and it goes away from you down the road: and you understand that
you’re not going to see where they get to or what they’re headed for,
even as those two big words arrive on the screen to tell you so.
RECESSIONAL
It was the fiercest tornado ever recorded in Oklahoma history, which
made it remarkable in all the history of weather, because the torna-
does of Oklahoma are themselves top of the standings in almost any
year. It didn’t touch down long or go far, but what it touched it
turned to flinders and waste, and left nothing standing.
Up north where it began Muriel Gunderson was on duty at the
weather station at Little Tom Field, and took the astonishing readings
sent in by the radiosonde equipment that she’d sent aloft attached to its
balloon. Not that you couldn’t already tell that something big was
going to roll over the prairie within the next twelve hours or so: back
on the farm the horses would be biting one another and the windmill
vanes trembling in the dead air as though ready to start flailing as soon
as they perceived the front.
The radiosonde was a blessing most ways. A little packet of radio
instruments, no bigger than a shoe box, that could measure wind
speed, air pressure, humidity, and temperature as a function of height,
and send it all back to the radio receivers in the shack. No more follow-
ing the ascent of the balloon with the theodolite—the instruments
knew where they were, and kept transmitting no matter how far above
the cloud cover they went. Women around the country were putting
these little packages on balloons, sending them up, and then (the draw-
382 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
back) recovering them after they’d fallen to earth on their little para-
chutes. There were instructions on the container for anyone who found
it about how to mail it back, but in the daytime you just went out in the
direction of the wind and looked for it.
Muriel was damp everywhere her clothes bunched. Tootie lay under
the porch as still as though dead, except for his panting tongue. Muriel
began taking down the readings that were coming in from the instru-
ments. She’d had to have training in all of it, RAOB or radio observa-
tion, the Thermistor and the Hygristor, like twin giants in a fairy tale;
it still made her nervous always that she hadn’t got it right.
Well this number sure didn’t seem right. It didn’t seem that baro-
metric pressure could get that low. Radiosonde equipment was myste-
rious: in the old method you knew you could get it wrong, and how
you’d be likely to get it wrong, but now it was as though only the
machine could know if it was wrong, and it wasn’t telling.
Maybe she’d set the baroswitch incorrectly before she let it go.
Well who knows. Better to trust the reading than to guess, she
guessed.
She went to the Teletype and began typing up the readings. The
Teletype was new too, her words and numbers transmitted to other
machines elsewhere that typed them at the same time she did. When
Muriel got to the baro pressure number she put it in, and the time and
height, and then put in a new line:
This is the number, folks, no joke.
Down under the porch, Tootie lifted her head, as though catching a
smell, and ceased to pant.
The twister itself didn’t touch down near that airfield, and Ponca City
itself was largely spared too, a fact that would be remarked on in the
churches the following day—the fine houses and old trees, the Poncan,
the Civic Center, they all stood and still stand, the high school and the
library. But out along Bodark Creek and to the west it churned the
earth and the blackjack oaks and the works of man in its funnel like
the fruits and berries tossed into a Waring blender. Those little houses,
F O U R F R E E D O M S / 383
A Street to Z Street, Pancho’s, Sal’s, Connie’s, never firmly attached to
the earth in the first place, were lifted up from their slabs and stirred
unresisting into the air, block after block, with all their tar paper, bath-
tubs, bicycles, beds, tables, fretwork-framed proverbs ( Home Sweet
Home), Navajo blankets, Kit-Kat clocks with wagging tails, pictures of
Jesus, potted cacti, knives, forks, and spoons, odds and ends.
It was bad, it was devastating, but it was one of those disasters that
manage to inflict wondrous destruction without really harming anyone
much. For in all of Henryville blown away that afternoon there was
not a single—the word had by then changed from a colorless technical
term to one that came into our mouths, some of our mouths, at the
worst moments of our lives—not a single casualty. A beloved dog; a
caged bird; some miraculous escapes beneath beds or sturdy tables.
The reason was not Providence, though, really, or even wonderful luck;
it was that there was almost no one in Henryville that day.
That day—it was the greatest in Horse Offen’s career, the defin-
ing act of it anyway and certainly productive of an image that would
remain before memory’s eye—that day was the day the last rivets
were banged into the five hundredth Pax bomber to be turned out at
Van Damme Aero Ponca City, and Horse had persuaded Manage-
ment (his memo passing upward right to the broad bare desk of
Henry Van Damme) that every single person at the plant, from
sweepers to lunchroom ladies to engineers to managers, ought to be
brought onto the floor for one vast picture of the plane and them-
selves: a portrait of the greatest team and the greatest plane in the
greatest war of all time. Everybody’d get a two-dollar bonus for
showing up off-shift.
So we came and crowded in together, complaining—the heat, the
closeness, the air like a fusty blanket, the spirit dejected, the mind dull.
Under the shadow of those wings we sheltered, though of course not all
of us were responsible for its coming into being, some of the smilers in
the back having just been hired and many of those who had indeed
riveted the dural and calibrated the instruments and hooked up the
wiring already gone, dispersed, headed home. Anyway the picture—we
nearly rebelled before the huge banquet camera could be focused and
fired, Horse with bullhorn mother-henning us ceaselessly—the picture
is that one you still see. Connie is in front, beside Rollo Stallworthy,
384 / J O H N C R O W L E Y
and some of the other Teenie Weenies are scattered here and there; you
can find their faces if you knew them.
Then as we stood there, about to break up, the twister came on,
prefigured by the deep nameless dread induced in humans by a precipi-
tous fall in barometric pressure, and then by weird airs whipping
around in the great space and even rocking the ship we stood around,
as though it shuddered. The windows darkened. Soon we could hear it,
distant sound of a devouring maw, we didn’t know that it had already
eaten our houses and their carports, but the Oklahomans and others
among us who knew the signs announced now what it was. As it bore
down on us, the buildings all around were pressed on, the dormitories,
the Community Center, and we heard them shattering and flinging
their parts away to clang against the roofs and windows of ours, and
there might have been a panic if it hadn’t been clear to everyone that
we were already in the one place we would have run to. We were
warned to stay away from the windows, and we milled a little, but
there wasn’t much room, and we hardly even spoke or made a sound