Under Old Nell’s Skirt

I know a man, a Maya in the Yucatán, who can call up wind: he whistles a clear, haunting, thirteen-note melody set in the Native American pentatonic scale. He whistles, the wind moves, and for some moments the heat of the tropical forest eases. It’s a talent there to appreciate. But does he summon the wind, or does he know just the right time to whistle before the wind moves? He says, in effect, that he is on speaking terms with the wind, and by that he means it is a phenomenon, yes, but also a presence, and it has a name, Ik, and it is Ik that brings the seasonal rain to Yucatán. You may call such a notion pantheism or primitivism or mere personification: he wouldn’t care, because for him, for the Maya, for all of tribal America, the wind, the life bringer, is something to heed, to esteem: Ik.

In Kansas I’ve not heard any names for the nearly constant winds, the oldest of things here. When the Kansa Indians were pushed out of the state, they carried with them the last perception of wind as anything other than a faceless force, usually for destruction, the power behind terrible prairie wildfires, the clout in blizzards and droughts, and, most of all, in tornadoes that will take up everything, even fenceposts. But people here know wind well, they often speak of it, yet, despite the several names in other places for local American winds, in this state, whose very name may mean “wind-people,” it has no identity but a direction, no epithet but a curse. A local preacher told me: Giving names to nature is un-christian. I said that it might help people connect with things and who knows where that might lead, and he said, To idolatry. Yet the fact remains: these countians are more activated by weather than religion.

Almost everything I see in this place sooner or later brings me back to the grasses; after all, this is the prairie, a topography that so surprised Anglo culture when it began arriving that it found for this grand-beyond no suitable word in its immense vocabulary, and it resorted to the French of illiterate trappers: prairie. Except in accounts of novice travelers, these grasslands have never been meadows, heaths, moors, downs, wolds. A woman in Boston once said to me, Prairie is such a lovely word—and for so grim a place.

More than all other things here, the grasses are the offspring of the wind, the power that helps evaporation equal precipitation to the detriment of trees, the power that breaks off leaves and branches, shakes crowns and rigid trunks to tear roots and disrupt transpiration, respiration, nutrient assimilation. But grasses before the wind bend and straighten and bend and keep their vital parts underground, and, come into season, they release their germ, spikelets, and seeds to the wind, the invisible sea that in this place must carry the code, the directions from the unfaced god, carry the imprint of rootlet and rhizome, blade and sheath, culm and rachis: the wind, the penisless god going and coming everywhere, the intercourse of the grasses, the sprayer of seed across the opened sex risen and waiting for the pattern set loose on the winds today of no name; and so the grasses pull the energy from the wind, the offspring of sunlight, to transmute soil into more grasses that ungulates eat into flesh that men turn into pot roasts and woolen socks.

Now: I am walking a ridge in the southern end of Saffordville quadrangle, and below me in the creek bottom are oaks of several kinds, cottonwood, hackberry, walnut, hickory, sycamore. Slippery elms, once providing a throat emulcent, try to climb the hills by finding rock crevices to shield their seed, and, if one sprouts, it will grow straight for a time, only to lose its inborn shape to the prevailing southerlies so that the windward sides of elms seem eaten off but the lee sides spread north like tresses unloosed in March. If a seedling succeeds on a ridge top, it will spread low as if to squat under the shears of windrush, and everywhere the elm trunks lean to the polestar and make the county appear as if its southern end had been lifted and tilted before the land could dry and set. A windmill must stand straight and turn into the wind to harvest water, but the slippery elm turns away to keep the wind from its wet pulp.

And there is another face to this thing from which life proceeds. Yesterday I walked down a ridge to get out of the November wind while I ate a sandwich, and I came upon a house foundation on a slope bereft of anything but grasses and knee-high plants. It was absolutely exposed, an oddity here, since most of the homes sit in the shelter of wooded vales. This one faced east—or it would have, had it still been there—and the only relief from the prevailing winds that the builder had sought was to set the back of the house to them. There was the foundation, some broken boards, a few rusting things, and, thirty feet away, a storm cellar, its door torn off, and that was all except for a rock road of two ruts. The cave, as people here call tornado cellars, was of rough-cut native stone with an arched roof, wooden shelves, and a packed-earth floor with Mason jar fragments glinting blue in the sunlight; one had been so broken that twin pieces at my feet said:

 

 

The shards seemed to be lost voices locked in silica and calling still.

These cellars once kept cool home-canned food (and rat snakes), and, when a tornado struck like a fang from some cloud-beast, they kept families that mocked their own timorousness by calling them ’fraidy holes, and it did take nerve to go into the dim recesses with their spidered comers and dark, reptilian coils. I stepped down inside and sat on a stone fallen from the wall and ate safely in the doorway, but, even with the sun shafts, there was something dismal and haunted in the shadowed dust of dry rot here and dank of wet rot there. Things lay silent inside, the air quite stilled, and I felt something, I don’t know what: something waiting.

