Tornado Daze

On graduation, devastation, and the St. Louis blues.

At a lake near my house there is a heron I call my therapist. I hadn’t seen him since October: seven months weighted with the ache of a century. Too much happened and too little changed. I wish current political horrors felt unrecognizable, but it’s like watching a reboot of a movie no one wanted the first time. Familiar in the worst ways, leaving me longing for what’s familiar in the best ways.

From a distance, I questioned if it was really him. There are a lot of herons in St. Louis. There is a lot of beauty in St. Louis, and it tends to vanish without warning.

But it was my heron, my old friend. Don’t ask how I know — do I ask you about your avian analysts? He was back in his office: a withered log under a bent branch. A flood had wrecked his last one, but he had found similar new digs.

All that mattered is that he had stayed. He stayed in St. Louis even though he could fly anywhere. I stayed, too. We stared at each other and didn’t wonder why.

He watched as I floated, awaiting my tales of woe. I stopped paddling and started drifting. I stopped trying and let my sorrow show. The heron stood impassive. Tears don’t faze a creature that’s seen so many storms. My tears are a drop in his lake.

I needed the reminder. I stayed until his legs began to twitch in a familiar way. He was restless, having already cured one client. I snapped a photo as he launched into flight.

The day was warm and cloudless and bracketed in blue. It was my first “normal” day after a national book tour and requisite self-promotion. The lake was a mirror reflecting the beauty of my surroundings, but it never reflected me. Here I was free to be human: unmarketed, unjudged. I passed sunbathing turtles and ragweed gleaming like gold. I kayaked under the highway and the whole world left me alone.

For two hours, I felt sorry for anyone who didn’t live in St. Louis and didn’t know what they were missing.

* * *

I came home happy. My son was at school, but my daughter was done with classes and graduating on Monday. I was trying not to dwell on it. Nothing can prepare a parent for that particular mix of pride and pain.

“Let’s get report card sundaes!” I exclaimed. “Like when you were little.”

My daughter laughed. “Report cards? No one cares about report cards senior year.”

“We’ll get summa cum laude sundaes,” I told her. “Make ‘em real big!”

We used to get report card sundaes at The Fountain on Locust, an art deco ice cream parlor harkening to the era when St. Louis was the envy of the world. This venue is fancier than St. Louis’s usual culinary fare, like frozen custard so thick, it’s served upside down. (This is a Very Important Feat in St. Louis.) The Fountain on Locust does have a Toblerone cocktail, though, for anyone who has wondered what it’s like to drink a Toblerone, which is everyone.

But I remembered another place.

“Let’s go to The Fountain on Delmar,” I said. “It’s the new branch on Delmar Boulevard, with the same menu, and we still haven’t seen it.”

My daughter agreed and we debated who should drive. One of those conversations impossible only two years ago. One of those conversations that preludes more permanent, painful departures.

Childhood takes a long time to go by so fast.

We set off past dilapidated buildings and empty lots. St. Louis has looked like this my whole life. When I drive from my house to downtown, or to my favorite bookshop Left Bank Books, I pass homes with no doors or windows and storefronts where bricks were stolen and sold — buildings that have never been inhabited in the twenty years I’ve lived here.

When guests visited, they’d ask what happened. Was it a bomb? A tornado?

“Nothing happened,” I would answer. And I meant it.

What happened was nothing: what happened was abandonment. White flight by racists fleeing once grand neighborhoods, politicians who let plutocrats buy properties only to let them rot, generational poverty that made it impossible for homeowners to pay for repairs. The buildings were so ornate that it is easy to envision what once existed, and hard to accept the ease with which people let it fall away.

Abandonment in a grand old city reads like an act of defiance. Look what you’ve done, the houses scream. Look what you didn’t do.

The Fountain on Delmar is in a new area called the Maker District attempting to bridge the “Delmar Divide”: the separation between wealthier white areas and impoverished Black areas on Delmar Boulevard. Over the last few years, restaurants and art studios have arrived in once abandoned spaces. With them comes the risk of gentrification, but also genuine attempts at equity by folks who work in the area, and who recognize the danger of papering over old wounds with new money.

I write this in the present tense because my heart can’t handle a past tense future.

We sat in a booth and waited. Another mom was there, wiping ice cream off her little girl’s face. She eyed my older child with envy, and I wanted to tell her to treasure her messy kid, her messy child full of time.

“It seems impossible,” I said. “That you’re graduating. That you’re leaving.”

“But we’ll always be able to do things like this,” my daughter answered. “We’ll come back here when I’m home visiting.”

Days later, when I saw photos of the wreckage in what remains of The Fountain on Delmar, I remembered her words and cried.

* * *

We didn’t know how bad the tornado was when the sirens went off that afternoon. Tornados warnings are common in St. Louis. We have a ritual of turning on the TV and seeing if weatherman Steve Templeton has his sleeves rolled up (that means it’s serious) and if so, cajoling our babyish dog into the basement. We are used to living under the constant threat of sudden disaster that, until now, never arrived.

I never thought the whole region would lose so much so fast.

St. Louis is a city of slow losses. They are losses born of apathy and betrayal: problems left unsolved, neighborhoods neglected, justice delayed and denied. St. Louis is also a city of slow progress, where solutions are curtailed by red tape and rampant poverty. Its triumphs are hard-won, harder fought, and tenuous. We are used to quiet rot in St. Louis. Ruins line our roads like a rebuke, a reminder of our failings.

What we are not used to in St. Louis is speed. Decay at least leaves a corpse. What people fear, now, is disappearance.

