Diary of a Wimpy Diarist

I wish I had kept a diary my whole life. I have written in scattered journals for a week or so at a time, but nothing consistent and nothing that really captured the moments in my life that are getting harder and harder to remember. My fortieth birthday is next year, and so last winter I wrote a “40 by 40” list of 40 things I wanted to accomplish before I turned 40. One of them was to keep a journal. So I started using this beautiful leather-bound journal I got from a friend and once a week I jotted down how I was doing on my list items. Then it was once a month or so. Although now I couldn’t tell you when I last wrote in it.

But one good thing about having been a writer all my life is that I have captured some of my life events in the stories that I’ve told. Recently I was cleaning out a drawer in my office and came across old poems that I had written 10 or more years ago. They give me a glimpse into my past but they are also cryptic. Why did I say what I did? What is it that I was really thinking at the time that made me feel this way? The ideas seemed so important at the time and are lost to me now.

I have written various books, from the nonfiction puzzle book Badger Brain Teasers to the children’s book Solar System Forecast to my novel published on kindle The Gathering Storm. I have also written a sequel to The Gathering Storm that still needs to be edited and then published. And in between those two I wrote another unrelated novel that is probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written, though it needs a lot of editing before I submit it for publication.

But the first book I wrote from beginning to end almost no one has ever read. It’s a travelogue about two trips I took in 2005. I recently started reading it over again and editing it. As my first full-length book, it is in need of much more editing than anything I’ve written so far and will require a couple passes at it. But one of the things I like so much about it is rediscovering moments I had with my family that I had completely forgotten about. The book is basically a journal of the summer of 2005, both the thrilling and the heartbreaking.

So, as an example of a snippet of my life that I had completely forgotten until I edited my travelogue, I present to you a scene from the book featuring my children, Kaden (who was 4 at the time) and Lucy (who had just turned 2).

******

Kaden took over the reins that night and told his own bedtime story. His traveling companions on this trip were now his traveling partners in a rocket ship to the planets. He started at the sun and worked his way outward, naming every planet in order and relating facts about each of them. “Grandma liked Jupiter best because of the storm called the Great Red Spot.” He even remembered to mention the asteroid belt in the right location and Sedna, “discovered in November 2003 and farther out than Pluto.” This was when it first hit me just how fascinated he was by space.

After the trip he would continue to learn about the planets, checking out a book on a different planet every couple days when we went to the library. He would sit right down in the aisle and read them to himself, then at home he would quiz me to see if I knew what the names of the planets’ moons were. I had to start reading them with him so he wouldn’t catch me with a puzzled look on my face. Soon the different colored toy balls in our house became planets. And somehow Lucy’s favorite became Uranus. Only to Lucy, it was Myranus. Not Your Anus, as she apparently thought, but Myranus.

We would ask the kids what their favorite planet was. Kaden’s would change by the day, but Lucy’s was always Myranus. Kaden even tried to correct her.

                “Lucy, it’s not Myranus. It’s yuh, yuh, yuh, yuh YOUR Ranus. Can you say that?” he would instruct her.

                “No! Lucy’s Ranus!” she would respond.

                A couple months later after a story time at the library, Lucy was playing with toys the instructor set out. She was playing with a toy that required her to manipulate different buttons to pop open the lids where Disney characters appeared. She was not acquainted with Disney characters, so I pointed them out to her.

                “There’s Mickey Mouse. There’s Minnie Mouse. That one’s Donald Duck. There’s Goofy. And that one’s Pluto.”

                “HEY!” Lucy shouted. “WHERE’S MYRANUS?”

 

 Kaden was the solar system that year for Halloween. Fortunately, Lucy was just a princess.

The Snake in the House

My father-in-law used to live way out in the country — the sticks, as they say, or the boonies or the middle of nowhere. All were accurate descriptions. After driving to a place that can’t even be found on the map, you had to turn onto a dead end road, then a long dirt driveway bordered by a cow pasture, then pass a vacation home owned by out-of-staters who never visited, before you finally found his house nestled into the start of the 40 acres of forest that he owned.

My husband and I drove out to see him one day, having the afternoon off and time to kill on a Sunday drive in the country. We didn’t know whether or not he’d be home, but the rolling hills and bucolic scenery was worth the drive either way. I had been to his house before, a small A-frame with a detached garage. As a single guy, he didn’t need much space, and he didn’t have much. The door opened into the galley kitchen, and then a living room, bathroom, and bedroom completed the first floor. The bedroom contained bunk beds where his sons occasionally slept when they would come to visit. Upstairs was a loft that made up my father-in-law’s bedroom, a space I imagined to be quite small but had never seen myself.

Despite not needing much space, my father-in-law had embarked on a project to create an enclosed breezeway between the garage and his house. When we arrived that afternoon, we found the garage empty and knew that he wasn’t home. But my husband had to use the bathroom, so he retrieved the hidden key and we made our way carefully across the construction area and to the door. We let ourselves in and I stood in the middle of the living room, staring into space with nothing to do, as my husband shut the door to the bathroom.

I don’t have any idea what I was thinking about as I stood in the living room and just outside the bathroom door, my gaze looking at nothing at all as I faced the general direction of the downstairs bedroom. But within moments of my husband leaving me alone in the living room, I caught sight of movement in the bedroom. Along the base of the far wall, I saw the back half of a large snake as it slithered under the bunk bed.

“Jeremy?” I called, my voice sounding reasonably brave and steady under the circumstances.

“What?”

“There’s a snake in the house.”

Maybe you’ve heard the expressions “coolheaded” or “grace under pressure” or even “he was my rock when I needed him”? I’ve heard those expressions too. Perhaps someday I’ll witness such a thing. This was not the day.

“A snake? Where?” His voice was already at least an octave above mine and completely panicky. In bad situations he has always been the one to freak out, overreact, and completely abandon any sense of calm. Oh, the stories I could tell. And will, eventually.

“I just saw it go under the bed.”

