We recently watched a movie called Hero (1992), a tale of a swindler named Bernie LaPlante (Dustin Hoffman) who, ignoring the risk to his own safety, rescues a bunch of passengers from a burning airplane that has just crashed in a field.
“I think I’d do the same thing in that situation,” I said to Tara afterward, confident that I would be able to push aside any fear and summon the inner strength to nobly risk my own life when faced with a threat.
Sadly, any illusions that I would act heroically in the face of danger were squashed Thursday evening, when out of the blue – quite literally, as the sun had been shining brightly an hour earlier – an otherwise peaceful evening was interrupted by blaring alerts on our phones. I figured it was an Amber Alert or something, and was actually shocked when I saw the message.
“OK”? Definitely not ok!
They’d been forecasting a chance of thunderstorms for our area, and in fact, Tara had just moved her pickup into the garage as a few pulses of lightning flickered to the west. But tornados? In February?? That had never happened in Wisconsin before.
I was mostly okay until we stepped out onto the deck and heard the tornado sirens. At that point, I did what anyone under those circumstances would do: made peace with the fact that I was about to die.
“We’ve had a great life together,” I told Tara, grasping her shoulders with trembling hands and giving her a peck on the cheek. “Catch you on the flip side!”
The flip side being…what? The afterworld, I guess, if such a thing even exists.
What can I say? I never met a melodrama that didn’t appeal to me. Tara, to her credit, was the calm, cool, and collected yin to my yang that night. She was the Bernie LaPlante we needed. “Here’s our plan,” she said, taking charge of the situation while I paced fretfully, hoping my children would share heartfelt words during my impending eulogy. “If the sirens go off again, we put on our shoes, grab the cats, and take shelter in the basement bathroom.”
The shoes were necessary, she said, in case we had to walk through debris after the tornado ripped our house to shreds. Never mind the fact that she might have ended up hobbling around with a sock and shoe on one foot while the other was bare because of her crazy sock-shoe-sock-shoe thing. Good luck dodging broken glass and shards of twisted metal that way, baby!
Wisely, I refrained from saying as much in the heat of the moment.
After a fairly nerve-wracking 30 minutes or so, we were in the clear. Luckily, the tornado dissipated right around the time it reached our town. There was a crazy amount of thunder, lightning, and hail, but we did not end up blown to Oz.
We were right to be nervous, though.
I didn’t take these photos; they’re courtesy of the Associated Press and the National Weather Service-Milwaukee. Thankfully there were no deaths or injuries, but there was quite a bit of property damage in parts of Jefferson and Rock Counties. The tornado was rated an EF2 on the Enhanced Fujita Scale (0-5), so pretty decent. The yellow line shows the path; for reference, we are just northeast of Lake Koshkonong. Had it stayed on the ground just a little bit longer, it could conceivably have passed right over our property. I think my borderline panic was at least a little bit justified!
So, not only did Wisconsin end up with its first-ever February tornado, but such events are becoming more common thanks to everyone’s least-favorite party crasher, climate change. Just the fact that we went from 18″ of snow and subzero temperatures a few weeks earlier to record warmth, severe thunderstorms, and tornados in the middle of winter tells you all you need to know about that.
No such weather excitement this weekend. In fact, there wasn’t a cloud in the sky on Saturday. Not that we’d know, as we were mostly indoors. We spent a couple of hours at the PBS Wisconsin Garden & Landscape Expo at the Alliant Energy Center in Madison, where my wife geeked out over seeds. As she does.
My reward for tolerating all this? Lunch and a couple of cocktails at Prost! MSN after. We sat at the bar, as we like to do, and struck up a great conversation with the affable bartender, chatting about everything from music to…well, more music. Fine, the convo was a bit one-dimensional, but he’s a Built to Spill fan like we are, so it was an enthusiastic discussion. And when he handed us our tab, he only charged us for the first round of drinks. Suffice it to say, he got a nice, fat tip.
“We need to befriend our bartenders more often!” I declared on the way out. And that, my friends, is a life lesson you should embrace as well.
Not a fan of either team, but c’mon, 49ers. Mahomes needs to be brought down a peg.
Mark My Words 
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