By 2:45, it became clear that this tornado was different. All I can remember from its peak is that my son was on the school bus. I panicked as golf ball-sized hail slammed our home and we tried to account for his whereabouts, only for him to text us that part of the bus fell off, and that it was not returning to school but heading to our block. When the bus arrived, we screamed at him to run, and he entered the house soaking wet. I held him like I never would let him go.

And then, fast as it started, the storm was over. I had taken a photo when the sirens blared, the sky dark with grey clouds. I took one from the same place a half hour later, and the sky was turning blue as it had been on the lake that morning, a preternatural beauty that gave no indication of the destruction it had wrought.

* * *

There are cities that are nice to visit but horrible in which to reside, and others that seem unremarkable to outsiders but are fascinating to residents, and St. Louis is the second kind. When you notice the absence of what St. Louis has when you visit other cities — its lush fecundity, its casual historic allure, that so many of its best sites are free even though the city is poor — St. Louis seems like a miracle.

For a tornado to destroy what so many with so little have fought so hard to preserve is more than gutting on a material level. There is a cruelty to it, a potential loss of memory and culture, that feels unbearable.

The tornado cut through places that make the city proud: Forest Park and its zoo and museums, the historic buildings of the north side and Central West End, the towering old trees lining our streets. The tornado hit the wealthiest and the poorest areas. But I fear most for the north side of St. Louis, a mostly Black region long impoverished and exploited, and what plutocrats may try to do to it.

On Monday evening, we began the drive to my daughter’s graduation ceremony. We were immediately turned around by fallen trees and wires, detoured from disaster to disaster. This was my first view of the worst destruction, which I had avoided — to spare the repair workers and to spare myself. In 2022, St. Louis had a record flood that hit my neighborhood the hardest. I still have trouble walking the streets where I watched cars and dreams float away.

We started trembling at the downpours. Now we’ll shake to the sirens, too.

I had been dreading graduation because I’m going to miss my daughter. I had also been dreading it because my father has late-stage cancer. He has fared better than his prognosis, but I become terrified we will lose him before every looming milestone. I’ve dreaded these changes for years, the inevitable breaking of family bonds. I wanted things to go well because it’s rare when my parents and my children are together.

Throughout my grief, my comfort had been St. Louis, hometown of my children. Beautiful, broken St. Louis. Wild, reckless, anti-authoritarian St. Louis, a place that has long defied everyone and everything, including the odds.

What were the odds, people asked when they saw the path the tornado tore through the heart of the city. Again, with agony: What were the odds?

“The odds are ever in our favor,” I whispered to myself here in District 12, imagining the horrors the Capitol may bring upon the remains.

In the arena, I watched the graduation of my daughter and her classmates, Title I public school kids who had, in twelve years, endured the Ferguson chaos, the rise of autocracy, the pandemic and Zoom school, a record flood, and now the worst tornado in recent history — in addition to chronic problems of poverty and discrimination.

I saw families who had lost friends or homes or cars or their basic sense of place. My family was in the last group, the luckiest one: Our burden was grief, not survival.

And our pride was our children, no matter who we were. Pride could never be stolen. Pride kept us going no matter the odds.

Midway through the ceremony, a new tornado watch began. Lightning filled the stadium like a malfunctioning floodlight. I saw my face reflected in the arena window and don’t know if it was tears or rain.

We drove home through pitch-black streets and dead traffic lights. Forest Park loomed to my left, looking like a field of decapitations. Even in the dark, I knew the outlines of those trees. I knew what wasn’t right, and was not deserved, and rage met grief.

Can’t St. Louis catch a break? a friend asked. Oh yes, I thought, St. Louis can catch a break. The breaks St. Louis catches snap branches and slice through wires. The breaks pull out roots and drain our power away.

Thunder roared like a clapback. Lightning flashed like a wink. We catch only the bad breaks in St. Louis, and we catch them with skilled and weary hands. The mending, we do on our own, because God knows no one else will.

* * *

Most St. Louisans have never seen a major tornado hit the city. The last time it happened was 1959. The worst tornado before that was in 1927, cutting a similar swathe and killing 79 people. (Five so far have died in the 2025 tornado.)

I spent the weekend in a daze: helping my daughter, worrying about my parents, listening to maudlin songs. You know you’re in your 40s when you don’t know what character in the Bruce Springsteen parenting oeuvre you’re supposed to be.

But I have a new song on rotation. It’s called “St Louis Cyclone Blues” and it was recorded by Lonnie Johnson, a musician who moved to St. Louis in 1921, won the Booker T. Washington Theatre blues contest in 1925, and survived the tornado of 1927, which he immortalized in verse:

I was sitting in my kitchen, lookin' way out cross the sky.
I was sitting in my kitchen, lookin' out across the sky.
I thought the world was ending, I started in to cry.

I wondered what Johnson would think of me writing this article nearly a century later, discovering his music on technology he could not fathom and I cannot stand. But at least it led me to his song, and the consolation that St. Louis has always sung the blues. St. Louis has always immortalized pain and turned it into art.

“Deep, low-down, mournful misery throbs in every word,” an advertisement for Johnson’s hit promised, and that was thought a good thing, because it was true.

I’m going to the lake to wallow in my Missouri: the tornado made sure there’s plenty of water for that. I’ll see if my winged therapist survived and has patience for my woe. I’ll feel sorry for everyone who lives in St. Louis and knows full well what they are missing. Another day, another disaster, another woman wondering how much more left to lose — that’s the end of the world on repeat, that’s the St. Louis blues.

* * *

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The sky around the time the siren went off…

…and the same sky about a half hour later.

Our family hail collection.