Mid-June 2025.  Interstate 80 in Nebraska and Iowa

As we roll down the highway, the ceiling is low and very dark for 9:00 in the morning.  The Nebraska cornfields around us soak up the rain.  Eighty-five degrees here yesterday, but much cooler today.  Everything is green, green, green. And so very neat—the verges are carefully manicured.  In fact, we passed a big mowing machine operating in the center median in the midst of the deluge.  Good thing the operator was in an enclosed cab.

 

We are out of the rain now and into the sun, but rain clouds are building again to the southwest.  Yesterday evening in Iowa the clouds were quite alarming.  I watched the clouds for any sign of a tornado while Dave kept us on the road trying to outdistance the storm.  This was around Davenport, Iowa.  Last time we came through here, going East that time, it was also evening and stormy.  We stopped at an Italian restaurant.  Sitting in a booth by a window, I had a good view of the storm activity.  It was raining hard and the treetops were whipping back and forth.  At one point, all over the restaurant, phones blared the emergency signal.  The message was “Tornado sighted, take cover now.”  No one seemed concerned, most didn’t even look at their phone.  Sitting right beside a big plate glass window, I was concerned!  Our food had just come to the table, so I kept an eye on the trees.  I figured that as long as they kept whipping around, we were ok.  But if it suddenly got still, I would consider sheltering in the bathroom.  Of course, it eventually did get VERY STILL, but we kept eating.  I learned later that the rotation of a forming tornado had been spotted, but it never descended or touched down.

 

I have a lot of childhood experience of  following tornado watches on the TV or radio/or sheltering from tornado activity.  I lived in a big city (Wichita, Kansas), so you could not truly see the horizons.  We relied instead on the siren warning system to know when conditions were dangerous.  One evening we had just sat down to dinner at home when the sirens began to blow.  We lived in a house without a basement or a tornado shelter.  Dad cleaned office buildings as a second job, and one of those buildings had a full basement.  Mom and I wanted to jump in the car and rush over there right then, but Dad wanted to eat his dinner.  So we all ate dinner (not calmly), and by the time we were finished, the “all clear” signal had sounded.

 

The warning sirens were not fool-proof, though.  I remember as a teenager that one Friday night a tornado demolished several homes in an area of town where some of my classmates lived.  Because the tornado had formed directly overhead in that neighborhood, the sirens had not activated.  No one was injured, though.  Being a Friday evening, many people were out to dinner or other activities, and in one home the family was safely in the basement Rec room watching TV when the twister hit.