Was there a connection between this cave and that house absent but for its foundation? The site, sloping southwest, seemed placed to catch a cyclone in a county in the heart of the notorious Tornado Alley of the Middle West, a belt that can average 250 tornadoes a year, more than anywhere else in the world. A hundred and sixty miles from here, Codell, Kansas, got thumped by a tornado every twentieth of May for three successive years, and five months ago a twister “touched down,” mashed down really, a mile north of Saffordville at the small conglomeration of houses and trailers called Toledo, and the newspaper caption for a photograph of that crook’d finger of a funnel cloud was HOLY TOLEDO! Years earlier a cyclone wrecked a Friends meetinghouse there, but this time it skipped over the Methodists’ church and went for their houses. In Chase County I’ve found a nonchalance about natural forces born of fatalism: If it’s gonna get me, it’ll get me. In Cottonwood Falls, on a block where a house once sat, the old cave remains, collapsing, yet around it are six house trailers. Riding out a tornado in a mobile home is like stepping into combine blades: trailers can become airborne chambers full of flying knives of aluminum and glass. No: if there is a dread in the county, it is not of dark skies but of the opposite, of clear skies, days and days of clear skies, of a drought nobody escapes, not even the shopkeepers. That any one person will suffer losses from a tornado, however deadly, goes much against the odds, and many residents reach high school before they first see a twister; yet, nobody who lives his full span in the county dies without a tornado story.

Tornado: a Spanish past participle meaning turned, from a verb meaning to turn, alter, transform, repeat, and to restore. Meteorologists speak of the reasons why the Midlands of the United States suffer so many tornadoes: a range of high mountains west of a great expanse of sun-heated plains at a much lower altitude, where dry and cold northern air can meet warm and moist southern air from a large body of water to combine with a circulation pattern mixing things up: that is to say, the jet stream from Arctic Canada crosses the Rockies to meet a front from the Gulf of Mexico over the Great Plains in the center of which sits Kansas, where, since 1950, people have sighted seventeen hundred tornadoes. It is a place of such potential celestial violence that the meteorologists at the National Severe Storms Forecast Center in Kansas City, Missouri, are sometimes called the Keepers of the Gates of Hell. Countians who have smelled the fulminous, cyclonic sky up close, who have felt the ground shake and heard the earth itself roar and have taken to a storm cellar that soon filled with a loathsome greenish air, find the image apt. The Keepers of the Gates of Hell have, in recent years, become adept at forecasting tornadoes, and they might even be able to suggest cures for them if only they could study them up close. Years ago a fellow proposed sending scientists into the eye of a tornado in an army tank until he considered the problem of transporting the machine to a funnel that usually lasts only minutes, and someone else suggested flying into a cyclone, whereupon a weather-research pilot said, yes, it was feasible if the aviator would first practice by flying into mountains.

Climatologists speak of thunderstorms pregnant with tornadoes, storm-breeding clouds more than twice the height of Mount Everest; they speak of funicular envelopes and anvil clouds with pendant mammati and of thermal instability of winds in cyclonic vorticity, of rotatory columns of air torquing at velocities up to three hundred miles an hour (although no anemometer in the direct path of a storm has survived), funnels that can move over the ground at the speed of a strolling man or at the rate of a barrel-assing semi on the turnpike; they say the width of the destruction can be the distance between home plate and deep center field and its length the hundred miles between New York City and Philadelphia. A tornado, although more violent than a much longer lasting hurricane, has a life measured in minutes, and weathercasters watch it snuff out as it was born: unnamed.

I know here a grandfather, a man as bald as if a cyclonic wind had taken his scalp—something witnesses claim has happened elsewhere—who calls twisters Old Nell, and he threatens to set crying children outside the back door for her to carry off. People who have seen Old Nell close, up under her skirt, talk about her colors: pastel-pink, black, blue, gray, and a survivor said this: All at once a big hole opened in the sky with a mass of cherry-red, a yellow tinge in the center, and another said: a funnel with beautiful electric-blue light, and a third person: It was glowing like it was illuminated from the inside. The witnesses speak of shapes: a formless black mass, a cone, cylinder, tube, ribbon, pendant, thrashing hose, dangling lariat, writhing snake, elephant trunk. They tell of ponds being vacuumed dry, eyes of geese sucked out, chickens clean-plucked from beak to bum, water pulled straight up out of toilet bowls, a woman’s clothes torn off her, a wife killed after being jerked through a car window, a child carried two miles and set down with only scratches, a Cottonwood Falls mother (fearful of wind) cured of chronic headaches when a twister passed harmlessly within a few feet of her house, and, just south of Chase, a woman blown out of her living room window and dropped unhurt sixty feet away and falling unbroken beside her a phonograph record of “Stormy Weather.”

London Harness, an eighty-five-year-old man who lives just six miles north of the county line, told me: I knew a family years ago that was crossing open country here in a horse and wagon. A bad storm come on fast, and the man run to a dug well and said, “I’m going down in here—you do the best you can!” The wife hollered and screamed and run to a ditch and laid down with their two little kids. That funnel dropped right in on them. After the storm passed over, she and the kids went to the well to say, “Come on up, Pappy,” but there weren’t no water down there, and he weren’t down there. If you’re in that path, no need of running.

Yesterday: in the sun the broken words on the Mason jar glinted and, against the foundation, the wind whacked dry grasses and seed pods, tap-tap-tap, rasp-rasp, and a yellow light lay over the November slope, and Ma and son: did they one afternoon come out of the cave to see what I see, an unhoused foundation, some twisted fence wire, and a sky turning golden in all innocence?