Finding Shelter From The Storm

That’s it, really. 2800 words or so.

I went to see Twisters in what I thought was the aftermath of a panic attack, but was actually in the middle of a panic attack. Like a tornado, the signs sometimes come in hindsight, but experts of course know the elements needed.

When I was a kid I spent a lot of time in Oklahoma. In their science museum- which given the current climate in the region, I digress I do wonder about these days, but - in their science museum, there were many exhibits about tornadoes. My kid brain was somehow most unsettled by the earthquake simulator and looping videos of the Bay Bridge aftermath. There was a rubbery platform to climb on and simulated plate tectonics would ripple it as the tvs played.

The tornado exhibit had swirling hourglass whirlwinds suspended in water, diagrams of fronts crashing into each other, cells and cloud and cold and hot air. I wish I recalled more of the exact sciences of it. The ability to feel when a tornado comes is more in my body, as probably it is in any body who’s known how wind shifts in expanses. Pressure drops. An arid or hot, cloudless day, and then the immediate sweep. Weather, all at once. Seems like most of our bodies might know that now.

Experts know the real words for it all. I know some of the words about what happens in the body linking electricity through the nervous system, the brains plastic and so easily dug and swollen culverts and ditches and scattered sites of trauma.

Earthquakes just come. When I lived in California, they’d ripple under my feet, small temblors and I’d not even notice as I made my way over broken asphalt from giant roots of beautiful and terrible eucalyptus trees. One day we sat in class on the top floor of a historic and pretty building, learning about poems, probably. The chandelier began swaying and I dove under the table. When the shaking stopped, I opened my eyes to pairs of legs and slowly made my way back up. No one else had moved.

Oh, you’re from like, Kansas, right? said someone. I did not correct them.

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In the eye of the panic attack, Twisters was an excellent choice. It’s a great movie. Glen Powell is certainly a movie star and e a s y on the eyes. The bad guy has a bolo thick with shitty gemstones, so you know he’s rotten. The lead gal does a Oklahoma accent passably. Tunde Adebimpe, from my beloved TV on The Radio, has a turn, and is delightful. I was very happy to see him. At one point, during a scene at a rodeo, I muttered to my ma that there better be a barrel racer shot. Indeed, the glorious last happy rodeo shot is a gal furiously turning her figure eights. I’ve been to many a rodeo, and pow wow, and flea market, and anything you can hold at a rodeo grounds, and I love them. At another point, my ma poked me and happily whispered, Stillwater!!! 

That the movie was filmed in Oklahoma is evident, and very enjoyable. I think my mom, who managed to scrape and fight her way out of a trailer into being the first college student in our threadbare ancestry, will always keep Stillwater in her entire heart, a favorite place. There’s no actual Stillwater in the movie, but the mention enough was enough to thrill her. They stood in Midwest City, home of Tinker AFB, for Stillwater’s rodeo scene. I’ve been to that air show plenty of times.

Sapulpa is the hometown of the main character, and where my ma was born. When she drives through the night to a plaintive country song, my ma squinted. That’s not Sapulpa, she murmured. I looked it up. She’s right.

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Overhead shot after overhead shot of trucks driving down gravel roads, and red dirt and pumpers and compact brick houses in subdivisions. Earlier in the day I’d had the rare urge to go ride my bike on some empty, far away road. I haven’t gone out like that in a couple years now, I guess.

When I worked my way up to do what I suppose is now a premier gravel bike event six odd years ago, which seems a thousand miles away from what I want to do these days, it started in the Stilly (credit: my cousin Trey), made its way out and through ranch pasture, slips through woods, creek crossings, and plenty of red dirt, midway to Guthrie, and back around. In the last stretches I crossed Indian Meridian and took a photo. If I’d left the course and kept going, I’d find my way to my grandparents house. I sang along to “Ghost Riders in the Sky”, a song my grandad loved and that gave my ma the willies. It features in the film as a pretty fun cover by Charley Crockett over fun scenes of big, silly trucks.

Throughout the past few days, or months, really, I’d wanted or needed to go do something in the middle of nowhere, or at least as close as I could get. It had evolved by the time the panic attack showed up to the familiar need to just go. Just start driving to any place where I could look at something different and familiar. Just keep going, and pretend I didn’t have to stop. Until exhausted I’d curl up in my hatchback set up with the sleeping bag spread out in the back, or a cheap motel, and sleep.

