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WAIT 'TIL THEY SEE WHAT'S COMING [1]
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Date: 2025-02-12
More than fifty years ago, now, I found myself where you really don’t want to be when threatened by a tornado.
I was in the basement of a women’s dorm, in a small denominational college, in Kentucky.
I had been minding my own business, trying to study for the Biology test I was facing, the next day, when an announcement came over the loudspeaker that there was a tornado warning.
I am from western Pennsylvania, where we don’t have a lot of tornadoes, so I didn’t take it seriously.
Until the announcement came that we should move to the basement. A few minutes later, the electricity went off.
All up and down the halls, young women grabbed their jewelry boxes, their diaries, their guitars, their clandestine hamsters, and headed for the dormitory basement, that was, for the most part, above ground, but it was still a basement.
Some headed for the sorority chapter rooms. (A little less than half the students at the school were Greek. But the college was too small for the fraternities and sororities to have houses. Instead, they had chapter rooms in the dorm basements.)
Normally only sorority sisters and pledges were allowed in the chapter rooms, but that night they were generous, and allowed just about anybody in. The rooms had furniture and carpeted floors, so they were a little more comfortable than the rest of the basement, that was home to a small laundry room, and a whole lot of storage space.
I sat out in a hall. With an optimism Dr. Pangloss would have admired, I tried to study for the Biology test.
I couldn’t focus on biology. Especially not when the fire alarm went off in the men’s dorm across the parking lot.
It turned out some idiot had decided this was the perfect time to pull a false fire alarm, and bring the fire department from where they were needed to prowl around a dark dorm and see that there was nothing going on there, besides a bunch of drunk fools, getting drunker and more foolish.
As far as I know, no one was drinking in the women’s dorm. For one thing, we weren’t supposed to have alcohol in our rooms unless we were over 21, and they actually enforced the rules in the women’s dorm. For another, most of us were too busy panicking.
Every now and then someone would hear something, or think something was going to happen, and there would be shrieks and young women, in assorted states of undress, shuffling from one part of the basement to the other.
Eventually, I took my personal effects and went back up to my room. I wanted to sleep, and my dorm cot was a lot more comfortable than the basement floor. Tornado be damned.
Tornadoes devasted much of Kentucky that night. But nothing hit the college.
Which may explain why the Biology test, I was sure would be postponed, wasn’t.
Afterwards the sorority girls collected clothing etc. for tornado survivors. Other students, including one of the finest degenerates it has ever been my pleasure to know, actually got their hands dirty helping survivors.
Many years later, when a tornado destroyed most of Dawson Springs, Kentucky, I contacted the faithful sisters of Phi Mu, and let them know two Phi Mu alumnae resided there, and they might want to do what they could to help survivors.
What all this nonsense is leading to, is that tornado season is coming up in a few months. As I now live in the Monongahela Valley, where tornadoes are uncommon, I’m not worried.
It’s folks in Kentucky, Kansas, Ohio, Texas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, you know, red states, who have to worry that their homes will be blown away, while they spend the night in a cellar, presuming they have one.
Then there may, or may not, be help from FEMA. Maybe the agency will still be there, and still able to provide aid, temporary shelter, money to rebuild. Maybe it won’t. Maybe survivors will have to rely on their state, their insurers, if they have insurance, private charities, and the faithful sisters of Phi Mu.
How much help do you think Oklahoma or Kentucky can afford to give disaster survivors?
This may be the spring for fundraisers.
Tornado season is coming, and the storms will hit red states the hardest.
They have sown the wind, and they are about to reap the whirlwind.
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