Gary, Save Me
Casey and I got caught in a tornado warning on our way home from Michigan today.
In regular heavy rain we’d keep driving, but after a “Watch,” a “Warning,” and finally an “IMMINENT THREAT” alert screeched out of our phones, we stopped.
We pulled off in Gary and drove for the sturdiest building we could see, a combination Department of Motor Vehicles and Child Services.
The glass doors were locked and the security guards on the other side didn’t want to let us in. They have a no-pets policy, and we had Basil with us, wearing a summer bandana instead of his service regalia.
“Even in a tornado?” Casey asked. But before they could answer, someone else unlocked the doors and barreled out of them to shelter someplace else, and we stepped in after him.
A sweet guard, pro-Basil, or at least indifferent to him, showed us to the stairwell where a dozen other employees and clients sheltered.
The power went out in five minutes. Two emergency lights came on. One burned out quickly. The other one held.
We didn’t have cell service but one of the sheltering social workers did, and she used it to play Indiana weather TV out loud and to text her husband about the Italian beef she’d left simmering in a Crockpot since the morning, which would now live or die by the speed of the Indiana linemen.
Another social worker checked her Ring camera. Her American flag was ripped out by the wind, “pole and all.”
Meanwhile the DCS guards continued to check on us, steady yet sort of lumbering, using their phones as flashlights.
When the worst of it passed, about forty minutes later, the guards told us we could leave. But “DCS employees are not free to go home,” the social-worker-in-chief reminded everybody. “I want to be absolutely clear.” Casey and I stepped into the green-gray light, waded in the storm water. Got to the car, got to I-90, and returned home to Chicago, where the rain fills our basements, and the tornadoes only lick our gates.