The Longest Day

I have heard a lot about April 3, 1974, during my lifetime. My dad lived through that day, and being a weather geek himself, always used to tell me about how it wiped Guin, Alabama, and Xenia, Ohio, "off the map". It was a day that spawned several F5 tornadoes across the country. They called it a "generational" tornado event. Well, apparently, "generational" is equal to about forty years.

What we all witnessed on Wednesday is not normal. Thankfully, it is NOT something that we have to get used to (I don't think). Atmospheric conditions made Wednesday the absolutely perfect day for what we saw. Forecasters knew it was going to happen days in advance. I first heard about the forecast on Saturday. Even though the storms eventually took hundreds of lives, if not for the advance warnings we had, I'm sure it could have been higher.

Here in Hamilton County, we were pretty fortunate - for the most part. The folks in Apison wouldn't agree. The extreme southeastern portion of the county was hit by an EF-4. At work today, my coworkers went out to photograph the devastation. What the pictures show, they said, is nowhere near an accurate description of the true story. If you've seen the images of Tuscaloosa... then you know what Apison looks like, albeit on a much smaller schedule. There were houses in the pictures that are just completely... gone. A pickup truck was sitting beside a railroad track, its wheels nowhere in sight and no good explanation for where it came from. Just unbelievable destruction.

My heart goes out to all the people affected by this, and there are many. I love Tuscaloosa - anybody reading this probably knows that. While I never made it to the University, I still feel a connection to that city. To know that it was hit by what may soon be declared as THE most devastating tornado to EVER hit the US... that's just hard to fathom. It's a cruel reality of how bad the day was. It's not something that those of us who lived through it will soon forget. I just read a book a few months ago, entitled F5, that was about April 3 and the damage it brought on Limestone County, AL (Athens). I wouldn't be surprised if I'll soon be reading the sequel, unfortunately set in Tuscaloosa County.

I'll leave you with this image. This is satellite photography that you can actually see tornado tracks on. You can see them from space! Absolutely the most efficient tools of destruction the earth has ever seen.

Tornado tracks across central Alabama - http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/severe-storms-20110429.html

New York City Dreamin'... Doesn't Have the Same Ring

I haven't written a blog post in months. This will probably seem like a crazy post to come back to. But oh well, my life has been a little topsy-turvy lately anyway. This post is about a dream that I had last night. I'm used to having crazy dreams, but this one struck me as different for some reason.

The setting is New York City, and it's apparently September 11, 2001. Note that date... I'm sure you already have. I'm on the streets of Lower Manhattan, suspiciously close to the World Trade Center towers. I think it starts with me, early in the morning, hanging around outside a coffee shop. I see people going to work, with their Starbucks in hand. Then I wander into a subway, and there is the first peculiarity - I see former WCW/WWE wrestler Dean Malenko, the "Man of 1,000 Holds". Yeah... I haven't thought about Dean Malenko in yeeeeears. So that would be weird enough. I think I may have asked Dean something about when he'll resume his wrestling career. Either way, I know that we greeted each other like old friends.

Next, I am in some kind of store, looking at, I believe, touristy-type merchandise. The store owner seeme to be this hippie woman, with red hair in braids, but she was very friendly. I walk back outside, and that's when I look up to see one of the two planes (I'm not sure which one) striking one of the World Trade Center towers. It seems like it may have been the second plane, but oddly, I had not even reacted to the first one if I knew it had hit. Either way, I do remember feeling very shaken by this (duh).

I'm not sure what happened in between, but next I am listening to a man giving a speech outside the store I mentioned above. It was apparently about terrorism and what our response should be to this tragedy. That's when I look up, and see that the building is starting to collapse. Naturally, I'm terrified. I duck into the store again, trying to outrun the now wave of smoke and debris making it's way from the tower down the street in front of me. It grows dark as night in the store and people are screaming. All of a sudden, instead of being in the store, I'm in some sort of SUV with my now ex-fiance, Amanda. We are trying to outrun the still-charging cloud, but there's only one problem... the SUV will apparently only go in reverse. I'm looking out the back window as we continue down a hill, and I see a park with a lake. For some reason... we apparently cannot turn OR stop the vehicle either. Sure enough, we continue on, and crash into the middle of said lake.

I think this is where the dream ends, sort of anti-climatically. If there was more, it was the kind of situation where I had forgotten it by the time I woke up. That always frustrates me actually. I have a strange dream in the middle of the night, wake up, fall back asleep, and then have ANOTHER dream that causes me to forget much of the first one. The dream I described here was striking enough that I woke up in the middle of the night and almost wrote down these thoughts. But, it was also important enough that I am able to remember details twelve hours later (though probably not all details). It involved such an important event in our lives, that I think it really struck a nerve.

Very strange, and not a type of dream I would like to have again, any time soon.