“Get on a chair!” he instructed me. I didn’t think it was necessary as I knew where the snake was – under the bed. But I did as I was told and stepped up onto a metal folding chair. (My father-in-law is an ace decorator.)

“What kind of snake was it?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I only saw the end of it. It was long. And thick. No markings. Black.” I wasn’t about to go peek under the bed to get a better look.

“No rattle?”

“No.”

There was quiet and I waited for him to get out of the bathroom to rescue me. “What’s taking you so long?” Apparently, knowing there is a big snake outside your door makes it hard to relax and finish.

I finally heard the toilet flush and then he called out in his same rushed, agitated voice, “Is it safe for me to open the door?”

“Yes,” I said from my high perch, getting a bit exasperated.

He came out into the living room and joined me on a chair. I pointed into the bedroom. “He’s under the bed there. I saw him gliding along from the right. He was probably halfway under already by the time I saw him. He looked long and fat. Let’s leave a note for your dad and get out of here.”

“We have to barricade him in there so my dad knows where he is.”

“Is there not a door?” I asked, looking into the bedroom and seeing a dresser against the wall where I thought the open door should be.

He looked at the same dresser. It was solid and old and met the floor without any gap. There would be no sister snakes hiding underneath it. “Let’s move that in front of the door.”

We climbed down from our chairs and crept toward the bedroom. Keeping one eye on the bunk beds, we pulled the near side of the dresser as it began to groan across the hardwood floor. We managed to wedge it in the doorway and block the room off without the snake ever coming out to say hello.

We stepped back to admire our work and then Jeremy exclaimed, “Oops, I forgot about the pocket door.” I saw then that the missing door was just slid back in between the walls. That would have been substantially easier than lugging the dresser.

“Do we put it back?” he asked.

“Nah.” I was not interested in spending any more time in the house. “Let’s just write a note and go.”

So we left my father-in-law a note on his counter and ran for the car.

                According to my father-in-law, he left the door barricaded for a week so the snake would be good and ready to come out. Then one evening he turned off all the lights in the house except for the light of the TV. He pushed the dresser away from the opening, lay on the floor in front of the TV with a baseball bat, and waited. It didn’t take long for the snake, all five feet of him, to come out at top speed, head off the ground, looking for a fight. What he found was the solid side of a wooden baseball bat. My father-in-law said it was a blue racer, a large, angry snake that, while not poisonous, would give you quite a fight.

                I suppose I could draw a lot of conclusions from this, but I’m going to leave it simply: Don’t live in the woods.

 

The woods can be pretty, but just think of all the snakes in there. Not to mention, spiders.

Solar System Forecast

 

My first children's book is out! Solar System Forecast is a picture book explaining what the weather is like on the planets (plus the sun, Titan, and Pluto). The book is available at Amazon.com in hardcover, paperback, digital, and Spanish!

This Is Why I'm Going to Hell

I was raised in a devout household. My mother was a devout Catholic and my father was a devout Agnostic. The product of such a union was a bewildered girl with a strict code regarding what I’m not sure I believe in. But as a child, on Sunday mornings while my father was either working or fishing, my mother took my sister and me to mass.

            My mother, having been educated by the Jesuits, knew all the complex rules and elaborate codes of her faith. You would think I would have been spared knowing these things, being fortunate enough to have a cheap mother who sent me to the public (read: free) school with all the other little heathens. But my mother made sure to pass along all her Catholic wisdom to my sister and me. For instance, we were not allowed to eat before going to mass, so we would be “pure” to receive the host. Another rule we strictly adhered to was that we mustn’t wear shorts to church or else we’d burn in hell.

            But my mother’s favorite rule was that no wine could be left over after the service ended. So every week after mass, as people streamed out of church toward the pancake breakfast or the bars downtown, my mother directed us to the room behind the altar known as the sacristy where she volunteered for her Christian duty of finishing off the wine. It did not seem to matter to her that every member of the congregation had either dipped their host in the chalice or sipped their share from it outright, she grabbed it with both hands and guzzled Jesus’s blood just the same.

For many children, attending church for an hour a week isn’t for listening and learning, it’s a test of patience and a chance to see just how entertaining your imagination is. Each week I tried to will God to send a lightning bolt through the skylight above the priest’s head at the altar during the consecration of the host. I wasn’t trying to kill him, just wow the congregation with a sign from God. I would work on other psychic abilities too: trying to get the cute boys to turn around and sneak a peak at me, or dropping a ceiling fan on the old lady in front of us who warbled when she sang. And then there was the day I thought I acquired the unusual ability of being able to smell over extraordinarily long distances. I was staring in boredom at the flower arrangement below the lectern and then … I smelled the fragrant blooms. From fifteen rows back! (I counted!) I thought maybe God had given me the gift of superolfactory perception. It was a couple years before I realized it must have been perfume from one of the ladies nearby.

On typical Sunday mornings as children, we would attend Sunday school classes at the Catholic school on church grounds at 9:30 a.m. before heading to mass at 10:30. Introduction to Sunday school came with my own mother, who was the religious education instructor for the kindergarten class for more than a decade. I may have been only five at the time, but I can recall some of her lessons. One of them involved all the kids in class having to say what we thought God looked like. After a handful of “Santa” answers, my mom was overjoyed to hear me say I thought God looked like a cloud.

Another facet of teaching catechism to kindergarteners, according to my mother, was reading us Jewish literature, or at least Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree. She read this book to her class every single year and still could never keep herself from sobbing at the end and terrifying all the children.

In fourth grade, our Sunday school teacher, Miss Miller, tried expanding our horizons by teaching us about other faiths. She drew the symbols of other religions on the chalkboard and then described to us what they stood for.

“This one is the cross. We are all Christians and our symbol is the cross because Jesus died on the cross.” We all nodded our heads. This we understood.

“This one is called the Star of David. It is the symbol for the Jews and may be what King David’s shield looked like when he was a young warrior.” Our eyes were beginning to glaze over. We lived in a small farming town in Wisconsin. What was a Jew?

