The Tornado Master

I grew up in a city called Dublin, a suburb of Columbus, Ohio. If there is one remarkable thing about the topography of Ohio, it is precisely how unremarkable it is. I now live in the Pacific Northwest, and whenever I look out the window as I fly out from Seattle–Tacoma International Airport, I always stare for several minutes at the gorgeous diversity of geographic features, from the expansive Lake Washington to the countless inlets of the Puget Sound, from the Olympic Mountains to of course the towering peak of Mount Rainier. After dozing off for four hours, I arrive back in my home state of Ohio, look out the window and see... flatness. It is like the surface of a marble. No mountains, no lakes, no big forests. Just a seemingly endless array of alternating farmland and tiny woods, with the occasional town or village. If I am lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Columbus from 20,000 feet, I could probably count the number of tall skyscrapers on my hands.

One unfortunate consequence of the flatness of the land is in the frequency of severe weather. I have lived on the West Coast on-and-off for about five years now (three years in college—I spent my fourth year at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic—and two years in Seattle), and in that entire time, I could probably count on one hand the amount of times I've seen lightning or heard thunder. Back home, during the spring and fall, it seemed every week had at least one thunderstorm roll through. When rotating winds and low pressure areas combine and meet flat land, some of these thunderstorms become severe enough to produce tornadoes. Every year, there would be at least one incident where the emergency warning sirens would start howling, often in the middle of the night, and everyone in the county would be encouraged to move to a windowless room on the bottom-most floor of their building, such as the basement. One time in middle school, I remember that we had to stay in school for about half-an-hour after school was supposed to end because of an active tornado warning. We would regularly conduct tornado drills in which we would move to an interior location in the school far from window glass.

The city of Dublin would test the emergency warning system every Wednesday at noon, as long as the weather was decent. It would consist of an often unintelligible announcement: "This is a test of the Dublin emergency warning system. This is only a test." This was then followed by one short burst of the siren, starting at a low pitch, rising to a higher pitch, and then coming back down before stopping. Finally, the same unintelligible speaker would announce: "This was a test of the Dublin emergency warning system. This was only a test." They would usually skip this test if the weather was truly bad; I don't know the exact standards, but I would guess that they skip it if it was raining at all. Definitely they would skip the test if it was actually storming that day.

One Wednesday when I was in elementary school—this had to have been around 2006, when I was 7 or 8 years old—my friend Jackson and I were playing at recess, and it was cloudy. The sky was overcast, but it was not raining. I have no idea what the context was of this role-play was, but I remember distinctly that I raised my arms over my head, made claws with my hands, and screamed to Jackson: "I AM THE TORNADO MASTER! YOU WILL ALL DIE!" Precisely at that very moment, the emergency warning siren went off for the weekly noon test. It was a total coincidence. I had no idea that it was noon at Wednesday.

The look on both of our faces is one I will never forget.