Funnel

by Erin Jamieson

I’ve always wondered what it would be like to be inside of a tornado.

Unlike the minor earthquake here a few years ago, most of the time, you know a tornado is coming. You watch meteorologists tracing it as it gathers speed. The sky becomes strangely quiet. I’ve heard the air even tastes different. You know it’s coming, and you can’t look away.

With my mom, it was like that. I should’ve known better. You’d think someone obsessed with storm tracking could have seen it coming.

And I guess I did. I just didn’t want to believe it.

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The inside of a tornado isn’t nearly as chaotic as everything thinks it is.

When I was barely old enough to remember, Reed Timmer was caught in the middle of a tornado. He was one of those Storm Chasers from the Discovery Channel, a show that fizzled out after 5 seasons. Inside the tornado, it’s surprisingly smooth, he said. Nothing like it looks from the outside.

He survived. Had some cuts from glass when his car shattered. Everyone says he was lucky.

I agree, but not for the same reason.

Reed Timmer experienced something that I’ll never be able to.

When I was seven, my father took me to see the Golden Gate Bridge, just the two of us. Mom had weekend work—no surprises there. I’m sure I went to San Francisco before then, but that’s the first time that I remember it.

My father grabbed a cup of coffee from the Flywheel Coffee Kiosk and bought me a chocolate chip scone. The energy of the city made me feel like I had a second heartbeat.

We wandered into a bookshop. I know we went to the park but I don’t remember that.

What I remember is wandering into an aisle with my father. How obsessed he got with a book about genealogy or something else equally boring to a 7 year old.

I wandered off.

He didn’t notice.

A bright green and red paperback caught my eye.

Twister Trouble.

There was a wacky white woman with red hair and a dress with clouds and rainbows splattered over it. I don’t know why I found it interesting, out of all the books in the store.

I sat down on the worn paisley carpet and started to read. I tried to. There were words I didn’t know. But I never heard about a tornado before. Maybe I had, and didn’t understand. I knew about earthquakes. But earthquakes I always envisioned were like invisible monsters, lurking underneath.

A tornado was something you could see coming. Something you could prepare for.

A tornado was something, I learned, that you could chase.

When he finally found me, I got a little lecture about wandering off. Not a very harsh one. It lasts maybe a minute or two. But all day I thought about that book.

My father took me back to the store and bought it. When we came home that night, he read it to me. And I asked him to read it to me over and over, long after I knew it by heart. He told me one day he’d take me to a science museum.

But he never did.

I did research on my own when I was 10, 12. I never talked much about it, because every time I did Mom dismissed it like a phase. Like how I grew out of liking Barney and Friends or decided I didn’t need to have my crusts cut off my Pb&J anymore but the next week liked grilled cheese way better.

I did stop obsessing about tornadoes for a while.

And then the fights started when I was 16. Small fights. Stupid things. I knew our money was tight. I knew they didn’t agree on things. I didn’t stop to think that it could be something bigger than forgetting to put the toilet seat down.

Tornadoes you could prepare for. You could save lives.

Tornadoes treated everyone equally—for better or worse.

Tornadoes don’t give a shit if you’re the kid your parents want you to be or if you fit in or if you’re on the verge of a breakdown.

And it was only when I hinted what I wanted to do that my parents snapped out of it.

Because as bad as it was to have my mom lecture me about how there were a hundred other things I could do with my life, it felt better, I realize now, that she said anything at all.