Next she drew what looked like two tadpoles canoodling. “This is the Yin and Yang. It’s about things that are opposites. Day and night, summer and winter, empty and full. It is a symbol for people who believe in the Chinese philosophy of Confucianism and Taoism.” Okay, we got the opposites, but that’s where it ended.

There were a couple other symbols she showed us that I have completely forgotten. At the end, Miss Miller asked us if we knew anyone who was a religion other than Christianity, symbolized by the cross.

My hand immediately shot up. Because I was the only one in the class raising her hand, Miss Miller called on me.

“Kelly, who do you know who has a religious faith represented by one of the other symbols on the board?”

“My dad.”

“And which one is it?”

I had already decided on my story the first time I saw the symbol on the board. I liked space and wanted to think I partly came from some place cooler than Earth. “The star,” I told her.

“Oh!” Her facial expression was awash with wonder and acceptance. “The Star of David,” she gushed. “That means your dad is Jewish.” She was clearly fascinated to learn that a half Jew was sitting right here in front of her, in Catholic Sunday School. Jews for Jesus! That would also explain to her why my father was never at church with the rest of my family.

A little later that same year as we were studying the sacraments, we were taught how to baptize someone in an emergency. If there was not a priest around to perform the sacrament for an unbaptized person who was on death’s door, any individual could perform the rite. Therefore, the nine-year olds in our class were given instructions on how to wet one’s fingers and make the sign of the cross over the afflicted individual.

I was trying to think of a situation in which one of us could possibly find this information of use. Perhaps one of my little classmates would stumble upon a beaten-up drunk in an alley on the way home from school. Or maybe someone’s parents would still be in bed Saturday morning as one of the fourth graders sat up watching cartoons, and there would be a knock at the door. The child would open it, only to have a man pitch forward into the room with a bloody knife sunk in his back. Of course the kid wouldn’t really know if these men had already been baptized, but why take the chance that they hadn’t?

Fortunately for me, and everyone else in the class, Miss Miller already had a situation in mind when she decided to teach us emergency baptisms.

“For example,” she said, scanning the room until her eyes found me. “Kelly, let’s say you’re playing catch in the backyard with your father when he suddenly clutches at his heart and falls to the ground, his eyes rolling back in his head. Find some water, or if there is none available, spit will do, and wet your hands. Then make the sign of the cross over him, touching his forehead, heart, and shoulders as you say, ‘I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.’” As she said the words, she drew a big cross in the air with her hands, blessing my father’s imaginary dead body in front of her.

I committed to memory the lesson of that class. Although I never did have to perform an emergency baptism on my father, I did put the lesson to use a couple years later.

My mother had found a “cute” holy water font. I would love to know at which store she was shopping when she ran across this item. The font was made of porcelain and meant to hang on the wall in a home. Above the small bowl for the holy water knelt a little angel praying. We decided to hang it on a nail above the light switch in my bedroom. In the lobby of our church was a little tin barrel with a spigot that was filled with holy water. Church members were welcome to take some of this water home with them to use for I-cannot-even-begin-to-imagine-what-purpose. One Sunday my mother took an old used cottage cheese container to church with us and filled it with holy water to put in the font in my bedroom.

Besides doing the sign of the cross when I entered and exited my bedroom, I soon found another use for the holy water.

My sister and I rarely got along. Four years older than I, she was in high school at the time and headed down the road toward becoming one of the world’s few female serial killers. She appeared to me to be nothing but evil. Her days consisted of spewing out insults at me, physically harming me if I so much as crossed the threshold of her room, and listening to an unhealthy amount of Prince on her record player. So for the most part I stayed out of her way and hid in my room, organizing my filing cabinet or rearranging my furniture, while she stayed in her room, trying on clothes, putting on makeup, and making lists of who she was going to kill first. Pretty much everyone in the house avoided her, except for one helpless little soul: her cat. And so it happened one night, after a particularly violent tirade that had her storming back in her room, slamming the door, and cranking up When Doves Cry at an obscene volume, that I whisked the vulnerable Kitty into my bedroom, locked my door, and performed the emergency baptism to save him from my sister, the Devil.

I dipped my fingers in the holy water in the font on my wall and recited the words, “I baptize you in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” It was a bit tricky, because I wasn’t sure exactly where a cat’s shoulders end and the neck begins, but I fumbled my way through it, touching what I figured was close enough to the proper body parts.

Kitty lived to the ripe old age of twenty-two, and my sister never did become a serial killer. (That I know of.) My sister took it pretty hard when the cat died. She had the cat cremated and the ashes put into a little vessel that was small enough to wear on a chain around her neck. (Totally normal.) I never told her that I baptized her cat, but I like to think about how surprised she will be when she gets to Heaven and finds Kitty waiting for her.

After the sixth grade, religious education classes were taught on Wednesday nights instead of Sunday mornings. It was common for all school districts to hold sports practices Mondays, Tuesdays, and Thursdays, with Fridays free for our own recreations and Wednesdays for the kids to attend church classes. For my junior year, the classes were held in the basement under the rectory. There were two classes held in separate rooms, each taught by a volunteer from the church.

My class was taught by an older lady named Ms. Kulwicki, who was kind and maybe just a little too gullible. My friend Melanie and I could get her off topic and chatting endlessly until class time had run out and we had accomplished nothing on the curriculum. One day we got her going on the subject of capital punishment. We fueled the flames of her rant by asking innocent questions such as, “Why does the government think it can play God?” or “Doesn’t Jesus say that an eye for an eye is an outdated teaching and that we should learn to turn the other cheek?”

And then there was the day that Ms. Kulwicki didn’t show up. The fifteen or so kids in our class sat around the long table in their cold folding chairs and talked amongst themselves. About 10 minutes after class was supposed to have started she still hadn’t shown up. Someone decided to head upstairs and look in the parking lot for her. The rest of us thought it would be funny to turn off the lights. The room, being a windowless cement cell in the basement, was pitch black. A few kids started crawling under the table, poking at the other kids.

