You probably would not like the insane humidity that causes the tornadoes from the shearing layers of wind that form the rolling tube and resulting tornado. They are not fun. It feels like Russian roulette as a kid huddled in the deepest corner of a basement, covered in a foam mattress. The storm front is often enough to get your attention on an instinctive layer of awareness. The the presence of hail and its audible size tell of the height and magnitude of the enormous thunderhead looming above. You hear the breaking of tree branches and the occasional thud from weak trees falling in the surrounding neighborhood or wider surrounding hardwood forest. The wind bellows in random intense gusts often accompanied by rain and hail. The really scary part is when the local chaos yields to absolute silence except for the blue green flashes of lightning. In this moment, even these seem to change as none have the immediate thump and crackle of a strike within the scope of a few miles. This is when a new type of howling starts. It is a sound that conjures a primal fear well outside the conscious mind. The sound of trees snapped like toothpicks is enormous when they are larger than one can wrap their arms around, the warnings on the radio blare the robotic voice, devoid of emotion, dashing hope, as sirens like a nuclear bomb is imminent compete against the primal howling and chaos approaching. The darkness visible through the cracks of a barricaded window light up as the twister disrupts the local patterns exposing all in its war path to the wider sky’s activities. As it gets closer, the lights flicker many times before finally going out. The wind then pulls in the opposite direction, towards the monster.

I was within a mile of a large one in Tennessee. It damaged the roof of a friend’s house and went through his neighborhood. The house directly across the street was only a foundation, the bottom half a set of stairs, and most of the walls around a water heater. The surrounding houses on that side of the street were partially destroyed. One of the 2in by 6in roofing joists, presumably from the totally destroyed house, was shot down the street and into the house that faced the street where the road curved. The board went though all of the walls and was halfway out of the back wall, extending over the back yard. Just outside of that neighborhood, the tornado hit a mobile home trailer. It looked like someone had dumped the contents of a paper shredder strewn across the area. The two large i-beams of the trailer were wrapped around the trunk of a very large century plus age oak tree that had no branches left to speak of. What remained of the wheels and axles were the only clear indicator of the source of the carnage, as any larger items appeared to have been carried away.

That one was not fun as a kid. I was huddled in the basement a few times a year, but that one was the only seriously close call.

The worst I saw was actually in the countryside. It cleared a path that went down into the soil substantially. It looked like a clearing for a pipeline or utilities, but was not straight enough. It had crossed a road that was on a small hillside where the grade was more filled and compacted like an extending shelf, rather than cut into the existing bedrock. All that was left of the road was around a half a car’s width of a little thread. My dad got stuck in our old two wheel drive truck trying to drive around it. That one was really strong and it had been a smaller diameter on the ground for a F4 magnitude. IIRC that was from one of the longest swarms that had been recorded in the 90s with several that stayed on the ground longer than any before.