Before I decided to walk the 17-mile path of last week’s tornado in Oklahoma, I wanted to check out its origins.
Would I be able to reach the rural stretch of land where the storm dropped from the sky like a pencil pushing through the clouds, as one resident told me? Would it be possible to track the storm, mile by mile, minute by minute, on foot and in detail?
To find out, I downloaded a map from the National Weather Service and drove on Thursday afternoon to Newcastle, a rural town southwest of Oklahoma City. I found the quaint cul de sac where the tornado was born. No one expects an infant to grow into a terrorist. Likewise, looking at the humble beginnings of this tornado, I’d never have dreamed it would stomp across the metro area, smashing neighborhoods, killing 24 people, including seven children in one elementary school, and causing an estimated $2 billion in damages.
At the end of Pendergraft Lane, I met the Eubanks family’s horses, Denali and Mikey, who didn’t seem to have a care in the world; saw a few downed tree limbs; splashed in a puddle or two, left from the rain. The most memorable scene, however, was that of Leacie Pratt, 8, swinging on a broken play set. Its wooden pieces were intact but had been twisted, as if its joints were melted. The swing set creaked and flexed and swayed beneath the weight of the tiny girl in purple sneakers.
She kept on swinging just the same.
Leacie’s grandfather, Gene McCullah, told me the family was away when the tornado hit and felt extremely lucky only the swing set and his tool shed had been damaged.
Have you seen the rest of the path? McCullah asked.
I hadn’t. Not more than a few blocks, really.
But after meeting them, I wanted to see it all.
There’s something about walking that submerges a person in a place. The ambling speed is geared for making observations and conversations. Writers from Bill Bryson to Henry David Thoreau have long observed this. “You must walk like a camel,” Thoreau wrote in an 1862 essay, “which is said to be the only beast which ruminates when walking.” By walking the storm, I wanted to process it – to chew it up, camel-style, and spit out something that made sense.
When I explained this to my dad over dinner on Thursday night, before I took off, he jokingly asked if I was trying to “be the tornado.” Maybe I could twirl around and make whooshing noises while I was at it, he said. Lighten the mood.
As much as I love a good twirl, I didn’t want to be the storm by walking with it. What I really wanted to do, I realized after seeing Leacie on the swing set, was to learn what the tornado was up against. To meet the people whose lives ostensibly were ruined by this event, which is a horrific but frequent occurrence in Oklahoma, and to learn what it takes to recover. Did the tornado win this battle, or did they?
It wouldn’t be easy. As I walked back to my rental car that night, I called Nate Gunter, an editor at Oklahoma Today magazine who is from Moore, the suburb south of Oklahoma City that was hardest hit by the storm, to ask him about the project. You know you’ll have to cross two highways and a river, right? he asked.
Two highways and a river. I’d have to figure that out.
My conversation with Gunter was cut short when an older woman with gray hair and glasses drove up and stopped beside me to ask what the heck I was doing out here by a field of horses at the end of a random street. “Are you lost?” she asked.
I told her the plot, blaming it partly on my editor.
The woman laughed wildly.
You’d better make sure your editor knows what you’ll have to walk through, she said.
I wasn’t quite sure myself.
‘Fashion Hat’
Doubts in mind, pen, notebook and smartphone in pocket, I turned on a GPS mapping app called My Tracks and set off Friday morning on the tornado’s trail.
I’d saved a route of sorts on my phone. It snaked mostly eastward across the Oklahoma City metro area, going through neighborhoods that, in satellite images, look like they’d been put through a wood chipper; to elementary schools where teachers shielded their students from deadly debris; and ending east of the city, 17 miles away. It took the tornado about 40 minutes to zip down the path, according to the National Weather Service. I knew in the best of scenarios, assuming I finished, it would take me much, much longer.
The morning stretch was pleasant. The sky was a nonthreatening, monotone gray. Birds were chirping. A cool breeze helped my mood. I walked past a few uprooted trees; a barn whose sides had curled back, like paper under a hair dryer; and a field of cows that looked at me like I was crazy for walking through this country. Minimal damage, really. You had to keep your eyes up to find evidence that the bucolic scene had been rattled by a low-grade twister still gathering its power.
After taking a few photos of workers who were trimming branches from around power lines, I was settling into a groove of sorts. I’d walked about 4.5 miles, making right angles at mile markers to try to stay on the tornado’s diagonal path. In a little neighborhood where all houses were intact, I hollered at a man walking a corgi. I wanted to ask what he’d seen and heard. Other residents described the terror they felt as they watched a twister drop from the sky, and then the relief that it seemed to blow through this area without causing nearly the damage it could have. The fellow walker didn’t respond. No matter, I thought. Plenty of people to meet on the path.
But minutes later, I heard a car drive up behind me and stop.
I turned to see not one but three police cars, lights on.
Not exactly the folks I’d hope to meet.
You can’t get arrested just for walking, right?
Where are you headed? one cop asked. I realized I didn’t quite know the answer to that, so I muttered something about CNN and pulled a work ID out of my pocket.
Apparently someone in this neighborhood had called the police on me. I can understand why people here would be protective in this moment. The cops said there had been a string of auto burglaries lately. Backpacks are suspicious after the Boston bombing, even if mine just contained a water bottle, bananas and granola bars. And everyone had to be on the lookout for looters after the tornado. But Oklahomans also are inherently skeptical of anyone who does not travel by car.
