It never rains but it pours--literally!

Warning: This post is a whopper. It should hold you guys over for awhile. :)

It's been quite an exciting day. I woke up grumpy this morning, not looking forward to having to spend two more weeks in school. But somehow, things conspired to make the afternoon and evening quite exciting....

We begin the saga with this afternoon at one-thirty, when I was innocently working on my Honors paper in my room. Glancing out the window, I noticed that the sky was starting to get dark and the wind was kicking up. The more time went on, the darker the sky became and the stronger the wind grew. So I decided to walk over to Chapman Hall for Honors class before the storm hit. Bundling my books into my knapsack, I started off. When I opened the door into the outside, the wind hit my face. My skirt kited around my knees. I was thankful, for once, for the warm, heavy load of books on my back, a good ballast against the wind.

I curled up in the entry area in Chapman with my books on a bench, but the storm outside distracted me. The three-story windows soared up, expanse of glass like a clear waterfall, showing the turmoil outside: clouds whirling overhead, foaming like waves, seething like live things. The elm and goldenrain trees outside Chapman kicked into a white froth. Leaves, plastic bags, debris flailing through the air, whipped high over the buildings. Power crackled from cloud to cloud. Occasionally, a petite Asian girl would poke her head out of the writing center and stare, worried, at the sky. People banged into the entry area, the glass doors slamming behind them. Some laughed, some exclaimed, some cursed. Two women came in, giggling and breathless. One of them called her husband “on the farm” to tell him to “cover the greenhouse”. Water streaked glasses and beaded damp skin. At two fifty, I walked upstairs, just ahead of Dr. A. Nicole entered, too. We were just getting settled down, marveling at the strength of the storm, when a sound like a gunnery in full fire splintered the silence. Rain, mixed with hail, battered the windows, hard barrage of ice and water. As though the sky were a big ship-of-the-line attacking a little sloop. Nicole and I pressed our faces to the glass. All over the building we could hear squeals of surprise and dismay. Every one of the huge plateglass windows was under attack: I wondered if they would all shatter, the storm having battered in our portals, leaving the building to sink under ice cold water and wind. Jessica and Lewis blustered in. “Ow, ow, ow!” Jessica was complaining, “See! Look! That’s from the hail!” she gestured to several red welts on her bare legs. “We don’t have storms like this in Kentucky!” she moaned. “I’m just wondering about my car,” Dr. A said, “While I was visiting my mother in Minnesota over the break, they had baseball-size hail that damaged my car. I just had it repaired. One of the other professors took my keys and said he’d put it into shelter, but I hope he was in time!” I wondered uncomfortably about my own car. Rachel entered, soaked to the skin, her hair dark and wet as though she’d just been washing it.

Dr. A finally managed to establish order, and class commenced. She wrapped up our survey of the Middle Ages by discussing other eras’ attitudes toward the Middle Ages. She also described to us the main characteristic of the Middle Ages: “If you run across any piece of art or literature that presumes a center, a focus point, then it’s medieval. If it presumes an orderly cosmos and a certain ‘fitness’ to things, then it’s medieval.” My mind leaped to the Calvinist doctrine of vocation, and C.S. Lewis’s theories about all human beings being made to glorify some specific aspect of God, either by beatitude or by judgment, for both these systems presume a “fitness”, an aptitude, to the world. Russ came in for the last fifteen minutes of class, just as Dr. A reached this climax. He, Nicole, and Rachel carried on the discussion about whether Christ’s physical body had to be physically handsome as a manifestation of His divinity. The rest of us listened. After class, Rachel and I walked outside into a fairly tranquil world. The wind still soughed intermittently through the trees, sprinkling thick drops, like silver seeds, on the sidewalk. But in the west the sky was a-dazzle with pale yellow. Rachel went to put on some dry clothes. I hurried to the parking lot to inspect my car, which was undamaged, then spent the afternoon working on the Honors paper.

