Tornados I have avoided

I was in second grade class in Bloomingdale, Michigan. There must have been a nasty storm warning the school was aware of. I remember the teachers and adults being in an absolute tizzy. They obviously were trying to act calm and collected. You know, show no fear and the children will remain calm. Great story line unfortunately it was not working. There was a palpable fear in the classroom. I could feel, taste and understand something unusual was happening. The school was able to get all of the bus drivers or at least get all of the bus routes to have drivers. They sent everybody home early. It was like a combination scene out of Twister and the Wizard of Oz. The only things missing were flying monkeys and an airborne Holstein cow.

This story goes back prior to the State of Michigan mandating school busses be yellow in color. Our school had a multicolored bus fleet. Red white and blue was a combination I remember. The State of Michigan legislature finally passed or agreed to join the national concept of uniform yellow. It was proposed by Martha Griffiths because we were a tourist state and Michigan needed to adopt the standard for visual recognition by visitors to our state. Ms Griffiths was the first lady elected as Lieutenant Governor in Michigan in 1982. Matilda Dodge Wilson was appointed Lieutenant Governor in 1939. Michigan has very honorable people serving in respected positions for a long time.

The ride home on the bus was full of drama. The question of will we be whisked to Kansas like Dorothy was on everyone's mind. Kids were looking out all of the windows on the bus. There were the black roiling clouds all around particularly in the southwest. Back then tornados always came from the southwest and always during the day. Or so the common wisdom from back in the day was stated to us. It is amazing how people back in the early fifties could so emphatically get rigid facts from such rudimentary data. Whatever system used it was all they had at the time. This was prior to the Russian satellite "Sputnik" being launched in 1957. There were no "fall out shelters or any other heaven orientated punishment systems. Well, there was always God to be mindful of. As it turned out the fury of the heavens still trumps most efforts of man. I am still amazed the school administrators were able to get all the people home before the twister arrived. 

We had a few critters at the time of the storm. They were just as uneasy as us humans were. Their sense of order was threatened by seeing black to almost fluorescent pea green clouds. Animals can feel the sudden atmospheric pressure drop that accompanies a tornado. They become nervous and in terms of the "old west", cattle may stampede from the pressure effect and their more acute hearing picking up the accompanying storm noise.

The eerie radiance from the clouds made the little hairs on the back of your neck stand at full alert. Epinephrine overdrive is the term I later learned in physiology and neurology. Animals and humans (sorry about the redundant reference) have baroreceptors throughout our circulatory or blood systems. We are usually not aware of baroreceptors unless one is hypertensive or one has an overriding stimulus that will loosen them all at once. An example would be some one watching a surgical procedure being done or watching a very bloody gory accident involving some one we care about. In this case it would be a syncope event or a fainting spell. The sudden release of all of the controls in our circulatory system allows blood and fluids to go back into the capillary system. When the flood gates open the muscles we were using to support us in a standing position loose rigidity and stop opposing gravity. We become light headed dizzy and end in a horizontal position. Down on the ground it takes the brain a while to sort out what happened. The process is reversed and we become awake.

The above is a process is referred to as a startle reflex. Tennessee Fainting Goats have this happen to them. It is an unusual sight to see. What ever causes this to happen will fatigue and they will not do it again for a while. It certainly is an odd feeling trying to work with a flock of these goats. People that have them have a real smile on their faces when it is your first encounter with them. Plan as you will you are stunned the first time it happens.

I digress about the tornado story. We got home and Mom got us down in our Michigan basement we hunkered down as instructed. It was noisy in the basement as the storm passed. Luckily for us the storm skipped our farm home. When we went out side there was roofing materials some asphalt tiles and some steel roofing from a neighbor's barn that traveled almost a mile to land in our field. Their barn was pretty much destroyed.

I was reminded of the tornado as we drove through Dundee this afternoon. Seeing buildings exploded, roofs blown away, trees uprooted and electrical power lines askew was a reminder of unleashing power from the heavens. It also activated memories of long ago. It is remarkable to me there was so much physical damage to solid materials and buildings that seemed to be solidly constructed. As of Sunday night I do not know of major loss of life either in man or critters. The destructive forces in such a storm may be calculable by math formulas with logical predictable numbers. It is hard to visually imagine the amount of force needed to snap a tree like a toothpick half way to its top.

The clean up will take awhile and most people were already out starting to put their places back in to order. Buildings will be repaired and life as we know it will get back to as we know it. Animals will get over the storm faster than we will.

 Be safe and follow current tornado rules. Tornados they blow me away.

For more information about a specific case, consult your veterinarian.
The outside of a pet is good for the inside of a human.