The student who had left returned to say there was still no sign of our teacher. We were not yet ready to ruin our “night off” by reporting her absence to the alternate teacher in the neighboring room or the priests upstairs. Kids began turning the lights on and off at random, walking in and out of the room, breaking off into groups to make jokes, sitting on the table, and hitting each other with their folders. The noise in the room was turning into a dull roar. After 45 of the 60 minutes of class time had elapsed, Melanie and another girl, Anna, volunteered to preach from the bible as a joke. The other students sat around the table and watched the stand-up routine while I said I would take one last look upstairs for our teacher. I walked out the door and turned the corner in the hall and nearly ran right into Ms. Kulwicki.

“I was just coming back out to look for you!” I exclaimed, unable to hide my surprise.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, rushing by. “I accidentally fell asleep!”

She opened the door to the classroom, and there, seated around the table, were a dozen 17-year-olds quietly listening to two of their female classmates taking turns reading from the bible. Our teacher was overwhelmed with the wholesomeness of her class and thanked Melanie and Anna profusely for taking over for her.

God has an amazing sense of humor.

            But all was not fun and games in the Catholic Church. After I left home for college, the stories first began to break about the sins of certain Catholic priests and how the church had been hiding the fact that a number of their own had been molesting young boys. This did not come as a surprise to everyone. As many had already asked, What man feels a calling to a vocation where women are dressed in black obscuring sheets and are not given equal status to males? Or one that forbids marriage? I think it is a little telling that there is an old joke that says, “How do you get a nun pregnant? Dress her as an altar boy.”

            I had my own version of this joke. I first told it to my sister on Christmas. I had just attended Christmas services with my boyfriend at his Protestant church. When I returned home my mother insisted that my sister and I go to Christmas mass with her. I was furious to be forced to attend two holiday services on the same day. We arrived at church just as the ceremony was starting, and since all the “faithful” had suddenly come out of the woodwork for the holiday, there was a full house. We were forced to stand in the back vestibule for the next hour, peering through the windows at the service with the other latecomers. It was at this point that I turned to my sister and whispered, “How do you get a nun pregnant?”

She gave me a blank stare.

“Fuck her,” I said.

It was good that we were standing outside the chapel, because there’s a chance that the priest didn’t hear us laughing till we cried. And now you know why I’m going to Hell. I’m going to miss Kitty.
 

 

Back when I was still going to Heaven.

First Communion, May 1981



Paying Respect

 

I didn’t notice the little boy at first. I was sitting in the front row of the church, fixated on my grandpa’s coffin, and the boy was somewhere in the very back. Even when the service ended and we all filed out, I still didn’t see him because I was embarrassed that I was sobbing while having to walk past all the firemen from my town, who were there for the funeral in uniform, honoring my grandpa who had been the Fire Chief for many years.

We left St. Aloysius Catholic Church, where my grandpa had also served as an usher until his multitudes of cancer became too much for him to get out of bed, and his family and friends got into their cars to head out to the cemetery. My grandpa’s coffin was loaded into a hearse and my grandma rode along with it, led by a police car and a restored antique fire engine.

My dad turned the lights of our car on, which is standard procedure in a funeral procession, but the chilly and rainy October day might have necessitated it anyway. People stopped to stare, as they do for any funeral procession, as we drove down Madison Street toward Highway 12. The cars moved slowly, slow enough that a young boy, perhaps ten or eleven, could keep up with our progress on his bicycle.

I was old enough by that time, eighteen and had just started college, that I didn’t feel that this boy was my peer. I didn’t recognize him and didn’t give him much thought. The old fire engine would be a draw to any kid, and I didn’t think that his pedaling alongside our group was anything more than a child interested in a fire truck.

When we got to the cemetery, we gingerly stepped out onto the fallen leaves and wet ground. The casket was placed onto the little elevator that would eventually lower it into the freshly dug hole after everyone left. The family and closest friends of my grandpa then gathered around the coffin once more while the priest said a few more words. My grandma and her three daughters, including my mother, linked arms and stood closest to the coffin. A huge profusion of red carnations was draped over the casket. After some final words, someone in uniform, standing apart from the group, was given the signal to give my grandfather a final gun salute in honor of his service in World War II. I remember the first of the three-volley salute, the way it blasted through the air with violence, upending the quiet, reverent moment and causing my grandma to jump in fright. It was also then that I noticed the small boy, who had followed all the way out to the cemetery on his bike and was standing off to the side.

When the final words of prayer were over and my aunt had distributed red carnations to each of grandpa’s female relatives, the funeral goers moved back to their vehicles. As the young boy was getting ready to get back on his bike, my grandma approached him.

“Did you know Doc from the river? Were you one of the kids who would fish with him sometimes?”

“No, ma’am,” the boy answered, holding his jacket tight around him with his head bowed. “I just came to pay my respects.”

“Well, thank you,” my grandma replied. We walked back to the car and she mentioned that she had also spotted him in the church.

As is tradition, the funeral and grave-site visit was followed by a potluck in the church basement. We all headed back into town and gladly trooped out of the rain and into the cozy basement. A series of tables had been set up along the walls with more casserole dishes than I had ever seen in my life. The other attendees hung back to partake in the feast until my grandma had gone through the line first. But she saw the boy, who was lurking alone in a corner, and encouraged him to get a plate of food as well.

Once we all had gone through the line and sat at the tables to eat, the room became loud with the buzz of everyday conversation. I was sitting kitty corner from my grandma at the table and watched as one person after another came up to her to tell her they were sorry. There are not  many words that can be said on this topic, besides I’m sorry and thank you, and every time it felt awkward and made us all teary. When the priest came up to talk to my grandma, she asked him, “Do you know who the little boy was?” By this time he had eaten his fill and disappeared. The priest said he did know him. He attended funerals of the townspeople on a pretty regular basis. I remember the priest half apologizing for this, and also conveying the message that the real reason he came to the funerals was because of the hot meal that was served afterward.