As the afternoon progressed, the sky began to darken again. A huge, branched canopy of cloud blossomed overhead, as though a tall, dark tree were unfolding above the campus. Wind returned to stir the trees. I went running. The wind yanked my hair loose, as it had yanked leaves loose. My new shoes squelched through mud and slithered on drifts of fallen leaves, pressed like hands to the damp sidewalk. As I ran past Twin South, I passed Andrew, who greeted me courteously. Back in my room, I showered, then walked over to the cafeteria for supper. Andrew, Katie, and Crystal were sitting at the usual table together: the long table on the west side of the cafeteria. As I strolled up, Andrew said, “I saw Evelyn running today. It made me feel lazy.” “You are lazy,” Katie teased. She and Crystal insulted him for awhile. Jenny joined us, and Rachel. We sat and laughed and talked. Asher came, too. Asher asked if Rachel and I were going to the orchestra concert tonight: it’s at the PAC downtown. Asher called Kevin’s parents, and we managed to work it out, in the end, so that Kevin’s parents would take both Rachel and me. After supper, we parted: I returned to my room, where I tweaked my paper some more and yanked on a blue sweater over my lime green Systematic Theology Class T-shirt.

At seven o’clock, I skipped downstairs to meet Kevin’s parents on the southeast corner of Twin South. Rachel hurried up, while Asher, JAH [Jenny H.], Matt L., and Jason emerged from various locations. JAH was dressed in crisp black-and-white. “I felt like dressing up tonight,” she explained, flouncing her loose white skirt. We stood on the kerb for awhile, waiting. A couple of dudes in a rip-roaring green pickup truck howled by. “They’re going out to chase the storm,” JAH said noncommittally. Staring west, I saw that they indeed had a storm to chase: a line of angry blue clouds strung across the horizon. Already its vanguard had begun to ride over the university, and the main body of the force was swallowing up the skyscrapers downtown. A nervous RA from Twin Towers, in baggy pants and carrying an oversized flashlight, watched jumpily with us. The air was dead still, heavy. Everyone jumped then: the tornado sirens went off. Adrenaline licked through my body, lacing every vein. We scurried inside, while the eerie sirens screamed like aliens in the background. Inside Twin South, the RA strode up and down the halls, thudding on the doors with the butt of his flashlight. People crowded out of their rooms into the narrow hallway. We (Jason, Matt L., Rachel, JAH, and I) went down to the end of the west hallway, where we found James and Eleanor, together as usual. David and Spencer joined us later.

For awhile, people were pretty rowdy. We were on the boys’ hall, and the crowd was made up mostly of boys, who sat down the hall from us, shouting and guffawing, stirring about impatiently. We occupied the sliver of hall across from the room that James and Asher share. James let JAH, Rachel, and me inside. We poked our heads up to the window, and JAH gasped in awe. “Look, you guys!” The blank darkness that had enveloped downtown was surging toward us, though the air at our level was dead still. “That’s bad,” I said, “if it was raining or windy, then we’d be safe. But that’s bad.” The trees were still as becalmed ships. We crowded back into the noisy hallway. JAH called Kevin, urgently telling him to call his parents and tell them to get to shelter. Rachel and I followed JAH into another boy’s room, where someone showed us radar pictures: an angry red blot, like a brushfire, boiling toward us. We tried to settle down in the hall. JAH brought a box of food from James’s room, and she and Rachel munched goldfish and fig newtons. I whispered snide remarks in Rachel’s ear about asking to be saved from the zoo in Twin South. “I’d rather brave the tornado than this mob in here!” Rachel paraphrased with a chuckle. The boys were scattered up and down the hall, like pieces of their own messy belongings that were strewn about their rooms. A boy and his girlfriend were playing computer games on their laptops, side-by-side.

