LONG STORY SHORT By Kristine McGowan  Jason and I attending a Pittsburgh Pirates game hours before we’d get an alert that would send our hearts racing. There were no smiles later that night. On our second night in a campground outside Pittsburgh, I woke to a blaring noise right beside my head. It was my phone. It was 1:00 a.m., and Jason’s phone was emitting the same buzzing drone. Already awake, he stared at its screen. I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and saw this:  About the timestamp: Given the nature of the message, I didn’t think to take a screenshot until much, much later. My brain froze. No, every synapse in my head said. That can’t be right. We hadn’t expected rain tonight, let alone a thunderstorm. We couldn’t hear any wind. It had to be a mistake. Then I looked up, at the skylight above our bed. It was the middle of the night—yet the sky was bright. Grayish white light flashed through the plastic dome every second, dimming for just a heartbeat before flashing again. Lightning. A lot of it. And, accompanying it: the constant din of rolling thunder. That’s when the terror sank in. Before that night, we’d had just one experience with tornadic weather, when we were driving through Louisiana in a gnarly storm back in March. The National Weather Service issued a tornado watch for our area then—and, seeing as our hometown gets an average of zero tornadoes a year, we had to google what that meant. Fortunately, a tornado watch means that conditions are ideal for a tornado to develop but not necessarily that one will develop. The NWS was just telling people to stay alert in case the sky got even angrier. My nerves didn’t enjoy the tornado watch, but that’s all our drive through Louisiana amounted to: heightened awareness and no tornadoes. But on this night near Pittsburgh, things were different. The NWS had issued a tornado warning, not a watch. Which meant a tornado had formed nearby or was about to. And it could be heading our way. Jason and I leaped out of bed. We didn’t have a plan for this. We were in an almost-empty campground, inside a travel trailer anchored to the earth by nothing more than its own weight. We could hear the thunder but still no wind. When Jason opened the door, lightning lit up the sky but the campground felt eerily calm. There was hardly even a breeze. “I think we’re OK,” Jason said, but I’d stopped breathing. My lungs felt like they were collapsing. My arms were shaking, my bare feet frozen to the floor. Wind or no wind, I was heading straight into a panic attack. Jason wrapped his arms around me to stop the shaking. He told me I was just surprised because the alert had woken me up. He said we were OK—but my body wouldn’t accept it. I tried to speak, but the air felt too thin. My voice failed and dwindled to a croak. “Hey,” Jason leveled his gaze and his voice at me. “You’re starting to freak me out.” In other words, we needed to make a plan and I wasn’t helping. It felt like a slap to the face—one that I needed. I pulled myself together and forced some words out. Then we got Catsby in her carrier and put on our jackets, and we drove over to the campground’s brick-and-mortar bathrooms.* (It was the nearest shelter without wheels.) We’d hide out there until the tornado warning expired.** Given my panic, we probably arrived about 10 minutes after the warning hit our phones. Two other campers had already taken shelter in the bathrooms, and a couple more arrived shortly after we did. By then, the wind had picked up and rain pounded the ground and the roof. With all the lightning, the sky was so bright that birds began chirping as if the sun were rising. Despite all that, we did the only thing that anyone huddling in a public restroom with strangers at 1:10 a.m. could do: We introduced ourselves. Before we knew it, we were sliding into small talk. We all shared where we were from and what we did for a living. We explained what had brought us to this particular campground on this particular night. And of course, as lightning raged overhead, we talked about the weather. Usually, I dread small talk with strangers; it makes me feel awkward and self-conscious. But on this night, I couldn’t have been more grateful for it. Our light conversation dulled my panic and kept my terror at bay. It helped me forget that I could lose my house tonight.*** By the time 2 a.m. rolled around, the most violent thunderheads seemed to have moved on. The tornado warning had expired, as far as we knew. The campground was intact, and the sky had darkened to its usual murky blue-black. More at ease, we all said goodnight and returned to our respective camps. Jason and I found our campsite flooded but otherwise untouched. We went back to bed feeling rather lucky. The next day, we found out exactly how lucky we were. The storm that brought torrential rain and lightning to our campground had also generated four tornadoes in the region—two of which touched down within 10 miles of us. One of those twisters damaged several homes and destroyed a few buildings in the West Virginia panhandle; according to one resident, it touched down just three minutes after the warning went out. My mouth went dry when I heard that. If that tornado had decided to land just 10 miles southeast, we would be telling a very different story. Now, almost a week after that night near Pittsburgh, I can’t decide whether my panicked state was an overreaction—but as Jason implied, it certainly didn’t help. I’m grateful that he kept a level head and knew just what to say to get me moving. I’m also grateful to those strangers in the campground bathrooms, for all they did without knowing they were doing it. We’ll continue traveling in and near the U.S.’s Tornado Alley for a few more weeks, and this experience has taught us that we need to be more prepared.**** We can’t risk dawdling for 10 minutes if another tornado warning pings our phones. Now that we’ve been through it once, I hope I’ll be ready to act quicker next time. Though I’m crossing my fingers that there won’t be a next time. * Miraculously, Catsby gave me no trouble in the process, despite how much she hates being stuffed into her carrier. She was just as scared as we were, and Jason later said that I’d handled her with decisiveness, which probably convinced her to trust me. I’m not sure how I pulled that off, given how I felt like my bones were held together by nothing more than glue and string at the time.
** The tornado warning was set to expire at 1:30 a.m. originally, but the NWS extended it to 2 a.m. while we were hunkered down in the bathrooms. *** When you live in a travel trailer, it’s effectively your house. **** To that end, we picked up a Midland ER210 emergency hand-crank weather radio the very next day.
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