I took a lot away from that day. Besides the red carnation that dried long ago and has now been sitting in my closet for more than twenty years, I received a deeper insight into the human condition, from those who were at the center of attention that day and those who were at the periphery. My grandpa had a great life, with a remarkably kind wife, three beautiful daughters, a successful business, an active life in the community, and a peaceful refuge found in the surrounding countryside. But his life didn’t start out so bright. His father died before he turned five years old, leaving just his mother and baby brother. The little family struggled to make ends meet, including distilling their own alcohol during prohibition and bootlegging into neighboring states and running from the notorious competition. Somehow my grandpa still managed to be salutatorian of his graduating class and go on to open an ice cream shop with his younger brother before starting his own electrical company. But it would have been possible to imagine him, around the age of ten or eleven, attending funerals of people he didn’t know, all in search of a hot meal.

 

My grandpa as a little boy

 

My grandpa ("Doc") and his little brother ("Shimmel")

 

My grandpa during his Fire Chief years

 

Tornado Chasing During Wisconsin’s Record Outbreak

August 18, 2005, would turn out to be the biggest tornado outbreak the state of Wisconsin had ever seen. But it was early in the day and my sister and I had no way of knowing that as we decided to try our hand at tornado chasing for the first time.

It was a hot, muggy summer day and we were both visiting our parents’ home near Sauk City. My husband Jeremy and I would be celebrating our tenth wedding anniversary the following day in the Dells after dropping off our kids with my parents for some weekend babysitting. But today Jeremy would be participating in a golf tournament at the Reedsburg Country Club with my father and I would be spending some time with my mom, my sister Kristin, and my kids.

When we arrived at my parents’ house that morning the sun was emerging after a morning shower and the air was heavy with humidity. There were reports that the afternoon could bring severe thunderstorms, but by nightfall 27 tornadoes would scour great swaths of land in the south central portion of the state.

Like any Midwesterner, I know the inky blue darkening of the western sky, the sudden chill in the formerly humid summer air, and the distant sound of rolling thunder, only to be interrupted by the piercing wail of a tornado siren. People who live in Tornado Alley either love or hate severe storms and I, for one, love them. Back in the days before cell phones with cameras, I would carry a camera stored in the glove box of my car on the off chance that I might blunder onto a tornado sweeping through farm fields on my way to the grocery store. I am a person whose recurrent dreams usually involve a handful of themes, such as losing my teeth, searching in vain for a clean public toilet, discovering that I must take an exam for a college class I never attended, and witnessing a tornado.

The first tornado warning we heard that day was for a tornado that was on the ground and moving toward the area of the Reedsburg Country Club. Rather than be worried for Jeremy and my father, I was jealous. I have always wanted to see a tornado and now they were going to get a good shot at fulfilling my dream.

Although I had never seen a tornado first hand, that’s not to say I haven’t had some close calls. My husband and I were in Nashville during the tornado of 1998 that struck the city’s downtown. We were safely inside and away from the storm when the tornado knocked a giant old tree over onto our car in the parking lot of Vanderbilt University, crushing it. I was hoping that today’s storms would give me the chance to see a real live tornado, only without my car getting totaled this time.

The storms were coming to a full boil on August 18^th around my children’s nap time. I had my mom put the kids to sleep in the guest bedroom in the basement of their house, which seemed as safe a place as any for them. Kristin and I decided we would go out chasing tornadoes while my mom kept a watch over my napping children.

Here comes the disclaimer: Don’t try this yourself. We were foolish novices, never having storm chased before. I had taken meteorology courses at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, but I had not yet taken a storm spotting class and gave it no more forethought than “There’s a tornado warning for our county!” and  “Wouldn’t it be cool to see a tornado?”

We grabbed our digital cameras, jumped in my vehicle, and drove through Sauk City headed north toward the Reedsburg tornado. Fortunately for the golfers that day, the tornado dissipated before it reached the country club. Kristin and I didn’t know that at the time, but we kept the radio on, listening for weather updates. We were now hearing warnings broadcast for locations in the opposite direction, around the Madison area.

We were heading up Highway 12 over the Baraboo bluffs into a dark wall of clouds when the rain hit. It seemed our tornado chasing adventure was going to come to a quick end; it just wasn’t safe to chase in the blinding rain. I was disappointed but not yet defeated. We turned around and headed back toward town, out of the rain, making a new strategy to set up somewhere in a location that would allow us a better view of the edge of this storm.

At the base of the bluffs and across from the old Badger Army Ammunition plant was the Bluffview trailer park. I jokingly said that we should stop here, because if a tornado was going to strike anywhere, it would be this area of mobile homes. A gas station sat in front of the large collection of trailer homes and I did stop because I was running low on gas. I might have been a novice chaser but at least I knew that running on empty was not a good way to start.

As I got out of the car by the pumps I heard a sound that I had never heard before. It sounded like the rumbling of a locomotive, only it was coming from straight overhead. The noise was also eerily like the constant rolling of thunder, but there was no lightning whatsoever.

“What is that sound?” I screamed to my sister over the roar and rush of the wind. She had also gotten out of the car as I was filling up my tank.

“You’ve never heard that before?” she yelled in disbelief. She knew I had been close to tornadoes before, but this noise was new to me. “That’s it! That’s the sound!”

I still don’t know what made that sound. How can you hear thunder without lightning? Isn’t that physically impossible? Or was it something in the clouds, the wind and the pressure warning us of the genesis of a tornado?

“But where is it?” I yelled. The clouds overhead were a gray color, and not that menacing, although they were rushing by quickly. Because of the gas station blocking our view to the west, we couldn’t see the whole horizon. I willed the gas to pump faster into the car so we could get out of there and get a better look to see where this tornado might be. It sounded like it was in the sky right on top of us.

Suddenly a new terrifying sound filled the air. But it was a sound that, this time, I was quite familiar with. It was the sound of the tornado siren going off, right behind the gas-station building. Now we were really deafened by the noise. I stopped the gas pump even though the tank wasn’t quite full yet. We jumped in the car and took off down the road back toward Sauk City. But my desire to see a tornado wasn’t going to scare me away entirely.