I grew up near Oklahoma City and returned after college as a reporter. Once, while I was riding my bike to work at The Oklahoman, some evil woman in an SUV rolled down her window to yell, “GET A CAR!” I had one then, as now.
Maybe get-a-car woman moved to Newcastle. Back to haunt me.
I explained the premise of my journey to the cops: wandering reporter; trying to understand how people make it through something like this.
They thought the whole thing was hilarious and said my hat, a straw Fedora I purchased at Walmart (on the receipt: “Fashion Hat”) to keep my ears from getting sunburned, was probably part of what made a resident call the cops.
It made me look like an East Coaster, a detective said. A foreigner in my own land.
We had a laugh, took a photo together, and went our separate ways.
Good luck, they said. Hope you make it.
‘No media here’
Twisted blinds. Shattered glass. Decapitated mailbox.
I’d walked about seven miles in three hours, zigzagging across Newcastle to the northeast, mostly along high-speed roads with no sidewalks. My leather shoes filled with water as I slopped through shin-high weeds still wet with morning dew.
Already the power of the storm was becoming more apparent. As was its scope. News crews mostly hadn’t been covering the storm’s path this far west. As someone who had been hanging out nearer to the epicenter of the storm for the past two days, I was amazed to see so much damage way out here. This was another world.
Gate off its hinges. Banged up barn. Strips of metal siding turned to chewing gum.
I stopped on the corner of a highway and waited to meet Nick Carangi, a 53-year-old who lives in Newcastle and survived three damaging tornadoes in the region. At age 10, he hid in an underground storm shelter as a tornado passed. But after the storm, the door to the cellar, as people call it here, was stuck. That experience gave Staley an intense fear of being buried alive that he’s not been able to shake 43 years later.
Storms leave lasting damage, he told me. Both physical and psychological.
I waved goodbye to Staley and walked toward a neighborhood in Newcastle that I could see from a distance had been heavily damaged by the storm. I’d mostly been walking through farms and sparsely populated areas until now. But even from a distance, I could see the horrors of what a tornado does to a subdivision. Splinters of wood jutted up at odd angles. Sand-dune rooflines had been flattened.
Unfortunately, the neighborhood entrance had been turned into a police checkpoint. A young officer in sunglasses was not impressed by my media credentials.
No media here today, he said. We’re clamping down.
‘Unknown dangers’
I asked if there was any way to get past.
The officer said something that would change the nature of my journey.
You could become a volunteer, he suggested. Volunteers get official badges. And with one of those, you could pass right into the neighborhood.
Perfect, I said. Show me where to go.
About 20 minutes later, after walking down a road lined with fast-food restaurants and gas stations, I found myself at Braum’s, an Oklahoma-based chain of ice cream and burger stores, which was serving as the hub for volunteers in the area.
I signed an ominous release form, “hereby” acknowledging “the dangers associated with tornado cleanup volunteer work, including and not limited to dangers of live electric wires and other utilities, unstable structures, and other dangers, known and unknown.” (Unknown dangers — Like tornadoes? Walkabout journalists?)
I pinned a “volunteer” badge to my shirt, but still felt a little funny.
Is this ethical? I asked my Twitter followers, who I’d been updating en route.
“#justdoit,” a former colleague replied.
I did. And I took the change seriously. It’s not that I was going to shirk on my journalistic duties, but I promised myself also to look for ways to help. Not in the news-anchor-rescues-a-puppy sense. But I’d at least try to chip in. Earn the honor of that plastic badge with a safety pin.
In the Braum’s parking lot, I chatted with a couple of for-real volunteers. Judging by Blake and Drew Thompson, selflessness and access to heavy equipment seem to be two valued traits in times like these. The brothers heard on the radio that volunteers were needed and took off work to come. Blake, 28, wore a shirt dedicated to Oklahoma City’s beloved local celebrity, meteorologist Gary England. (Other cities have dozens of famous people to gawk at. OKC has The Thunder, its NBA team; the Flaming Lips, the indie band; and Gary England. People freaking love him. There’s even a Gary England Drinking Game).
The brothers brought a chainsaw and wheelbarrow, hoping to help clear rubble. Ready to do whatever was needed to assist strangers.
Credentials in hand, I wished them good luck and then hoofed it across a soggy field of knee-high grass. I could see the rubble of a suburban neighborhood on the horizon. Once I was in the thick of the grass, as the rubble grew larger, I wished I’d stayed with the pack. Forgotten the walk. Maybe working as a for-real volunteer would have been more helpful than wandering, writing and tweeting.
A helicopter swooped overhead, making multiple passes. I felt watched. Did the copter know about my somewhat falsified reporter-to-helper metamorphosis? Could the pilot see my suspicious, hipster-looter hat?
I neared this Newcastle neighborhood. It’s a cliché, but it resembled a war zone. Chewed-up homes. Flakes of insulation. Boards and nails and clothes in the grass. A box of Rice Krispies. A tiny, blue-haired doll.
Up the road I met Jason Leger, 36, whose house crumbled in the storm. Hundreds of volunteers had been helping him pile up the fragments.
“The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,” he says in a YouTube video he shot of the wreckage. Rain falls on a spooky line of trees that looks like something out of “Lord of the Rings.” Mist also appears to rise from the ground. “Wow,” he says.
It’s true that Leger had much taken away. He was wearing clothes purchased after the storm. A neighbor loaned him a car. But he did his part to giveth back.
When he emerged from the storm shelter to find that apocalyptic scene, Leger told me, his first move was to run across the street and dig a neighbor out of the rubble.
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