Tornado Movies and TV Psychics

Unlikely childhood anxiety balms

When I was a kid, I was deathly afraid of tornadoes. I grew up in Minneapolis and there weren’t any that I remember actually touching down in the city back then, but one finally hit one of the neighborhoods I grew up in after I’d grown up and moved across the metro in 2011. You can see where the tornado tore through that part of the city on Google Earth by the line of missing trees coming up from the river by I-94 and headed up toward 394.

---

The summer I was six or seven and living somewhere in that treeless path in the late 80s or early 90s, long before the tornado of 2011, my tornado fears had peaked to an all-time high. Looking back, it was probably the year that a tornado siren went off and my mom brought us down to the basement and then took herself back upstairs to finish browning the hamburger, sending me into a panic, demanding she come back downstairs with us where it was safe. She told me very plainly that if there was going to be a tornado, we’d need something to eat, and to go back downstairs with my sister, please.

My mom was in school or working during the day those summers that we lived there with my grandpa and aunt, and my little sister and I stayed at home with my grandpa. I would typically stay in our room reading or playing, or I'd go outside and play with the neighbor kids or wander across the street to play by myself at the park, but this one summer, I voluntarily spent most of the days in the basement. Because tornadoes.

First thing in the morning, I would find Grandpa’s newspaper and look at the back of the Metro section where Paul Douglas, my favorite meteorologist, had his daily weather column. If it was going to be sunny and clear, I was good to go. I could play outside or hang out in my room or do whatever I wanted! I’d check outside and make sure there weren’t any clouds — literally any, because in my mind, all of them had the potential to turn into funnel clouds — and then be off.

If there were clouds, or especially if there were thunderstorms in the forecast, all bets were off: I was spending the day in the basement as a precaution. There was a family room set up down there, adjacent to my mom’s bedroom, and I would turn on the small black and white TV in front of the wicker chair with the yellowish-orange cushion and watch Gilligan’s Island and I Dream of Jeannie reruns, or go through old boxes and find random treasures and generally just snoop around. When I’d get especially nervous about the tornadoes that never came, I would usually just start repeating some weird mantra I made up to keep them away, or praying (I would ask God to wait until I was at least 14 to make me experience my first tornado, the magic age at which I assumed I’d be mature enough to handle it). Other times I’d just start counting things around me, like letters. Each letter had a different value, so something like “BICYCLE” wouldn’t be seven letters, it would be ten, if I am correctly remembering my old alphabet value system. Ceiling tiles would do in a pinch. Seams in the concrete wall. Anything countable, really. It’s a wonder I never liked math.

Once my mom came home around dinnertime, I would go back upstairs, trusting her to protect us if there were any tornadoes. Plus, despite my mom having told us that she once slept easily through a series of three overnight tornadoes in Missouri when she was pregnant with me, I also trusted that tornadoes rarely happened at night, so I could relax.

I knew everything about tornadoes¹. I read and re-read every encyclopedia entry, reference material, or school library weather book and ate up stories from my mom and other adults who’d experienced them. I knew how funnel clouds formed and I knew that the sky turned greenish when they were nearby and that they sounded like trains and that the air became eerily still before one hit.

I would use these bits of knowledge to quell my fears in the event that I had to be out somewhere that was not my basement on a day I had deemed too tornado-y to be on a main level: it’s breezy, so it’s not likely there will be one right now, I would think. The sky isn’t turning green yet, so we still have time. God forbid I heard an actual train nearby that wasn't immediately accounted for.

The old house/art studio/supply store

Being away from my basement — any basement — was a near-constant fear when we’d visit Grandma in northwestern Missouri, who lived in a single-wide trailer in a rural town of about 120 other people in various questionable housing situations for such a tornado-heavy area. There was a storm cellar somewhere on the property, but it was old and hadn’t been maintained and she didn’t want to use it, fearing it wouldn’t be safe. There was also a whole house across the driveway², the one the family used to live in and where Papa taught oil painting classes and sold art supplies after they bought the mobile home, but it was also no longer structurally sound and Grandma feared it would also be unsafe in a tornado. She assured me we’d go up the road to the Baptist church if we needed to. I complained that we would never get there in time, but there was nothing to be done.

During every two-week visit, nearly without fail, would be at least one day of severe weather more intense than anything we typically experienced in Minnesota, and I’d have to have the TV turned to a weather channel or a local station that would have a severe weather ticker on the bottom or interrupt the TV show to tell us if anything was imminent. They didn’t have working tornado sirens out there in the middle of nowhere, so I needed to be sure I could keep track of any new developments.

One summer when I was a little older, we had my dad and his wife and my aunt and uncle and cousins over at my grandma’s, and we were all visiting and playing card games and had Sleepless in Seattle playing in the background. The weather outside was pretty wild, raining and thundering and windy, but I was able to distract myself with all the people around me and the fact that there was no severe weather ticker in the corner of the TV screen.

Must not be that bad if it hasn’t interrupted the show yet, I thought. That’s when my cousins, a few years older than I was, went outside to the gravel driveway to check out the RV setup where they were sleeping that night, and quickly ran back in to tell us they thought they saw a funnel cloud, or one that was about to turn into one. Panicking, I realize that the reason we haven’t seen any weather alerts is because the movie we’re watching is on a cable channel, not a local one, and we quickly turn it. There is, indeed, a severe weather report on, interrupting whatever was playing before.