At my next chance I turned off the highway on County C, about a half mile down the road from the gas station and trailer park. I pulled the car off the road and turned it around so that if we needed to escape from our position we were headed in the right direction. We rolled down the windows and sat on the edge of the car doors like the boys in The Dukes of Hazzard. We started snapping pictures of the clouds behind us. The roar of locomotives could still be heard overhead. We watched the gray, smooth cloud formation stretch above us and curl into a tail toward the western horizon. It was not at all how I expected the clouds to look. I was expecting dark thunderheads and wall clouds.

We exited the car and moved to the yard of the farm house across the street, where we continued snapping pictures until we realized that the clouds in the “tail” of the storm by the horizon were moving to our left, and the clouds over our heads were moving to our right. We discovered to our horror that the entire cloud formation was circulating above us. I took one more photograph before we retreated into our vehicle. It was the only picture in which either of us was in the shot. Kristin was turning to look back at me and was about to tell me, “We have to get out of here, NOW!” But she is captured in mid-turn with a look of concern and fear stretched across her face that speaks volumes.

It was a lucky thing that I had my sister with me on this tornado chase. Because even though I was aware of the situation I was in, I was more exhilarated than afraid. Had I been making the decisions on my own, I almost surely would have unknowingly put myself in the path of the tornado that day. My sister was more cautious and directed me when to back up from the storm. I followed her directions to retreat even though I wanted to stay.

I drove us a little farther down Highway 12 and again turned off on the next convenient road, Old Bluff Trail. We passed a quiet farm on our left and great stretches of farm fields. On our right and behind us was the storm. Also on our right were high hills that blocked a good portion of our view. A convent was tucked in among these hills.

We stopped twice along Old Bluff Trail to take more pictures. The sky was turning green overhead and the roaring continued unabated. We could see the clouds racing in opposite directions in the sky behind us, yet the air was quite still on the ground — for the time being, anyway.

The storm (and Kristin) continued to push us farther away from where we first stopped at the gas station. We cut across old Waterbury Road, a little-used stretch that is bordered by fields on each side, and came to Highway 12 once more as it straightened out after it curves around the extensive grounds of the former ammunition plant. By this time some of the other drivers were taking note of the storm and pulling off to the side of the road. The clouds were taking on newer and stranger appearances. It seemed as if an invisible giant were shredding little clouds by the horizon and then yanking them upward into the cloud mass above. We watched the now rain-wrapped cloud mass cross Highway 12 at the corner by the ammunition plant, and we crossed at a greater distance but parallel to the storm. The storm was heading toward the river and the hydroelectric dam. We got out of the car one last time by a graveyard at the side of the road and took a few more apropos pictures.

At this point we could see what looked to be a rain-wrapped funnel. It didn’t yet appear to us that it was making contact with the ground. But in fact, on every step of our retreat as my sister urged me to abandon our previous locations, an F2 tornado was tracking our steps.

As we had sat in the car’s windows on County C, two miles down the road and beyond our vision the tornado was ripping apart a garage and barn. As we passed the quiet farm before the convent on Old Bluff Trail and then drove beyond it to take more pictures, we were unknowingly crossing in front of the tornado’s path. A few minutes behind us, the tornado shattered the stillness at that farm, tearing off the barn’s metal roof and discarding it in a field. As the tornado crossed over the curve of Highway 12 in the cloud bank, it blew cars off the road not a mile from where we were watching on Waterbury Road. And as we stopped by the cemetery to take pictures of what appeared to be a rain-wrapped funnel cloud on the other side of the corn field, it was flattening old storage buildings at Badger Army Ammunition.

As the storm crossed the Wisconsin River I knew that we could no longer safely follow it and see, what I thought would be, the point when the tornado finally appeared out of the clouds and rain. The land on the other side of the river is hilly and forested and the curving roads are dangerous even in good weather. We crossed the bridge over the river as two miles away from us, the tornado, hidden from our view due to the rain that encased it, blew out a big electrical station at the dam. We were now close to home so we turned south as the storm continued east. As soon as we made the turn that took us farther away from the tornado, the skies opened up and the rain fell so heavily I could hardly see to drive the four miles home.

We would learn that the storm we chased until it crossed the Wisconsin River and entered Columbia County died out about ten minutes later after roping off into a very visible tornado shape. At the same time, a new storm was forming 30 miles away in southern Dane County. This storm would produce an F3 tornado that would rip through the community of Stoughton and kill a man who was sensibly taking shelter in his basement when his chimney toppled over onto him.

The tornadoes on that single day produced more than $40 million in damages across the state of Wisconsin. In Stoughton alone, 69 homes were destroyed and 304 were damaged. Governor Jim Doyle requested federal aid but by the time the request was considered, a hurricane by the name of Katrina had brought a large US city to its knees. Even though Wisconsin had received federal disaster declarations recently for damage caused by tornadoes and flooding that had a lower price tag than the August 18^th tornadoes, FEMA denied aid to the tornado-stricken people of Wisconsin.

When I look back at my tornado-chasing adventure I think about what close calls we had and the destruction the tornado caused, and how I would have been directly in the path of this destruction had it not been for my more fearful (or is it sensible?) sister. Yet the event has only made me want to go out and chase tornadoes that much more. Even driving past the destruction the next day of mangled metal in fields and trees broken off at odd angles has not dampened my enthusiasm. So for now “seeing a tornado” will remain on my bucket list. Let’s just hope I continue to have a sensible chase partner with me so that it’s not the last item I ever get to cross off.

The "tail" of the storm near the bluffs was moving one direction while the clouds above us were moving the opposite direction, resulting in one massive rotation.





Nearly the same pic - the farm in the back to the right would sustain damage maybe 10 minutes after this picture was taken.

 

My sister's look of worry that got me to get in the car and leave the path of the storm.

(I think she'd want you to know that she has since ditched the unflattering capris.)

 

In reality the sky looked quite green. Taken from nearby the convent on Old Bluff Trail.

Waterbury Road, where vehicles were starting to pull off, looking back toward convent.

