The Monday the Sirens Went Off in Neenah
Monday started about as ordinary as a day can start. I took my usual morning walk, came home, and before I dragged the hose out I did what I always do lately: I asked Gemini whether we were going to get any rain, or whether I needed to water. It told me we probably would not even see a quarter inch. So I watered everything.
About ten minutes later, at 11:58, my phone went off.
I had heard a little thunder rumbling off in the distance, nothing that worried me. Then I looked down at the alert. Three inch hail was possible. If you have never had that number put in front of you, three inch hail is enormous, roughly the size of a baseball, and it will shatter a windshield and strip a garden down to stems in about a minute. So I moved fast. I hauled my most valuable potted plants back under cover, got the car into the garage, and did the quick math on what else I could save.
Then the second alert came. Tornado.
And then the sirens started.
If you did not grow up somewhere that has them, the tornado sirens are a sound you do not forget. They are the old civil defense sirens, the same rising and falling wail you have heard in every movie about air raids, and when they go off for real they carry for miles. A long low note that climbs to a high one and slides back down, over and over, and it does not stop. There is nothing subtle about it. It is the whole city telling you, all at once, to get inside and get low.
So I did. I went down to the basement and waited. At one point, over the wind, I heard a tree crack in my own yard. If you have heard a big limb let go, you know it, a sharp gunshot crack and then a long tearing groan as it comes down.
When it finally settled and the wind backed off, I went out, carefully, to look.
Multiple trees down in my yard. My Norway Maple, the one that went in the ground back in 1963, lost a huge limb and peeled a strip of bare wood right down the trunk where it tore away. It took severe damage, though parts of it are still alive. Branches and green leaves were thrown clear across the street. I walked the neighborhood a little, and it was the same everywhere, worse at some houses, whole trees snapped off at the base or leaning into a roof.
Here is the part that still gets me. My house was fine. Not a shingle. The trees took all of it and the house came through clean. By the time the tornado reached my part of Neenah it was already out over the water, a handful of blocks from my house.
It had touched down a little before noon just north of Wisconsin Avenue in Appleton, then tracked south through Fox Crossing and Menasha, doing its worst in northern Menasha up near Highway 441 and US 10. It clipped Neenah on the way, went out over Lake Winnebago, and fell apart around 12:22. That last stretch over the water is the tail end I was standing under.
The National Weather Service rated it an EF-3, with winds around 140 miles per hour. Close to 1,500 yards wide, on the ground more than twenty minutes, a path about twelve miles long. Neenah declared a state of emergency. Three communities went under a curfew and a boil water order. Thousands of us lost power. Governor Evers declared a state of emergency for the area.
And still, somehow, nobody was killed. Sixty-eight people were treated for injuries, most of them at ThedaCare here in Neenah and St. Elizabeth’s in Appleton, and none of them were serious. An EF-3 went straight through the middle of the Fox Valley in the middle of the day, and everybody walked away. One headline I saw called it the thin line between a tragedy and a Wisconsin miracle. That is about right.
My dad has been over helping me cut up the wood in the back. It is a big mess, and it will be a while before the yard looks like a yard again. But it is wood and it is work, and we are all still here. I will take it.
