When the storm chases YOU!
Buckle up, and put on your storm chasing helmets, because we are traveling back to the ancient era of the late 90s/early 2000s.
For any modern readers used to smartphones:
I need you to pause and imagine a world with zero live radar apps. No Google Maps. If you were lucky, you had a thick paper packet of directions printed out from MapQuest before you left the house. If you missed a single exit or got detoured, you were just lost and asked locals for directions at a gas station.
You did not have a weather app pushing urgent alerts to your screen. There was not a universal text alert system yet.
My mom decided we needed a fun Great Lakes summer vacation, so we drove up to Wisconsin to visit her friend. The trip up? Immaculate. The vacation? Lovely. We even secured the ultimate prize for the ride home: a massive wheel of authentic Wisconsin cheese. The brightest orange yellow color, with a white rind. I was so excited to eat that cheese when we got home. First we had to get home.
Part I: The Barf Green Sky and a…Pillow?
[ ] We left Wisconsin early in the morning, the goal wasn’t to go home, yet. The trip up was 2 days, so we planned the trip home to be 2 days. Our hotel room for the night is pre booked a hotel over the phone, somewhere in Kentucky. Not long after being on the road, my mom looks at the sky, and just goes, “…Huh. Looks like bad weather.”
Since she’s driving, she tossed me (in the backseat) her Nokia Cell Phone and said “Deadname, call Grandma back in Tennessee, ask her to check the weather for us.” I dial the number from memory. Grandma answers, we ask for a weather update, and she asks for our location. I tell her where we are (somewhere right before Paw Paw, Illinois).
Grandma instantly goes into panic mode: “Oh shit, you guys. You are smack in the middle of a red zone. I don’t mean a small one, it’s huge, it’s several states wide. Even if you turned around, you’d still be in it. You’re going to have to try to get ahead of it.”
No speaker phone, so I translate to mom. She tosses a pillow at me, and tells me to keep it close.
“If I tell you to put it over your head, you do it instantly. No arguing.”
As we hauled asphalt down the highway, we would occasionally ring up Grandma for crumb sized updates. The sky kept bruising, getting darker and darker, until it eventually shifted into a vibrant, near neon vile green. I was the one who noticed it first, staring out the rear window from my pillow fort in the backseat.
I said “Mommy I know red skies at night are a sailor’s delight and mean Daddy is safe in the navy because he will have fantastic weather that day. I know super light gray is just wet, and fluffy is snow, and scary dark is the big thunderstorms. You told me yellow is hail. But Mommy, what does a green sky mean? It looks like the sky threw up!”
My mom gasped, an actual physical intake of pure dread, and right on cue the air raid sirens started screaming. I swear it could’ve been a scene from “Twister”.
Let me clear something up before the next segment: the American education system had absolutely nothing to do with my survival. I did not learn severe weather safety from some school video or a duck and cover drill on a gym floor. I knew my atmospheric conditions entirely because my mom was a rogue amateur storm chaser with the need to teach everyone *everything*. Luckily, that information has saved my life numerous times. Weather awareness is preparedness. So despite everything, thank for being a chaotic storm chaser mom.
Now, back then, in car on a highway, when the skies turn green, those sirens were the universal signal to get the hell off the road. And the only signal to get the hell off the road.
Mom yanked the car off at the very first exit we could find, which turned out to be a tiny brick rest stop about half a mile away from the interstate in freaking Paw Paw, Illinois. Surrounded by open fields. Maybe a barn. No wind farms yet.
We sprinted inside this brick cube to pee, dialed Grandma back on the brick for another frantic briefing, and just huddled inside that building until the first wave of sirens finally stopped.
So let’s take a short break with past me, and take a look at the phone we were using that day. This is not my photo, but a photo of the exact model, the Nokia 3310 from Wikipedia.
As well as the rest stop we stopped at. I was able to use tornado history, interstate history and connections, and years to locate exactly which one it was.
The sirens are gone, and we get back on the road. The sky in front of us is a patchy gray blue, but behind us is a wall of pure barf green, to the left is dark black, and to the right is medium gray and fuzzy with yellow tinges. My mom mutters something about storm chasers. I’m feeling good in my pillow fort. Mom got a few more out of the trunk at the rest stop. I had like four now, along with ‘get in the floorboard’ instructions. And then it hits me.
“Mom… I forgot the Nokia at the rest stop in Paw Paw.”