Rain-wrapped tornado leveling old buildings at Badger Army Ammunition behind the field. Taken from Prairie Road.

 

Gratuitous shot of a cemetery. Storm behind can barely be seen.

 

Peering toward the damage at Badger. I think these photos were taken several days after the tornado.

As I understand it, the buildings with the worst damage at Badger were farther back on the property, which is closed to the public.

The Art of the Trapeze

                “She flies through the air with the greatest of ease, the daring young girl on the flying trapeze.” Okay, so I’m not exactly a young girl anymore, but I did take a trapeze class last weekend at TSNY Chicago. The greatest of ease part is probably debatable.

                We decided to take the family to Chicago for a quick two-day getaway. Summer is drawing to a close and the weekends have been busy with one thing or another, but one August weekend miraculously demanded nothing from us, so we went on a little adventure. I picked out a historic old hotel to stay in (Congress Plaza Hotel), I booked us on a Lake Michigan fireworks boat cruise on Saturday night, and then asked my husband if I could book three spots in trapeze school for me and the kids Sunday morning. He said no.

                I never planned to ask my husband if he wanted to join us in the school. He has a fear of heights, so much so that standing on a chair is an activity that makes him uncomfortable. The platform for the trapeze is 23 feet off the ground via a ladder, which I knew he’d never be able to do. So, I figured I would go some other time with friends and we would find different Chicago adventures for this trip.

                I was still looking forward to our upcoming weekend in Chicago, despite not getting to do the trapeze. I had golf with my girlfriends Tuesday night and came home to the family that evening and the first thing I heard when I opened the door was my daughter yelling down the stairs to me, “Mom, I want to do the trapeze!”

                “Why did you tell her about it if you said we couldn’t do it?” I asked my husband. I never bring up activities with my kids until I’m actually sure they’re a go. No need to get them excited for nothing. He didn’t have a good answer. I searched YouTube for videos of the trapeze school so he could see it wasn’t as scary as it sounds. We all watched them and then the next day I asked him again if I could book three spots in the Sunday morning class. This time he said yes.

                We had a great Saturday in Chicago seeing the sights, but that night as I went to bed, it was not the notorious ghosts of the Congress Hotel that kept me awake but the thought of doing the trapeze the next day. I wasn’t scared, but I was nervous. I wanted so badly to do well. Not being able to complete a catch would feel like failure to me. I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to bring my knees up to hook onto the bar.

                A couple days before we went to Chicago, the kids and I drove around our town looking for a playground with a bar to practice on. The playground sets are all very specialized these days. It’s not like when I was a kid and they’d put a metal bar up on top of two logs and call it a piece of playground equipment. The best we could do at the playground was a twisting set of monkey bars.

                I told the kids they had to get their knees up to the bar without kicking off the ground, because they would be high off the ground when it came time to do it on the trapeze. Neither one of them could do it. I couldn’t do it from a still hang either, but if I started swinging I could get the momentum to do it. I realized that on the trapeze we’d have a nice big swing to start us off and figured that should be enough to give us the help we needed. This turned out to be true and not true.

                Our trapeze class was two hours long and began at 8:30 outside at Belmont Harbor. We were the first students to arrive, so we checked in and I bought a souvenir tank top with the word “trapeze” across the front, further solidifying my absolute need to succeed at this or be hugely disappointed. I showed the kids how to stretch out their shoulder and leg muscles and we waited for the rest of the students to arrive.

                Probably everyone who comes to trapeze school is delightful and friendly, but we lucked out with our group. Besides me and my kids, there was a pair of friendly ladies who cheered everyone on, a nice young girl and her boyfriend, and a woman and her adult daughter. With only nine students signed up, there was room for one more, but my husband declined.

                They put our belts on us tighter than you'd think they could go. It felt very much like I imagine a corset would feel. The instructors introduced themselves and then went over the basics of how to tie ourselves in, get up the ladder and then get in position to go. The instructor up  on the board would hold onto the back of our belt as we put our toes over the edge and put first one hand and then the other on the bar. We were to lean out and already have our weight over the net, then at the call of “Ready” we would bend our knees and at “hup” we would take a small jump. After that we would swing across and at the far side of our swing they call “knees up” at which point we roll into a ball while looking up at the bar and slip our feet over the bar. With any luck, we get into this position by the time we have swung back toward the platform, then we let go with our hands and let our bodies fall backward and stretch out toward where the catcher will eventually be. Then we just put our hands back up on the bar, let our legs down, and let go and drop into the net when we’re told.

                I’ve always been good at following directions. I grew up a rather quiet and obedient child, so when someone tells me to jump, I jump. I was the first in my family to go up. I got to the top of the ladder and onto the platform and was not very concerned with how high up we were. I was laser focused on doing what I was told, getting a feel for it, and nailing the practice knee hang. That’s exactly what I did.

                I got off the net and got ready for my daughter’s turn. She was clipped in and climbing the ladder and all seemed to be going well until I saw her face at the top. That fear combined with her obstinate personality meant there was really nothing that would convince her to put her hands on the bar and go. It was heartbreaking to see, because she was the one who really pushed for it and was so excited to try it. But she is not quiet and obedient like I am. She was not going any farther in this class. She had to do the backward climb of shame down the ladder.

                My son was up next. He is like me: quiet and obedient and generally easy to manipulate. He should have been the first child to go. But he got up there and I can only guess that seeing his sister’s freak out had poisoned his mind. My husband and I even shouted bribes up to my son for twenty dollars or whatever he wanted from the Lego store, but it wasn’t happening. And so it was that both my children backed down the ladder.

                I was disappointed that they didn’t go through with it, but it was also important to me that they know their limits. That, and I wasn’t going to have them climb the ladder again and have to be coaxed by the instructors and their parents while the rest of the class waited for them.