But us RUFers congregated together, around Jason and James and the guitar. I reminisced to Rachel and JAH, remembering all the funny stories I could about tornado alerts at home: how my father had to shake Brother1 awake one night when a tornado really was coming because Brother1 had slept through the sirens; how we dragged all our pets (guinea pig, rabbit, and cats) into my parents' closet to wait out the storm—how the cats had been terrified of the rabbit, and the rabbit terrified of the guinea pig (sharing the cat carrier with him), and the guinea pig had quietly munched his hay in the cat carrier, and how the cats had paced nervously until we penned them in my parents' bathroom. Jason sang dead love songs about cowboys, with a rakish grin (he knew he was being silly). Occasionally, he would interrupt himself to advise Matt L. about what chords to play next. Matt L., who’s very proficient at the guitar, strummed away imperturbably. Then he passed the guitar to James, and opened his Bible—for the rest of our forty-five minute imprisonment, he read studiously, an impassive smile on his face. Meanwhile, Jason, who’s always onstage, flipped out his umbrella in perfect timing to “Just A Spoonful of Sugar” from “Mary Poppins”: JAH, Rachel, and I sang along to the chorus. He sang a song from “Willy Wonka”, and JAH followed his voice. We were interrupted by the strict RD, who told us in no uncertain terms not to open the bedroom doors, to stay in the hall, and to be quiet and still if the power went out. After her announcement, the rowdiness resumed, storm surging back over its own eye. JAH sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, her husky voice twining itself with a lovely, unexpected twang through the tune, while Jason sang bass. Jason, JAH, and Rachel sang rounds. Then Jason and JAH sang something about a lion coming out tonight. JAH’s voice ululated up through trilling African animal calls, while Jason burred away below her. I sat and scribbled prayers in my journal. Spencer grinned rakishly at me from behind a corner.

Finally, at seven forty-five, they announced that we could leave. “The storm will be back in about an hour-and-a-half. There’s another one coming up I-35. So you all can go out and get whatever you need to, but be ready to come back.” Jason, David, JAH, Matt L., JAH, and Asher decided that they were going to go to the concert, though JAH changed into jeans and a T-shirt. “I’m not getting caught in a tornado in this!” she said, waving a hand at her finery. Rachel decisively marched back to the Honors House. I hesitated: I wanted to go to the concert, to listen to the orchestra perform, but my mind lingered on my laptop and my unsaved paper sitting up in my room. So, wishing aloud that I had more courage, I hugged JAH good-bye and ran back to Lottie.

I spent the evening working on my paper, which is almost finished, except for the conclusion. It has a wonderful, rousing bit toward the end: God was gracious to give me some epiphanies today in the realm of Anglo-Saxon poetry. Between writing, I listened to NPR on my computer and watched out the window. Big storms were moving through Oklahoma City and Stillwater, so I sat and prayed, and wondered what was happening in Tulsa. At nine o’clock, I strolled down to the study lounge for the hall meeting. I curled up on the sofa to write in my journal. Tara bounced in, wearing blue plush pajama pants. “Hi, E--!” she cried, “I haven’t seen you all day!” We discussed plans for watching a movie tomorrow, and wagged our heads over the storm, as everyone else was doing. When most of the girls had arrived, Julie, our RA, came in and talked to us about proper tornado procedures and the process for checking out. We listened attentively: a rim of girls around the room, all eyes. Not a silence of mere respect: Julie had brought ice cream, which kept everyone quiet. J I slowly slurped my vanilla-and-chocolate until the meeting was over. Julie begged us to finish the ice cream, so Tara and I both helped ourselves to seconds.

I asked Tara if I could come down to her room to write in my journal. “Sure,” Tarasaid cheerily. I padded after her to the room down the hall, which she and Jenny share. She perched on her bed, and I sprawled on the floor, and we ate our ice cream flavored with companionable conversation. Outside, the storm had returned: lightning danced devilishly across the sky, like blue witch-fire. Then came thunder, low and ominous like beating drums, then louder, until I half expected to see pieces of the sky crumbling off. Rain spattered the windows, then fell harder and harder, until the window was covered by another window of rippling water. Rain blew in sheets across the parking lot outside, driven from the north. I settled down to write in my journal. The room was fairly quiet: hiss of rain on the window, growl of thunder, and the buzz of Jenny’s weather bug. The bug perches on Jenny’s shelf and chirps like a loud cricket whenever the weather is changing: it’s been singing a real solo tonight. Tara asked about how tornados form, and I tried to explain about hot and cold air and fronts and things. At ten o’clock, Tara left to study with Nicole, but she said that I could stay in her room as long as I wanted. Too lazy to move, I accepted her offer. I’m crouched on the floor like just another stack of books, amid flip-flops, knapsacks, socks, papers, and empty styrofoam ice cream bowls. The storm has quieted outside. I’m tired myself.