I have fully trauma blocked the screaming that occurred next, but we had to turn around and drive directly back into the apocalypse to get the phone. We grab the brick, get back on the interstate, and the green sky immediately swallows us again. The sirens start wailing a second time.
Mom hits hypersonic speeds. She floors it so hard that kid me is convinced the back wheels completely left the asphalt. (Probably childhood embellishment, but it felt like we were literally flying.)
Part II: Total Blackout and the Ghost Truck
[ ] We drive all day, dodging close calls, green skies, and sirens across multiple states. Our destination for the night is still that hotel in Kentucky. It is late, pitch black, and raining buckets, but suddenly we see it: the glorious red neon sign glowing on a hill. We are less than half a mile away. Success is within our grasp, we can even see the green exit sign.
The exact millisecond our tires hit the off ramp, the power grid dies.
I’m not talking about a flicker, or power flashes, or lightening. I'm not talking about lights in the distance dark. I’m telling you every light within what the eye can see is just gone in a single moment, it’s night time, the storm is dark and raging, and the rain is coming in dark thick sheets. Visibility is none.
Total, absolute darkness. No streetlights. No headlights visible through the deluge. The rain goes completely sideways. Suddenly, an entire 18 wheeler comes hurtling UP the off ramp straight at us, loses control, and flips entirely onto its side in the grass. The trucker climbs out of the wreckage and just walks off into the dark toward a building, so mom keeps crawling forward through the chaos. The Trailor blocked access to that building.
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The hanging streetlights at the intersection of the off ramp are spinning so violently in the wind that they are level with their own wires. Mom realizes we are completely blind.
Part III: Superman Mode and Bathroom Cheese
Through the blinding fog, she spots the faint silhouette of a gas station awning. She guns it, pulling up to the pump closest to the door.
She yells at me to grab my pillow, put it over my head, and screams:
“See that big, burly fat man at the door? He’s waving! He sees us! Run to him, he’s heavy, he can get you inside. I’ll be right behind you. GO!”
I throw open the car door and step out. The wind hits me like a physical wall. My feet instantly fly out from under me, and I am hovering horizontally in the air, hanging onto the car door handle literal Superman style. Screw the pillow. It’s gone.
The absolute hero of a trucker sprints out, grabs me, grabs my mom , who was actively wrestling the gale force winds to get to my side of the car, and drags us both inside, slamming the heavy doors shut.
“This is a trucker stop,” he says. “We have showers in the basement. It’s the safest place, get down there.”
We huddle in the basement showers for what feels like an eternity. Our savior trucker comes down and brings us a couple of gas station hot dogs. He explains the power has been out for a while so they aren’t exactly hot, but they’re going to waste anyway, so we might as well have a tornado snack. Cold, bunless, glizzies have never tasted so good.
Eventually, the worst of the vortex passes. It’s still raining, but visibility is back to a normal storm level. We look out the window, and the Hotel is literally two buildings up the hill. It was right there the whole time.
We march up to the lobby, where a clerk holding a candle like a scene from Lord of the Rings, guides us to a first floor room. Too terrified of the windows and the ongoing storm to sleep in the actual beds, my mom and I drag our blankets into the hotel bathroom.
And there, sitting on the bathroom floor in the dark, we finally ate our wheel of Wisconsin cheese for dinner.
The drive back to Tennessee the next day was completely fine. But the carnage as we left the city? Unspeakable. It’s impossible to fully encapsulate what my tiny eyes saw in a linguistic form. Though my best attempt is,
This 20 later news coverage: Here
This video of Radar Data from that day: Here
This storm chasers early account: Here
Using my memory, historical interstate data, NWS data, Locations as points of reference, time period identifiers like the Nokia, and sites like Wikipedia, cited where able, to locate which storms, what year, how old, and even the rest stop we used.
I was 8 years old. It was 2004. The spot we forgot the Nokia in Paw Paw, IL, is Willow Creek Rest Area.
May 29–30, 2004 Memorial Day Weekend outbreak
- Duration: May 21–31, 2004
- Tornadoes confirmed: ~389
- Fatalities: 7
- Counties: Fayette
- F-scale: F3
- Injuries: 6
- Time: 9:15pm
- Notes: Storm Data takes this tornado from 4.7 miles northeast of the Lexington airport to one and a half miles southeast of Greendale. It touched down on Buck Lane, struck KY 1978, crossed Georgetown Road, and struck near Citation Boulevard.
- News and Survivor Reports: Here
We were on I-75 in Kentucky.
