Scared, On a Wooden Porch

At Weyerhaeuser Grade School, eight grades of pupils were arranged in columns in two classrooms.  We moved from right to left, year by year.  The "Old Schoolhouse" was our "gymnasium" and auditorium, in a manner of speaking.  I recall--sometime during my first years there--what it was like to be caught at the Old Schoolhouse during a thunderstorm.  We watched lightning strike the trees a few yards away, smelled the sulpherous air, and dared not make a run for our classroom, across the ballfield.  We were very small, and the sky was savage.  

Decades later, on an endless drive across Nebraska, I calculated how far away, and how huge was a thunderstorm that seemed to haunt us.  It occupied everything, making our car, and even the Counties we crossed, seem insignificant, and scared.  

Like thousands of other travelers, we have been through Oklahoma in the summer time, turning north onto Interstate 35 in Oklahoma City, pursued by tornado warnings, and winds that stretched trees like elastic ready to snap, taking a beating from winds from everywhere, wandering our lanes as if drunken.  

There is much in the world that reminds us what it is like to be seven or ten years old, backed up against the outside wall of an old wooden schoolhouse, watching, through a falling wall of water, as the sky beat furiously at everything we had supposed was large and strong, smelling the odor of our own fear.  

It is like living in tornado alley.  "Oh, God!", they cry.  "Oh, my God!"  And later, still scared and still helpless, they say it is the will of God.  They tell how they prayed to God, because the sky is so large, and we are so small; wanting to believe that there is something greater than the savagery.  

I understand that, even though I do not.  I am more like the kids backed up against the wall of the Old Schoolhouse, on a long, narrow porch, caught out there, feeling very small, not wanting to admit how scared I am, sometimes.