That’s the truth I don’t like to admit in my circles and the year 2024. I love driving. Or I love driving long distances, foot on the gas pedal, interstate or backroad vanishing beneath me. I’d spent from about 2018 to 2023 doing it as often as I could, probably stupidly during several months of COVID. I did it because I could or needed to when I lived in Minneapolis (short jaunts to do gravel, driving to Stillwater or South Dakota or Duluth). I crossed the country because I wanted to, and then I did out West and back, and out East and back a few times for work. In hindsight, that was maybe my favorite part of the job (not really, but at present, fuck that job.)

I grew up on long car trips down 55 to 44, to the Turner Turnpike, maybe old 66 to 62 til it turns into NE 23rd. The last time I did it I was heading back to Chicago, but I could probably do it if I walked out the door and got behind the wheel, only using my phone to listen to music, or at least I’d hope.

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My grandad died 12 years ago, and my ma flew down first. Their car had something wrong, so my pa and my brother and I tumbled into my old Mercury Mystique, where the A/C had conveniently gone out. It was July and we left late, drove overnight with the windows down, switching drivers. We stayed with my tio on my dad’s side, who conveniently had settled in Tulsa while I was growing up. Outside Midwest City, in Choctaw, were my mom and my grandma and my cousins, waiting on the services the next day. My tio’s new wife (the both of them some wild evangelicals these days, which is better left alone) loaned me her car when I expressed wanting to head down.

I must’ve been outside Chandler when the storm appeared in a rage. Hail, wind, thunder, lightning, the inability to see. I got beneath the underpass with the other cars and shook and wept furiously, praying to some God I often turn to when I’m a certain type of terrified. Lord, let me see my Grandma one last time. Let me through this. The sheets of rain blinked out. It was gone. I pulled back out, gunned it down 62 keeping my eyes open for cops. By the time my cousins and I were sitting out in front of the house hidden behind a car, sharing cigarettes and reviewing the eulogy I wrote, the ground was hot and gravely and dry. Probably the front never crossed Choctaw at all.

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I’ve lived through a few tornados, most of them in Oklahoma. I remember one where the rain and hail came first and my dad, non-plussed, drove through most of it, finally stopped and hid out somewhere after I’d entreated him to pull over, trying to remember my tornado knowledge from the weather reports. Little dust devils always sprouted out on the drive between my grandparents and my uncle’s place out in the sticks, it’s always exciting ancient boxcar in the yard, too many cars, too many parts, his passed out diabetic body being revived by my grandparents as I waited in the bed of the truck.

One of the real big hit ones hit on May 3, 1999, in Choctaw. Probably that’s quaint now, but it tracked 38 miles from Chickasha up through the Metro and East. My grandparents kept their eye on it. I heard this story so many times, from my grandma and grandpa, my ma. Tom and Nancy next door had a shelter, but they saw the trucks lined up front and figured it was best not to impose. They got in my grandad’s Chevy and headed to Sister Philips, miles out, who they knew also had one. On bore down a massive storm system that took out Stroud’s outlet mall, killed people in Moore, crossed Tinker and headed their way. But everything’s miles out in Oklahoma, and what else was there to do? By the time they got to the Philipses (from church - Mary, with her coke bottle glasses and soft black hands), the radio said the worst was over, and they headed back. They came up on 23 where the police had the road barricaded up. My grandad knew the officer though - he’s known a lot of officers throughout the destructive youth of my uncles, and helping out at the Vo-tech - and the young man let him through. The main drag destroyed. They slowly made their way past Indian Meridian before Triple X. Trucks gone outside Tom and Nancy’s. The houses untouched.

Before my grandma died, the storms had started multiplying and getting worse. That last hot spring she rode one out tucked into the bathtub I’d spent years scrubbing night dirt after tick check, bike helmet from the garage on her head. We talked on the phone weekly when she told me the story, and once again, talked about May ‘99.

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In the movie they make points to work real tornado tips into the dialogue. Helpful in the the present. Don’t get in your car, underpasses are not actually great, look for basements. Don’t run. Apparently I’m like my grandparents, though. Why not leave?

