As I begin typing this the wind gusts are still tearing at our tall pines and sweet gums and I feel the house tremble on its foundation.  The storm started about 5:30 this morning with steadier angrier winds that bombarded our house with a relentless deluge of rain and hail.  Lightning strobes and rumbling thunder broadened the martial effect.

There was a time when I loved this sort of thing.  Storms were exciting.  The magnitude of their fury distracted me from ordinary worries.  I knew storms were dangerous, but only to others.   The tornado of March 9, 1998, changed my perspective.  It should have been the tornado of summer 1976 that ripped the callow from me as it forced me and my friend to cling to our tent when a sudden night wind fought to convert it into a kite with us as the tail.

We were camping on the Loretta Lynn Ranch at Hurricane Mills, Tenn., a laughable irony that we in fact did laugh at next morning when we discovered one of the causes of the cacophony of crashing around us was the full-length trunk of an adult loblolly pine resting horizontally within six feet of us.  Several of its branches across our Army pup tent had died still grasping at our center pole.  Upon reflection, perhaps those branches helped us stay grounded in the maelstrom.  On our way out of the park, the guard at the gate assured us we'd been in a tornado.

"It's that time of year.  We get 'em."  He informed us the twister had done some damage to a couple of outbuildings on the ranch but, so far as he knew, nobody was hurt.

Adventure, but no post traumatic stressmaker. 

This was to come nearly 22 years later.  I was a news reporter then, and here's some of what I wrote for the paper later that day:

My wife, Angela, was already in survival mode by the time I was awake enough to know the night was still black and the wind was worse than anything I'd ever experienced. [I'd forgotten Hurricane Mills when writing this.]

It was a deep, intense, swelling surge pushing against the house, the kind that comes in gusts during storms.  But this didn't let up.  It grew stronger and louder.  Our wood-frame bungalow was shaking.  I had a sudden notion that if the wind didn't quit our home would blow to pieces.

"Oh,  Sarah," Angela said, sitting up abruptly.  She jumped out of bed and ran to our youngest child in a nearby room.  I got up, too, not thinking clearly but feeling less helpless on my feet.

I stumbled into the next room and peered out a couple of windows.  The constantly flashing lightning gave me glimpses of our yard, where nothing looked obviously amiss - no trees down, no debris swirling by.  But the wind still pounded our house.

Gathering information for my story later that morning, I learned that indeed a small tornado had brushed our house on its howling track from where it touched down at the edge of the river about a block away to a small bay two miles northeast.   It lifted an unoccupied house trailer across the road from us and hurled it straight at our house.  Had it not been stopped by a chain-link fence near the road, the trailer would flown into the front of our small house, where Angela and I slept.  The tornado snapped off  tree tops and damaged a couple of outbuildings along its path.  Once again, no one was physically injured.  

I interviewed probably the only person to see the tornado.  William Jenkins was up early for his job on the water harvesting crabs.  He heard an explosion and ran to a window in time to see what looked like a giant white pillow drifting across the road toward his house.  It slipped between his house and his brother's trailer.

"It was lifting up then.  It took some shingles off our roof and the metal roof from a shed in back, and that was it," he said.

Back to now, the wind gusts have ceased.  It's almost too quiet.  Unfriendly gray clouds still blanket the sky.  The National Weather Service has lifted our tornado watch, but I'm not comfortable.