That day 25 years ago day started unremarkably, as so many others had: sultry, sunny and hazy, as August mornings will do. We had a few things left to check off our list, with the oldest of our three little ones set to launch into first grade. School was starting the next day in Plainfield.
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The laundry hung limp in the backyard swelter as afternoon dragged on. The baby was fussy, fighting nap time with all of her tiny-yet-willful being. Why wouldn’t she just sleep?
Finally, as the cloud cover came, she dozed. I slipped into the backyard to bring in the clothes from the line. It smelled like rain. When I came back in, the drops began. No, it was hail. Ah, a nice little summer storm would blow through. Surely it would cool things off.
The almost-first-grader and her little brother, not quite 4, were huddled under an old lace tablecloth in the middle of the living room. How cute, I thought – they’re make-believe camping. I noticed the guys working on the bank under construction next door sprinting to their pickups and cars. It was beginning to look like a whopper of an August hailstorm. At least the trains weren’t held up; I could hear the sound of one steaming over the tracks a half-mile north of us. It seemed somehow louder and clearer than usual.
Then the lights went out. And the baby was up. Shoot! We would have to go kill some time at the mall while we waited for the power to come back on.
Making our way down the two-lane, I glanced toward St. Mary Immaculate Church, home to the contemporary steeple that was the subject of local derision. Too contemporary.
The steeple was gone. So were pieces of the dome that had enclosed the church sanctuary. The cemetery between us and the ruins was itself in shambles.
We turned back.
Neighbors were gathering on the sidewalks, sharing what we’d heard. That will happen in the wake of disaster. Somebody said there were live wires down in the neighborhoods west of us. Another had heard there was a semi dangling from a tree down by the river. Someone else said the high school four blocks away had been wiped out. There were rumors people had died over there.
Much of it was true.
The baby strapped snugly into the carrier strapped snugly to me, I clutched the others’ little hands and we went to see for ourselves.
The park where we’d spent so much time swinging and sliding was under a blanket of mangled old-growth trees, reduced to sticks, some of them uprooted almost as an afterthought by the whirl of a tornado the likes of which this part of the world had never before seen. Down close to the river, the little houses were flattened. We would later find out that 55 homes in the downtown area were entirely destroyed in that couple of minutes when the sky caved in. Another 55 were badly damaged, and 150 more in the village core sustained minor damage. Two blocks east of that literally beaten path, ours wasn’t among them. The tomatoes in the garden still hung on their vines.
South of us, the storm’s rampage had done much more. It took six people’s lives when it decimated the high school and St. Mary’s before heading on to scour through one more school building and four subdivisions, wiping out another 200 or so houses and leaving hundreds more with major damage, and killing four more – including a kid out delivering papers, and a tiny girl who was buried on the day she had been scheduled to start ballet classes. She was 3. In Crest Hill, the twister took out half of the apartments in one complex and claimed a dozen more lives, among them a young mom and her 5-week-old baby, whose bodies were found together in a nearby corn field.
Three days later, several dozen residents were still hospitalized, ten of them at Edward Hospital in Naperville, most in Joliet. When the final victim succumbed to his injuries two months later, the storm’s brutal toll would reach 29 lives, each one of them snatched out of what had been a clear blue sky.
It was a collision of two microbursts, somewhere over Oswego, that had spawned the killer funnel, theretofore unseen. Formed from what weather people call a high precipitation super-cell, the swirling demon was hidden completely by a thick blanket of dark clouds that hugged the ground as the cruel mess rolled our way. We literally didn’t see it coming. Nobody did.
And so it was that the tornado warning was issued at 3:51 p.m., a few minutes after the storm had flattened so much of Crest Hill and continued on its horrifying way. The sirens never did go off.
The literal silver lining was that great advances soon followed in storm spotting technology. The region’s planned new Doppler radar system, on the cutting edge for its time, was fast-tracked into service, virtually eliminating the possibility that a storm could ever again bolt out of a summer sky and wipe out a town without any warning. It wasn’t unlike the wholesale overhaul of rail safety that followed the horrific 1946 train crash in downtown Naperville, which took 45 lives and launched a new era of protections that would keep such a terrible accident from repeating itself. Unthinkable calamity sometimes finds a sliver of redemption in the precautions that follow it.
For us, there on the ground, the day was far less about meteorological advances than the wonder of the human animal, and the random hand of fate.
Of course, the board of ed could have opted to start the school year just a day earlier, or the storm could have formed a day later than it did. One of many “whew” realizations brought by the disaster, it brings many of us a shudder to this day.
Our neighbors had been caught in their station wagon down by the high school, the oldest of their three little kids knocked hard in the head by a careening board. I ran into Jacob on a walking path a couple of weeks ago. He’s a dad now. Another neighbor and her daughter were smack in the path of destruction, too, both escaping without injury. Just a couple of years ago, I learned that my dear yoga classmate Linda and her kids, and their vehicle, were set airborne by the gales that day. Today, Linda has two grand babies and a gentle way about her that makes it clear she keenly understands mercy.
Indeed, as our town gradually shook off its shock in the hazy blur of the days that followed, there were countless anecdotes like those, accounted moments of salvation and grace.
And there was help. Lots of it. Perfect strangers streamed into town by the busload – public safety responders, construction guys and so many volunteers, all eager to help however they could. We worked side by side – sorting through mountains of donated clothes, circulating in the devastated neighborhoods to drop off bottled water, making sandwiches for the hundreds of relief workers who swooped onto the scene with heavy machinery and chain saws, striving to somehow make order of nature’s inexplicable carnage and chaos.
I learned a great deal about the human capacity for gratitude and perspective in that long-ago string of days, too – about so many close calls and acts of astounding courage that kept the losses from being so much worse. I saw people who literally had lost everything they owned, giving thanks for the mysterious twists of fortune that had kept them alive, for their similarly intact loved ones, for the seemingly boundless kindness of strangers. I saw old men openly weeping and little kids clinging to their parents’ legs, for dear life.
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A quarter-century later, Plainfield hasn’t forgotten that awful and awe-inspiring day. We probably never will. A lot of us still physically tense up when the sky darkens and the weather advisories come on.
But that neighborhood park where we played? New landscaping, updated playground gear and a splash station make it a draw for families too young to know what happened there 25 years ago. And that’s probably a good thing.
And it may go without saying, but that year’s tomato yield tasted especially sweet. So has every one since.
Twitter @scarlman