I think of Park City as home. But last week, I was on a road trip Home to Rochester, New York.
It’s a long drive. Something like 1,964 miles and change. Google Maps says it’s 29 hours. I can’t drive 55, but I also can’t drive much more than eight hours a day, so I chunk it up into four days and three overnight towns. Park City to Cheyenne. Cheyenne to Des Moines. Des Moines to Toledo. Toledo to Rochester.
It was just me and my ride-or-die, Riley BB King, a small-but-mighty cairn terrier. I love the rhythm of the open road. The freedom of being on a journey and not knowing exactly what will happen along the way. I can zone out and listen to podcasts and my road trip playlist. Songs that make me remember things I wish I could forget. Focus on the open road and look ahead, always ahead.
I hope you’re staying ahead of the tornadoes, one of my friends texted. What tornadoes, I thought. Sure, the sky was dark as the inside of an old boot as I left Cheyenne on the second day. As I cruised across the Nebraska plains, clouds continued to convene overhead, thick and black. It was so windy, I had to keep my hands at 10 and 2 to hold my VW Sportwagen steady. My windshield wipers barely kept up with huge plops of rain. But I never saw an actual twister.
It was around dinner time when I pulled into the Econolodge parking lot just across from the fairgrounds in West Des Moines, Iowa. The room was a little more “econo” than I’d imagined. I briefly considered sleeping in my car. I decided I’d get to bed early and hit the road first thing. I took Riley outside to pee.
As we were circling the hotel, I heard a strange noise, kind of like a low wail. Some kind of siren, but not like an ambulance. I changed direction but it was all around me. I walked quickly toward the hotel entrance. A young woman with a neck tattoo and an older man with thinning blonde hair and horn-rimmed spectacles were standing outside looking at the sky.
“What is that noise?” I asked.
“Tornado siren!” replied the older guy a little too enthusiastically, I thought. I think his name was Larry. They were both wearing red shirts with the Econolodge logo, so I figured it was legit.
Riley and I followed them into the lobby. The TV hanging over the front desk was tuned to the local weather channel.
“See those rectangles?” said Larry, gesturing to the weather map on the screen. “Those are all tornadoes.”
I looked at the graphic that accompanied the rectangles. Eleven minutes. Ten minutes. Six minutes. The storm was bearing down.
“What should I do?” I asked trying to sound calm.
The man looked over his spectacles at me and said matter of factly, “Well, you can do whatever you want.”
I was like, “No, see, this is my first tornado. I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do.” For once in my life, I was desperate for mansplaining.
“Well, if I were you, I’d get a blanket, in case there’s flying glass, and get in the bathtub or a stairwell,” he said, pausing to look down at Riley, who was panting nervously. “And make sure you take Toto with you.”
The siren was still going off when I got up to my room on the second floor. I grabbed the comforter off the bed and headed back down to the stairwell on the first floor. There were two women already sitting there under the stairs. “Would you like a chair?” they asked.
It turned out they were Wendy and Sarah, two jewelry designers from Nebraska, in town for a show. Wendy showed me a picture on her phone that her husband had taken that afternoon when twisters ripped through Omaha and Lincoln — towns I’d driven through just hours earlier. It was a picture of a full-on tornado rolling down the street. They said the highest category tornado had uplifted cars, destroyed neighborhoods and even derailed a train. EF5, for extremely effing dangerous.
Wendy held up her phone again to show us the weather map.
“See that purple blob in the middle?” she asked. “That’s the debris cloud.” I thought of the scene from “The Wizard of Oz” when Dorothy’s house gets caught up in the twister along with trees, chickens, cows and the Wicked Witch on her broom. Clearly, this wasn’t Wendy or Sarah’s first rodeo. If they were chill, I would be chill, too. Fake it till you make it.
Riley was panting and looking at me intently. When I looked into his eyes, I knew that he knew exactly what was going on. I looked down at my red clogs and wondered what would happen if I clicked three times.
Just then, Larry briefly stuck his head through the door and exclaimed, “It’s almost here!” The dude was like a first-time father in the labor-and-delivery room.
“We heard he’s a storm chaser,” Sarah said, rolling her eyes.
Wendy held up her phone again. “It’s going right over us, right now,” she said calmly. The entire screen was red as the tornado passed over West Des Moines. I later found out it had touched ground about a mile away, destroying homes in a neighborhood. But it spared me and Riley and Larry and neck-tattoo clerk and my new BFFs huddled under the stairs of the Econolodge.
Suddenly, it was quiet. The sirens had stopped. I was definitely not in Kansas. And I was still miles from Rochester. But in that moment, sitting in the stairwell in my ruby clogs, wrapped up in a quilt with my best boi Riley, I truly felt I was home.