments for my brain to process it clearly. I was still feeling drunk, it was dark, but I knew that sound… what was it? And that’s when it hit me: It was a rattlesnake.
In my drunken stupor, not only could I not see where it was, but I could distinctly hear there were several of them rattling in the darkness below me. It sounded like a chorus of rattlesnakes. My mind recoiled, and I involuntarily stepped back from the door.
“Are you coming in here, or what?!” I heard someone yell over the wind. I thought I heard one of the guests sobbing in the back.
“ARE THERE SNAKES IN THERE WITH YOU?!” I screamed.
“Yes, but they won’t hurt you!” Someone replied. You know, I hate it when people tout pointless rhetoric that they know isn’t true. They’re god damned rattlesnakes. They are designed to hurt people. Just because these people were in there without being bitten (yet), didn’t mean I was going to be as lucky.
“FUCK THAT! I’LL TAKE MY CHANCES WITH THE TORNADO!” I yelled, and with that, I slammed the shelter door and ran back in to the hotel. Nobody came out for me.
Initially I felt panicked being back in the hotel, but an overwhelming sense of calm fell over me. It just didn’t seem like a big deal that a tornado was coming. I walked up to my room, and I turned the television. All the channels were static. I turned it back off and sat down on the edge of the bed.
I could hear glass breaking outside, probably windshields being hit by debris, along with breaking branches and the wind causing every joist and seam in the house to groan and creak in agony.
I grabbed a voice recorder from my laptop bag, and sat out on my balcony. I hit record and just began talking randomly about whatever came to mind (I still have the recording somewhere). I watched the hail turn to rain, and the wind pick up and become a torrent of chaotic debris, branches, and leaves.
It wasn’t a plane crash, but it would do.
It’s amazing what you can and can’t see in the darkness when all the power is out for a hundred miles in each direction. I’d always heard that a tornado kind of sounded like a growling lion or some kind of feral beast.
Until that night, I’d never believed them. But to my surprise, the sound is amazingly similar to a freight train flying past completely loaded with thousands of snarling tigers. I never saw the tornado itself that night, it was too dark and there were far too many trees trying to fall down around me, but it wasn’t without trying.
The next morning, I could clearly see the damage path that it had followed. It’d travelled only about a quarter of a mile from the backside of the hotel.
If the news reports are to be believed, it had been an F3 tornado that had torn through the area. And in fact, it was part of one of the greatest outbreaks of tornadoes in a seven day period, with a total of 401 reported.
To this day, I’m kind of disappointed I never actually saw that tornado. I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because I almost died in the process of trying to see it. I guess it just came to symbolize a lot of what was going on in my life at the time: chaos, destruction, and disappointment.
I’m glad to be alive now, don’t get me wrong. Next time, though, I’m still not sure I would get in to that rattlesnake infested storm shelter.