                The burden of the family’s success now rested on me. While it was great to have a large cheering section, every time I got to the top of the ladder, the whole world disappeared except for the instructors. Meredith was on the platform most the time, tying me in and giving me my signal to start. Chris was on the lines below and yelled up to me when I should do each move on the swing. Keene would be the one who I would be trusting to catch me when the time came. The rest of the class, the people passing by in the park — none of that existed when I got on the trapeze. Looking back later at photos, I am surprised to see the male student climbing the ladder and reaching the top just before I take off because I never had any awareness of anyone else in my presence except for my three teachers.

                We did the knee hang twice and many of the students got it both times, though there were some exceptions. It definitely is not as easy as some of the students were making it look. I may have been getting too confident, because on my third practice I swung my foot up hard and instead of getting it under the bar it smashed into the bar and then rocketed away and my feet dropped. Once I was no longer in the prime swing position for getting my knees up, it was hopeless. So instead we moved on to the dismount that the students in front of me had just learned: the backflip. On command, we swing our legs forward, backward, forward and then let go, curling our legs into a ball and grabbing onto our knees. Once again, I did exactly as I was told and landed my backflip safely into the net with little effort. When you do what you’re told, the rest of it follows naturally.

                But that miss had shaken my confidence.

                I didn’t know how many times we were going to practice the knee hang, and I wanted to move on to trying catches. You don’t realize how much energy each little turn up there takes until you're back on the ground. I would be panting and need to sit and rest after my jolt of adrenaline. Then when we added in the backflips, I would also be dizzy afterward from the adrenaline/tumbling combo. We ended up doing five practices, and I completed the rest of them successfully. On the last turn, Chris asked if I wanted to try a double backflip. By that point I was ready to go back to stage one and just fall easily into the net, but I said yes because I do what I’m told. Also, I would have regretted it if I hadn’t tried.

                The double backflip is the same as a single except that, as far as I know, you stay tucked and hope to spin around an extra time before crashing into the net. I’m pretty sure he also pulls you a bit higher with the lines and lowers you more slowly so you have time to get around, but that’s just a guess. Whatever the trick is to it, it worked. My husband took the video of it but he moved the camera so that you can't see me on the second flip. But I promise you that I didn’t land on my head.

                Finally we were up to catches. The only difference at this point was that we were to hold our hands a certain way and chalk our hands and arms up good so that we were easy to catch. Then once we were safely in Keene’s hands we just released our legs from the bar and let him swing us out and back and then he dropped us in the net. Easy peasy … as long as I didn’t fail at getting my knees up again.

                There were three women in front of me, and all made their catches. One required an extra swing to get her knees up, but she still did it. They were making it look easy. When it was my turn I climbed up and went back into good listener mode. I could do this. I had to do this. If I didn’t, everyone there would soon see a very ugly side of me.

                I got into position and put my toes over the board and my hand on the bar. Then I put the other hand on the bar and listened for the command from Keene, who was in the swing and preparing to meet me. Just as before, at the command of “Ready” I bent my knees and at “hup” I descended into my swing. I got to the far side of my swing and at “knees up,” curled into a ball and got one foot and then the other over the bar and to my knees. At the top of the swing at “hands off,” I lowered myself down and then stretched back as best I could. I looked for Keene and saw him swinging toward me. It was like watching a video tape in that squeaky, fast forward mode where you can see all the action but it happens so fast that you can’t linger or examine any part of it. You have to know what to do and be fully committed, showing only determination and no fear. Keene called “reach here” and “gotcha” so fast that I swore he said that he had me before he did (the video says otherwise) but when I heard the word “gotcha” I knew I had done it. Once he had his hands around my arms I let go with my legs almost without thinking. He swung me out and back and then we let go and I dropped easily into the net.

I did it! I did it, I did it, I did it! No one would ever be able to take that away from me.

                We had one more catch to go, and I was as stressed about that one as I was about the first one. What if I can’t get my knees up again like that time during practice? I wanted to leave there not feeling like I had messed up at the end. I wanted to believe that the catch wasn’t luck but skill. I had to make the second one too. I just had to.

                This time I was aware of one thing in the outside world besides my instructors. As I climbed the ladder I could hear Kelly Clarkson’s song “Stronger” playing. Kelly Clarkson has never let me down. I couldn’t let her down!

                Once more, just like before. Only I think I may have actually gotten my knees up even more quickly this time. I made the catch, I dropped into the net, and I think I smiled my first genuine, relaxed smile in two hours. I had successfully completed the flying trapeze.

                I’ve never been the type to enjoy watching myself on video, but this time I couldn’t get enough. I watched the videos my family took of the trapeze catches at least twenty times that day and many times since. The whole event happens so fast that there are things I didn’t even realize until it was over and things I can’t remember even though I keep reviewing it in my head. For one, I was supposed to grab onto my catcher’s arms and squeeze as tightly as I could. I have no idea if I did that. I wouldn't even know that I’d grabbed his arms at all if I didn’t have the pictures and video to prove it. I was only focused on him grabbing me. I also was surprised to see that sometimes I grabbed onto the trapeze bar with my thumbs around the bar and sometimes with them sticking next to my fingers. They never said which way to do it and it wasn’t something I even thought of as important until long after the fact.

                It’s been a couple days now and my entire upper body has never been so sore. It hurts to turn the steering wheel in my car or to put my hands together behind my back. I also have bruises in places that have never been bruised before, like behind my knees and, strangely, on the backs of both arms above my elbows (maybe from landing in the net after the backflips?). But I gained so much from the experience, including a newfound confidence, the knowledge that I can push myself to accomplish seemingly unreachable goals (and the seemingly unreachable arms of a trapeze partner), and the reminder that some moments, while so momentous and crucial, rush past us in the blink of an eye. Thank God for the video.

Video of My First Catch on the Trapeze

My husband bought me the professional photos as my anniversary gift.

Chalking up. Keene was on the board here but later would do the catching. 

Just going for a swing, 23 feet up.

"I can see Lake Michigan from here!"

The first catch. Looks like I did grab for his arms after all!

The easy part.

Letting go.

My 9-year-old daughter took this pic. Pretty amazing shot.

She may not be a trapeze artist but she is one heck of a photographer.