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Kathleen and I spent the month of August 1971 in northern Ontario, camping in the big sticks. On the way home we stopped overnight in Sudbury--not a pretty sight, really, after the great Canadian wilderness. Some sunshine might have helped.
We continued westward the following morning, driving into an increasingly threatening overcast, taking breakfast in a small town near Sudbury, prophetically called...Lively. We'd put only a mile or two behind us after breakfast when the farthest-North tornado ever to hit Canada roared out of the gloom and wiped us out.
It began as wind and driving rain, so fierce that I soon had to pull off the road. Rain was actually blowing in through the closed driver's side window at the cracks, and then gravel began pelting the window, so I grabbed a pillow to press against it for protection. The instant I got the pillow there, the window exploded.
I urged Kathy into the tiny space beneath the VW Bug dashboard; it seemed the strongest place structurally, the safest place to be. Laying face down on the passenger seat, I realized I'd have to do the righteous thing and squeeze my body in there as well, on top of her's, for her protection. Somehow we both fit into the tiny space.
At that very point the wind lifted the car from its wheels and sent it tumbling in slow-motion, off the road, down into and along a ditch. Kathy and I could only hang on for dear life, thinking our panicked private thoughts and preparing for the worst as we assessed our weird situation with each tumble. The car did perhaps a dozen revolutions; it could have been more, or less. Time became the only possible escape from that nightmare.
I'll always remember my sober state of mind as we rolled along, as close to death and serious injury as I've ever been. It was necessarily one of acceptance: first, of a force of nature far stronger than anything I'd ever encountered; I had to accept its obvious supremacy. And then, because of my head's proximity to the underside of the dashboard, that it might be crushed at any moment. A strange thought to have to accept, I might add.
I also worried that my jumbling body might hurt Kathy's. She later told me that what she feared was that she would drown in the rainwater that collected on the floor, held in place by centrifugal force.
We finally came to rest, oddly enough, alongside the road. We'd been rolled back out of the ditch. And we were wheels down. The roof was caved in and the doors unopenable, but a space was left above the seat backs large enough to squeeze through, so we crawled out the missing rear window, both our faces covered with blood from scalp lacerations.
We were, at that point, in the quiet eye of the tornado. There was more to come.
A school bus filled with adults was parked nearby, into which Kathy and I were kindly hustled by passengers who had watched us being tumbled along. My back had been whacked; I was stiff as a board, so they gently stretched me out on a bus seat. Kathy had no apparent injuries, but for cuts and abrasions, so she watched the panorama of strangeness happening out the window as the other side of the twister struck with a deafening howl. I fearfully expected the bus to start rolling, but with the weight of its passengers it held its ground.
We were situated almost directly beneath the International Nickel Company's over-the-road trestle, connecting one side of the enormous facility with the other. Before everyone's astonished eyes, the huge, webbed-steel trestle crashed to the ground, part of it landing on a stretch of railroad track upon which moved a mining company locomotive. As it struck the fallen trestle the huge diesel careened off the track and onto its side. Not a sound of this could be heard above the screeching wind. Kathy said it was like watching a silent movie.
Eventually, the wind died down, the worst of it was past, and Kathy and I were helped off the bus and into an empty building nearby. Someone had summoned a mercy vehicle to take us to the hospital.
The driver told us we'd be traveling a route rarely seen by tourists, a back road through the area where the first moonwalks were rehearsed. The main smokestack of the nickel company had been depositing toxic fumes onto the green countryside for so long that nothing was left of it but barren, rocky moonscape. Ideal for moonwalk preparation.
At the hospital, we learned that a workman had been up on that very smokestack, swinging in the breeze, when the twister hit. The company was adding thirty feet of elevation to the stack so the fumes would travel a bit farther before hitting the ground...a bizarre example of corporate ecological awareness. As I recall, that workman was killed.
We learned also that a work shed with four men inside had been blown from the top of a nearby hill, arriving at the bottom with three corpses inside. The one who escaped death is the one who told us of the horrific adventure.
One corner of the hospital's roof was missing, but things were in full swing on every floor. Four doctors looked after me for the next few days, in a confused and disorganized setting, trying to decide whether or not my neck was broken. It was not. I could have told them it wasn't if anyone had asked me. But, anyway, I appreciated the medical attention.
Kathy was released on the second day, having suffered only cuts and bruises. I earned a bad back in that tornado, with two fractured vertebrae that have haunted me since. I was finally released with some aspirins and bandages and the advice to see my family doctor. Before we left the hospital, Kathy and I were interviewed by the Toronto Star newspaper. I still have the clipping, and my hospital wrist band.
Kathy had been staying at a local motel, awaiting my discharge. Her father drove one of the family cars over from Detroit for us to use. His job summoned, and Kathy and I were up to the drive, so her father returned home by air. He later told us that a stranger at the Windsor, Ontario airport, with whom he spoke of the tornado, asked, "You mean the people in the green Volkswagen?" We had heard the same question a couple of times at the hospital as well. We were "small world" celebrities.
Kathy and I drove out to the site of the big blow and found my car where we'd left it. In its presence, I felt the presence of the tornado again. I don't understand why the back side of it didn't blow the car away. Maybe it was retrieved by a clean-up crew and left where we found it.
My eyeglasses had been lost in the wild ride. I decided to look for them in the muddy surroundings so I could help Kathy drive home. It seemed a hopeless search, but a quarter of a mile down the road I actually found them, intact and usable, sticking straight up out of the mud in the ditch. A heavy metal pan I'd brought (for panning gold) was also found nearby, bent fully in half.
We towed the VW home. It remained parked in the garage for two years, until I moved from there, first selling the car's still usable engine to a friend. During those years I'd occasionally stick my head through the mashed, broken window for a whiff of the distinctive smell deposited there forever by the experience: the smell of mud and gravel and twisted steel, the very same smell that was there at the end of our wild ride.
And I'd look with great interest at the blue paint smudge on the roof, where we were told some poor soul in a blue van had come soaring through the air to bounce off my roof and eventually land in the morgue. We had seen nothing, felt nothing, nor heard nothing but the tornado's roar.
For a dozen years or more my hair would stand on end at the sound of thunderclaps, at the sight of a threatening sky, or even if the rain fell too hard. Living through such an experience is a valuable thing, in retrospect, but I can't say I necessarily recommend it.
My bad back has been worth it. Knowing that I may have helped preserve intact and healthy one of the most beautiful people who has ever lived has made it worthwhile. Maybe that's why I was put on earth; that's how beautiful and important a soul she is.
