I recently had some car problems, but I had to travel from my town of Webster to Oxford, the town next to it. (Oxford's where I grew up.) It was raining very lightly on the morning of the fourth, so I grabbed an umbrella and left the house around 9:30 a.m. I stopped at an ATM, withdrew $20, and then walked to 7-Eleven to break the twenty for bus fare.
The bus pulled up right as I left the store. (The bus stop is about 50-60 feet from 7-Eleven.) I boarded the bus, and the driver said "How are you?" "Wet!" I replied, "Despite the umbrella!" She said "There's a tornado warning." I said "That's all we need."
I sat down near the front of the bus. Two more people got on. One of them strapped a bicycle to the rack on the front of the bus.
Suddenly, the wind increased tremendously. So did the rain. The bus was rocking back and forth.
A large tree next to the area where people stand or sit to wait for the bus snapped in half like a matchstick.
A very old photo of the corner of Davis Street and Main Street in Webster. That big tree was
the first one to fall. That concrete pillar in the middle of the photo is where the bus was parked.
Right after that, a second tree broke and fell. Luckily, the wind pushed the trees away from us, toward the railroad tracks and 7-Eleven, and not toward us. Two trees landed partially on the tracks, but not even in 7-Eleven's parking lot.
One of the passengers said she could see the actual tornado, but the direction in which I was seated didn't allow me to see it. The driver was freaking out a bit, and someone said a little girl in the back of the bus was, too.
My friend John texted me at around 10 a.m. to tell me there was a tornado warning in effect for Webster. I replied "I'm in it." And if I could have texted "in" in italics, I would have!
I just looked at all the huge windows in the bus and thought, Well, we're f***ed, but I was wrong. The three-story brick building on the other side of the street the bus was parked on shielded us from the brunt of the storm.
I didn't even have time to get nervous. The whole thing was over in a couple of minutes. Not far from us, within our line of vision, a couple of buildings had sustained some extensive damage.
The Mobil station across from 7-Eleven lost its roof (shown below), as did a dance studio a few hundred feet further down the road (not shown below).
The town razed two buildings in record time. They were gone well before midnight. (The two broken trees at the bus stop are also gone.)
And hey, remember the Friendly's Restaurant I showed y'all in my "Keeping It Short" post a few days ago? Well, the sign at the entrance to that little plaza currently looks like this:
And by the way... When the bus finally left the bus stop, the bicycle was still strapped to the front!
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P.S. ~~ I want to give a shout-out to someone I've mentioned on this blog before, namely the rhyming guy named Pat Hatt -- and yes, that's his real name -- the author of the It's Rhyme Time blog, as well as plenty of books! Recently (last Wednesday) Pat did a post called "A Silver Showing As The Whoopdis Keep Growing!" This is part of a month-long series where Pat is basing posts on various comments he's received on his blog over the years. Each day he devotes an entire post to a different follower of his blog, and Wednesday, it was my turn! So check it out, including the comments below it. Lots of nice comments about Yours Truly and my own skewed slant on things.
Thanks for your time.