I can drive through pretty bad crying. I shouldn’t, but I can drive through what feels like a small panic attack running through me. The panic attack before Twisters started as I was driving out to the suburbs, and all I wanted was to keep driving. It was not well-received when it finally hit, but there’s no point in holding a grudge about that. Some things can grow and spread if you don’t hunker down against it. Nobody needed that.

All day I’d made the wrong choices, after an exhausting and unpredictable and soul-wearying week. I called them out to myself: more cold coffee, less food, choosing more tasks than I needed to, traffic, too much talk radio. Of course the conditions were right. I’ve been in a fight with a hospital over some truly shitty actions taken with regards to billing and my health and I both don’t know why I keep fighting and why I do. I’m so fucking mad about it. I can see it so clearly how it’s fucked up. How it’s not my fault. How it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t decided what to do, now, with the latest, This is what we, the hospital, say is accurate. It doesn’t matter that it’s not. You remain fucked. 

I thought many panicked and hard and painful thoughts in the panic, whipping around and flying out of my mouth, eventually. The system is rigged. We’re all fucked. I’m never going to a fucking doctor again. I’m going to die of cervical cancer. How does anyone live. How this is happening to everyone, and especially femmes and queers, and especially Black ones, and here I am, with all my immense privilege and what time I have, and what’s the point? Things are too bleak. Nothing is going to change. This keeps happening to me. I tried and it didn’t work. This is only ever going to keep happening to me.

Might as well chase after a tornado. Might as well drive straight towards it.

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The movie made me cry, which maybe I would’ve done anyway, and made me miss being somewhere else, and did not do anything to mitigate my desire to run the fuck away. It does a good job of putting the real images of a storms aftermath in fiction, the scattered belongings and absolutely destroyed buildings and people dazedly trying to find the threads of their lives and keep going. The predatory shitbirds willing to take advantage of acts beyond our control. I don’t know if that made me cry, but the tragic plotpoints (perhaps too maudlin or hamfisted for others, but it’s a movie) were, well, sad.

When I drove back to my house eventually, I started crying again. It takes a while, sometimes, for these electrical impulses to work out of a body. I used to be better about carrying meds with me, but I’ve been less good at that lately, with not great results.

This is the longest I’ve not gone without a long drive with nothing to talk about in a few years. I’ve been in my house for about a year and a half, and I don’t know what to do about the restless energy. I do know most of my clear-headed strategies to deal with a panic attack involve staying put: sitting immediately on the ground or in a dark shower, doing my taps, finding a spot to stare at and focusing intensely on it, the corner of a ceiling, following the lines to the floor, lots of water, closing my eyes. The dark. Shelter from a storm.

The acute parts of my anxiety disorder appeared, not surprisingly, hidden in the dark of an abusive relationship, got worse during some exacerbating incidents that are part of the CPTSD package, that I pushed down or worked to chase away with self-medication, grinding through everything, long bike rides, blackouts, or weeping attacks in the middle of the night on my bike, extremely dangerous. I look back and see it: my inability to calm down as I prepared to head into the experience that most made me realize someone in my life was willing for me to lose that life out of callous and very fucked up something in them. That afternoon I’d had a Xanax from someone and not knowing what else to do, I took it, and remember the incredible relief. I don’t take Xanax these days. I know drinking in fact makes the anxiety worse. I keep an eye on things. There are signs, there is science. Pressure systems and what we can’t see coming, seasons, the increasing terrible world. You pick it all up and you try and get to safety when what it is appears, suddenly, heading your way.

Last month in the thick of the heat tornadoes appeared close enough to Chicago and my house that the sirens went off all over town all night. Off went our phones.

I walked out into the alley and watched the clouds rapidly cycle through the night, their ripple and twist in the heat, and waited for it. All at once the stillness, the cold landing on my body. The fence and night blooming moonflowers that began to billow in and out in a rocking shake. The trees bending. Then the sharp rain, the hail. I went inside as the electricity began misfiring and sat on the edge of my bathroom, waited it out.

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I dunno. Go see Twisters. I’d honestly see it again. If I had one wish, it would be for everyone I love and everyone they love who has to white knuckle it through panic attacks to find help that worked for them. Actually, my other wish is that health care was not such a fucking maze of razor-wire and slippery walls and banal indifference and absolute exploitation and greed. That’s probably related. I try to believe we’re not fucked. Ceasefire now. And go to the movies anyway. Be good to each other. As my favorite Lonestar bottle cap says: key-p y-oar ch-inn up.