The map showed the county we were in, Daviess, surrounded by other counties with warnings and confirmed touchdowns; we were the only who hadn’t yet been confirmed hit. The county map looked like a reverse target, the bullseye us in white, surrounded by tornadoes in red.

Everyone was calm but me, and it eventually passed and we went back to the movie and the game. I thought my cousins and aunt and uncle were nuts for going out to the RV to sleep that night, as tornadoes clearly did not respect the established no-nighttime-attacks rule in Missouri.

Uncle, cousin, Dad, Mom, cousin, Grandpa, Papa. Early 80s at Grandma and Papa’s in Missouri, probably not even properly paranoid about the ever-present tornado threat

When I was nearing the end of 7th grade, Twister hit theaters. An aunt and uncle in Minnesota took my sister and cousin and me to go see it.

I can’t really say what about that movie exactly did it for me, but after we left the theater, I felt like a huge weight had been lifted off my shoulders: the movie had spontaneously cured my immense phobia of tornadoes, and in May, no less, just in time for the beginning of tornado season. It all literally just ended right there in the parking lot after I got done watching that movie, as though my psyche had said, “that’s it. This is exhausting. Time to give it up.” After we got back to our aunt and uncle’s house, we played “storm chasers” outside. Suddenly I was not only no longer afraid of them, but in my preteen mind, where the possibilities for the future were still endless, “tornado chaser” stuck there for a minute as a potential future career choice if I ever got better at science.

It’s a good thing I’m not really afraid of tornadoes anymore, because none of the houses around here seem to have full basements.

A movie about very very dangerous tornadoes and people dying and almost dying everywhere at the hands of them made me lose my overwhelming fear of tornadoes for some reason, but it wasn’t the last time something completely irrational would counter an equally as irrational fear.

---

When I was 8 or 9, an older friend told me some crazy theory she saw on the show Sightings about the world ending in May of 2000. Of course I believed her immediately and accepted this without question, and I got off the phone to go fold towels in the bathroom, because that was the first thing I could think of to do to prepare: start being a more obedient daughter. I definitely got a strange look from my mom after coming out of the bathroom, done proactively folding towels with a terrified look on my face for no apparent reason.

That very specific fear lasted a few years, strangely coloring a significant chunk of my childhood with the ever-present dread of “knowing” I wouldn’t make it to 17. I very literally believed this would happen. I also developed an adjacent irrational fear of neighboring South Dakota and Mount Rushmore, where I had understood the “source” of whatever would cause the end of the world to be. Like with tornadoes, if the fear in the background got to be too loud, I’d flip on the little TV in my room and distract myself with sitcom reruns and Jay Leno. Since I refused to tell anyone what I was afraid of, I got well-practiced at acting normal while I was a near-constant electric ball of anxiety on the inside for years on end.

Anyway, I got over that one, too, as I wrote about back in 2011:

The little girl […] saw something on television that, although it terrified her, made her stop and watch. It was the Montel Williams show, and Montel's featured guest was Sylvia Browne, the world renowned quack psychic he had on every week (the little girl actively avoided things like psychics, fearing that they would confirm her fears. She still maintains a healthy distance from such people). She was asked to predict when aliens would first make contact with Earth, in a way that no one could deny. She said it would happen in ten years.

This tiny little bit of TV talk show bullshit instantly convinced me that the Sightings guy obviously had it all wrong. The year 2000 was only three years away and the psychic said that it would be ten years until we met aliens! Nevermind being afraid of aliens; I did not care. The world wasn’t ending, after all! I got on my bike and went to my friend’s house, suddenly the happiest kid alive who’d just secretly found out she was going to live after several years of secretly believing she and the rest of the world were condemned to die horrendous, probably fiery or otherwise cataclysmic deaths in just a few years.

I did eventually get the OCD diagnosis everyone was expecting a couple years later, but interestingly enough, something similar happened a year or so after I graduated high school: I went into a Barnes & Noble bookstore at the mall and wandered around, found the psychology and self-help section, and then a book about managing OCD. I picked it up and flipped to a random page and my eyes drifted to the bottom, where I found a simple sentence about “magical thinking” that said something to the effect of, “you are not important enough for your actions to magically affect the universe in the way that you think.”

Magic words again, telling me this time that I was not magical after all, and neither were my obsessive thoughts or my weird counting, blinking, tapping, and rearranging habits. Something clicked then and I eventually became much better able to reason myself out of nonsensical thought patterns after that. Sometimes they still pop up, but then I remind myself: you are not magical, remember? They aren't exactly magic words, but they do tend to act like it, most of the time.

Anyway, the new Twisters movie looks fun, and so does the super country soundtrack:

---

1. A current minor phobia of mine are bridges. Not all bridges, but the super high ones and the super long ones that are too easy to see over. Hate them. I get dizzy and start to get tunnel vision if I have to drive over a particularly scary one. Before heading to Virginia Beach with my visiting sister for the first time after moving to the state, I looked up the route and saw that the only way to get there was by taking the Hampton Roads Bridge-Tunnel, a 3.5-mile-long bridge and underwater ocean-tunnel. Terrifying. I immediately started watching YouTube videos of the world’s most terrifying bridges to… make myself feel better?

2. Buying a mobile home to place directly across the driveway from your falling-down house is a long-held Strike family tradition. My dad did it, too. Actually, looking back, I’m pretty sure it’s just a rural northwestern Missouri tradition.